Picking up where I left off with my last post [and after a long hiatus for me, I know, but the combination of the busiest time of year for me, a job application, and childcare has drained my mental resources], I think it is important to discuss the limitations of the political praxis connected to postmodern theory. While it is important to demand a theoretical understanding of the emergence of postmodernism (including post-structuralism and post-colonialism), it is more important to understand the limitations of the political line resulting from this theory and thus why, inversely, a marxist-oriented political praxis is superior. For as marxists, whenever we talk about the strengths and weaknesses of a theory this talk should not be abstract; it should have something to do with concrete practice, the project of human liberation.The entire postmodern discourse, after all, was premised on the usurpation of marxism and the substitution of a totalizing communist discourse with a politics that was properly radical. Marxism, we were told, was not only a failed experiment but thoroughly eurocentric: its concept of the revolutionary subject was infected by chauvinism, the fact that it spoke of universalism and science was far too embedded in the European Enlightenment to amount to anything properly radical––even though the "post" tradition itself has emerged from Nietzschean categories. So the question becomes: does the set politics postmodernism wishes to substitute for the totalizing of marxism answer the questions raised by capitalist hegemony? And byI mean possess the capability of a revolutionary overthrow of the so-called "end of history".Although I could write a very long and involved essay about some very specifically philosophical limitations of postmodernism in regards to praxis (and have even done so in my dissertation), I'm not going to spend too much time discussing these problems here. Suffice to say, the rejection of the productive subject and universalism permit no foundation for resistance; if there is no such thing as a productive subject that is being dehumanized, that is, then how can we speak of oppression? (In order to answer this rhetorical question, I urge interested readers with a philosophical bent to read Jeff Noonan's.) I could also speak of the idealist understanding of "power" the postmodern tradition promotes––an understanding that divorces power from economic and political foundations and makes it transhistorical, something that was not at all produced by humans but produces humans, and thus is akin to the notion of power/violence promoted by the arch anti-semite Eugene Duhring in the nineteenth century and adequately taken apart by Engels. These are important philosophical interventions, true, but they would amount to tens of pages and are, anyhow, besides the point.For the point is that the only politics that can be expressed by the postmodern tradition is a disunified politics, inexorably fragmented, that is incapable of responding to the fact of capitalist hegemony. The fact that it promotes this disunity as a strength––by virtue of rejecting the unification that is only possible under the despised "totalization"––is something that should be treated as extremely dubious while, at the same time, recognized as a logical result of the way politics was practiced at the centres of capitalism until the advent of postmodernism.And the politics resulting from postmodernism is what is often called "identity politics". That is, if you come from an oppressed group then you will automatically be a political subject, regardless of your political line, and everyone from a position of privilege who speaks against you can be nothing more than a representative––consciously or unconsciously––of oppression. A radical politics, then, will be expressed by those who simply adhere to these subjected positions, based on some sort of stand-point ethics, which will spontaneously unify in a non-totalizing manner.In the previous post I spoke of postmodernism as being. Now we can speak of identity politics as. For we really do need to take identity politics seriously; it cannot be dismissed as if it emerged from a void as some ahistorical and quaint phenomenon. After a history of the left being dominated by privilege––by white, male, straight, able-bodied, etc. organizers––it is understandable that the underprivileged who have been excluded from this discourse have rallied around postmodern identity politics and, in this rallying, unfortunately judged communism to be worthless.Again we need to be clear that we are speaking of leftist praxis at the centres of capitalism; the vital anti-capitalist movements of the most oppressed at the global peripheriesgravitate towards communism. The people's war in India, for example, has little interest in postmodernism… even less interest in the "identity politics" articulated at the centres of capitalism. Even still, we cannot completely dismiss identity politics without accepting that it only exists because of the failure of the left, especially at the centres of capitalism, to produce movements that did not valorize white, male, straight, and able-bodied subjects. Some time ago , I argued how some dismissals of identity politics were themselves an even worse form of identity politics where the identity of the proletariat was automatically treated asand. And so we need to recognize that most attacks on identity politics are driven by the same identitarian bullshit… So that, maybe, what we now call "identity politics" cohered in response to an already existant identity politics where the proletarian was already veiled in a specific identity. My thoughts on this issue stand … again, the penalty of the sins of chauvinist communism.So despite the problems I have with so-called "identity politics" and postmodernism, I am somewhat grateful for its intervention. Those who complain that Luxemburg or Kollontai didn't require "safe spaces" are the same people who don't realize that one hundred Luxemburgs and Kollontais could have existed if such spaces existed. Those who complain that focus on some "identitarian oppression" are also those who don't realize that their understanding of the proletariat is also identitarian. And so this postmodern period of identity politics can and should make us question the way movements were build decades ago. Rather than accepting it or dismissing it altogether, however, we should thank it for its intervention, step beyond the stale politics it promotes, and renew our "totalizing project" bothandof its complaints.We need a unified movement that is capable of breaking away from the unrecognized identity politics of excepting a certain type of (unionized and white) worker as being the proletariat. Postmodern identity politics might have given us the realization of such a worker but it has not given us the politics of apprehending such a worker as the "hard core" of the proletariat since it also resists totalization. Indeed, those who champion identity politics spend a lot of time speaking of the structure of oppression but, in the end, they are utterly incapable of explaining the root meaning of structural oppression . Only marxism, which delves into the material foundations of a given mode of production, can provide us with this insight. Postmodernism only speaks of the surface reality and, due to its concern with the surface, refuses to grapple with deep material structures––this would be scientific and totalizing, after all.In order to overcome capitalism we need a unified movement, springing from the kernel of the hard core of the proletariat, that is dedicated to revolution. A movement fractured down innumerable identity lines is incapable of responding to capitalist hegemony––it can only result in an ineffectual movementism. The point is to develop a movement based on a shared political line rather than splintered identity concerns and, the supposed sin according to postmodernism, where these concerns finally intersect based on a proper understanding of class is where such a movement can emerge. Capitalism will not fall based on innumerable "unique raindrops" or marbles scattered upon multiple trajectories: just as the bourgeoisie was united as a class against tributary feudalism, the proletariat (but understood in the above sense) must be united against capitalism.But what does the praxis of postmodernism provide? Only fragmentation. One speaks from their subjected position and this speaking is supposedly radical––but how do we gauge the distance between opposed subject positions at that horizon where stand-point ethics becomes confused? Does a white trans woman's experience trump the experience of a queer woman of colour? Do we simply count up the oppressions all the while ignoring the political line? The point is to unify these oppressionsa political line, totalizing them into a counter-hegemonic unity … and this is where marxism again takes over from postmodernism.