Postmodernists oppose “grand narratives,” and perhaps the “grandest” of all “narratives” was authored by Karl Marx, that of the proletariat taking power and creating a society in which all individuals can develop their talents to their fullest. For postmodernists, this is mere verbiage which masks an extension of Enlightenment rationality that serves to legitimize political power and oppression. Where Marxists (critically) defend science, rationality, the idea of an objective, knowable world, and human subjectivity, postmodernists proclaim the impossibility of objective truth, the absence of a pregiven human subject, and that all social movements or societies which seek scientific knowledge or objective truth lead to yet more oppression. The class struggle and socialism are particular examples of such “metanarratives,” and in any event have become outmoded.

One can effectively argue against such notions, and Marxists have often done so. That said, there are aspects of the postmodernist critique of Marxism that deserve greater scrutiny. It is true, after all, that no matter how much anti-Stalinist Marxists actively opposed the rulers of the Soviet Union and like states, those rulers spoke in the name of Marxism. Foucault is not wrong to ask what in the works of Marx “could have made the Gulag possible” — or, to put it in more materialist terms, what in those texts could have been used to justify the Gulag. In this spirit, this article will attempt to discern what is valid and invalid in the postmodernist critique of Marxism, and, moreover, if what is valid in the critique of Marxism (as popularly presented) is valid as a critique of the thought of Marx himself.

Why does this matter? Because the core of the Marxian understanding of capitalism — that it is a system of production for the sake of production in which all of life is increasingly subordinated to the needs of capital accumulation, where human life itself is reduced to a “production cost” — remains as true as ever. Yet Marxism is hardly the dominant trend within the so-called “anti-globalization” movement today. The movement is divided between those who are only opposed to neoliberalism, or “globalization,” and those with an explicitly anti-capitalist viewpoint. Many of the anti-capitalists are anarchists who eschew Marxism due to the authoritarianism of both the Communist party states and the innumerable avowedly Marxist sects, both Stalinist and anti-Stalinist.