Lyotard channeling Lenin

In Chapter 5 of Postmodern Fables (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), Jean-François Lyotard writes this about the Iraqi dictatorship:

“Saddam Hussein is a product of Western departments of state and big companies, just as Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were born of the ‘peace’ imposed on their countries by the victors of the Great War. Saddam is such a product in an even more flagrant and cynical way. But the Iraqi dictatorship proceeds, as do the others, from the transfer of aporias [problems] in the capitalist system to vanquished, less developed, or simply less resistant countries.” (pp. 74-75)

Note that Lyotard is updating and/or channeling Vladimir Lenin’s thesis in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917). Why, Lenin asked, are the capitalist countries seemingly doing better and better — contrary to the Marxist prediction that their internal conflicts would manifest in worse and worse ways? Lenin’s explanation was that capitalism does generate huge problems internally but then successfully exports those problems to less rich and powerful nations. (For example, consider the later left-environmentalist claim that capitalism generates huge amounts of garbage but exports it to poorer nations, so the rich nations stay clean but poor nations get dirtier.)

All of this is relevant to the ongoing debates over whether much of postmodernism is a neo-Marxism.

(The Lyotard quotation is reprised earlier posts here and Chapter One of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.)

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