"Post-Modernist" Discourse

Post-modernism caps the discourse called by some the "new spirit of
capitalism," but it would be better to call it the ideology of the
late capitalism/imperialism of oligopolies.  A recent book by Nkolo
Foe gives a powerful description of how this functions very well to
serve the real interests of the dominating powers.14

Modernism originated in the discourse of the Enlightenment in the 18th
century in Europe, together with the triumph of the historical form of
European capitalism and imperialism that goes with it, which
subsequently conquered the world.  It suffers from contradictions and
limitations.  The ambition to be universal that it formulated is
defined by the affirmation of the rights of man (but not necessarily
of woman!), which are in fact the rights of bourgeois individualism.
Real capitalism, with which this form of modernity is associated, is
moreover an imperialism that denies the rights of the non-European
peoples who have been conquered and subordinated to the levying of the
imperialist rent.

Criticism of this bourgeois and capitalist/imperialist modernity is
certainly necessary.  And Marx effectively undertook this radical
critique, which it is always necessary to update and study more
deeply.

The new Reason considered itself emancipatory; and so it was, to the
extent that it freed society from the alienations and oppressions of
the Anciens Regimes.  It was thus a guarantee of progress, but a form
of progress that was limited and contradictory because it was capital
which, in the final instance, was to manage society.

Post-modernism does not make this radical critique to promote the
emancipation of individuals and of society through socialism.  Instead
it proposes a return to pre-modern, pre-capitalist alienations.  The
forms of sociability that it promotes are necessarily in line with
adherence to a "tribalist" identity for communities (para-religious
and para-ethnic), an antipode to what is required to deepen democracy,
which has become a synonym for the "tyranny of the people" daring to
question the wise management of the executives who serve the
oligopolies.  Post-modernist critiques of "grand narratives" (the
Enlightenment, democracy, progress, socialism, national liberation) do
not look to the future but return to an imaginary and false past,
which is extremely idealized.  In this way it facilitates the
fragmentation of the majority of the population and makes them accept
adjustment to the logic of the reproduction of domination by the
imperialist oligopolies.  This fragmentation hardly disturbs that
domination; on the contrary, it makes the task easier.  The individual
does not become a conscious, lucid agent of social transformation, but
the slave of triumphant commodification.  The citizen disappears,
giving way to the consumer/spectator, no longer a citizen who seeks
emancipation, but an insignificant creature who accepts submission.