Foucault and whether postmodernism is neo-Marxist

One datum. Here is Michel Foucault explaining why the proletariat engage in class warfare:

“The proletariat doesn’t wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because … it wants to take power.”

The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

That’s from Foucault’s debate with Noam Chomsky. Note the class warfare language, taken from Marxism — but the dropping of any normative standard, consistent with postmodern amoralism.

Further:

“It is clear that we live under a dictatorial class regime, under a class power that imposes itself with violence, even when the instruments of this violence are institutional and constitutional … [When the proletariat triumphs] it will exert a power that is violent, dictatorial, and even bloody over the class it has supplanted.” (The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature, p. 39).

For my fuller explanation of postmodernism’s divergent evolution from Marxism, see Open College podcast #23, “Is Postmodernism Neo-Marxist? Yes, No, & Sort Of”.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IjaymP5GGMg
Stephen Hicks on how pomo is and isn’t neo-Marxist

1 thought on “Foucault and whether postmodernism is neo-Marxist”

  1. Thank you Stephen Hicks for doing the work that many of us can’t do.
    Those statements are so telling, a question I still have is:
    Are the ideas that people séek to embed in law and conventions in society ie “safe schools” where pre schoolers are introduced to gender fluidity a part of a broad well defined organisation or are they just caolesing ideas that are possessing those disaffected with the current society

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