I’ve just been looking at an
interview by clinical psychologist and University of Toronto Professor
Jordan Peterson dealing with postmodernism and the triumph of Marxism in
Canada. In view of Peterson’s brave struggle against Political Correctness at
the U of T (which my late wife attended in more tolerant times) I was ready to
treat his venture into my own field (European intellectual history) with a
certain indulgence, until I encountered this opinion:
Communism was not popularized in the West under the direct
banner of communism. Instead, it came largely under the banner of
postmodernism, and aimed to transform the values and beliefs of our societies
through its Marxist idea that knowledge and truth are social constructs.
Why should we think that Communism did not enter North America
under its own banner? The
CPUSA had 100,000 members by the end of World War II and loads
of fellow-travelers who had profound influence on American culture and education.
Furthermore, for many decades Canada was home to a thriving Communist Party
under the leadership of Tim Buck, whose son attended Yale with me. Marxists
I’ve known or read do not believe that “knowledge and truth are social
constructs.” The theory they propound is that belief systems belong to the
superstructure of a society. What really determines a society’s direction is
who controls productive forces; and this control brings political, economic,
and, at least derivatively, cultural power.
More importantly, I’m underwhelmed by the assertions that
postmodernism, which Peterson tells us entered Canada sometime in the 1970s,
has transformed Canadians into Marxists. I shall readily concede that some
self-described French postmodernists, like Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and
Jacques Derrida, voted for the French Communist or Socialist Party and
expressed personal dislike for bourgeois society. What is more problematic,
however, is that someone who reads postmodernist texts will be transformed into
a Politically Correct leftist.
Although I’ve read such texts extensively, I’ve never felt the
slightest urge to march in a Black Lives Matter demonstration. Nor can I locate
anything in Derrida, Roland Barthes, or any other French postmodernist that
would make me inclined to speak at a Women’s March. I’m certainly not a fan of
these authors who try to deconstruct and decontextualize established meanings.
They also inconsistently expect to be taken seriously as semanticists while
reducing those shared understandings that create and sustain community to
subjective interests. I’m also aware that Lacan, Giles Deleuze, and other
postmodernists identified mental disorders with a capitalist economy. Less
evident is that these attacks fueled contemporary political radicalism, which
Peterson sees as penetrating Canada through postmodernist deconstructionism.
The ascription of psychological disorder to capitalism was a favorite theme of
the Frankfurt School, which belabored it for thirty years before Deleuze took
it over in the 1960s. (Deleuze expressed a debt of gratitude to
Herbert Marcuse for his fusion of erotic gratification with revolutionary
politics.) Since the war against social normalcy pioneered by the Frankfurt
School is flourishing in most Western countries today, why should I go to
French deconstructionists in order to look for its source?
The suppression of free speech by the Canadian government and
Canadian universities, a situation that Peterson has doggedly resisted, has
nothing to do with Marxist beliefs. Peterson’s observation on this matter does
not demonstrate such a connection:
The postmodernists built on the Marxist ideology. They
started to play a sleight of hand, and instead of pitting the proletariat, the
working class, against the bourgeois, they started to pit the oppressed against
the oppressor. That opened up the avenue to identifying any number of groups as
oppressed and oppressor and to continue the same narrative under a different name.
Postmodernists may or may not have “built on Marxist
ideology" but the “sleight of hand” they carried out in order to create
their own version of “the oppressed against the oppressor” generated ideas that
are not Marxist in origin. No Marxist government I’m aware of has prohibited
gender-specific language or criminalized negative references to gays and the
transgendered. I couldn’t imagine any self-respecting Communist leader
mandating transgendered toilets in public restrooms. Where exactly would I find
such an idea in Das Kapital or in Stalin’sFoundations of
Leninism? Communist states, moreover, have usually persecuted gays, and
dealt quite harshly with drug-users and others they perceived as social
deviants.
What we call "Political Correctness" is not a Marxist
creation, as I argue strenuously in The Strange Death of Marxism.
Rather, we are looking at a post-Marxist leftist ideology stressing
universalism, equality, and the social guilt of white Christians, and more
particularly heterosexual, male white Christians. Those who are labeled
victimizers (and often accept this label for themselves) are charged with
oppressing a steadily expanding range of designated victims, and they are
expected to expiate their guilt by showing said victims special verbal and
behavioral consideration. Conditioning factors that may help us
understand what’s going on are the cultural Marxist-inspired war against
“prejudice” and the social engineering imperative of the modern administrative
state. Only by considering such variables can we explain the forces that have
invaded Peterson’s country and threatened his job.
I’d caution against taking too seriously what Communist Parties
out of power in Western countries say and do to attract support. The shrinking
CPUSA in present-day America presents women’s issues and racial discrimination
as key issues in its advertising
for members. A bizarre entry for the CPUSA on Wikipedia would
make it appear that American Communists spent most of the last century fighting
for black civil rights while being viciously tormented by anti-Communist
bigots. This, of course, is PR gibberish. The party leadership was almost
always unswervingly
Stalinist, as long as that Soviet mass murderer was in power; and it
collapsed into total irrelevance after opposing Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to
liberalize the Soviet regime. If the Communists came to power, judging by their
behavior elsewhere, their present showcase "victims" would probably
disappear into a re-education camp.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/02/getting_the_culprits_right.html
