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The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left: A Marxist Critique
The polemical essays in this volume examine the complex interaction between history, philosophy and politics. The author defends historical materialism against contemporary anti-Marxist tendencies related to the Frankfurt School and postmodernism.
Upholding the tradition of Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin and Trotsky, this work is vital reading for those who wish to deepen their knowledge of classical Marxism. It provides critical insight into the philosophical and political issues separating scientific socialism from the ideological tendencies that influence a wide array of pseudo-left and anti-socialist political movements.
Upholding the tradition of Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin and Trotsky, this work is vital reading for those who wish to deepen their knowledge of classical Marxism. It provides critical insight into the philosophical and political issues separating scientific socialism from the ideological tendencies that influence a wide array of pseudo-left and anti-socialist political movements.
- GenresPhilosophyPolitics
297 pages, Paperback
Published December 7, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 17, 2019
This book is a must-read for any real leftists, especially in academia which is where the pseudo-left is most completely institutionally embedded. The book traces the degeneration of middle-class radicalism into identiry politics and demonstrates the intelllectual currents that fed into the postmodetn ideological framework that supports today's fake left. The recent implosion and disbanding of the International Socialist Organization under the pressure of the anti-Marxist identity politics that it itself cultivated (in the mistaken belief that these forces could be articulated with socialism) is proof of the validity of North's thesis.
December 24, 2018
This book treats an important subject. The effect of the transition of former student radicals into complacent, middle-class bourgeois whose philosophy has become "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em". These people now have influential positions in academia and are changing the way politics and social change are perceived by whole generations of young people. The warped point of view of postmodernism is an empty vessel with nothing to offer humanity as a way forward to enlightenment.
In fact, postmodernism's raison d'etre is the rejection of The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, from Spinoza to the French and American revolutions and the replacement of it with the forlorn shoulder-shrugging attitude that truth and facts are unknowable and that opinion is just as valid as facts and history. These pretenders laud ignorance and elevate it to the level that rational argument and such things as evidence are rendered meaningless. Opinion is all. On that basis, mankind would never have achieved the technical advances that we all take for granted: modern medicine, space exploration, the Internet, etc. Opinion didn't land on the moon or on a comet. Opinion didn't take our space exploration beyond the solar system. Opinion didn't put the Hubble telescope were it is. Opinion didn't eradicate polio.
We see before us, in this presidential election year of 2016, the end results of this kind of thinking. Endless wars for profit with no regard for human life or the life of the planet, industrial pollution that threatens life everywhere, political propaganda that five-year olds could see through taken as good coin: these are problems which must be solved and can only be dealt with rationally.
This book is an excellent primer on the dangers presented by postmodernism and its acolytes from academia to journalism. I recommend it highly, particularly to young people.
In fact, postmodernism's raison d'etre is the rejection of The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, from Spinoza to the French and American revolutions and the replacement of it with the forlorn shoulder-shrugging attitude that truth and facts are unknowable and that opinion is just as valid as facts and history. These pretenders laud ignorance and elevate it to the level that rational argument and such things as evidence are rendered meaningless. Opinion is all. On that basis, mankind would never have achieved the technical advances that we all take for granted: modern medicine, space exploration, the Internet, etc. Opinion didn't land on the moon or on a comet. Opinion didn't take our space exploration beyond the solar system. Opinion didn't put the Hubble telescope were it is. Opinion didn't eradicate polio.
We see before us, in this presidential election year of 2016, the end results of this kind of thinking. Endless wars for profit with no regard for human life or the life of the planet, industrial pollution that threatens life everywhere, political propaganda that five-year olds could see through taken as good coin: these are problems which must be solved and can only be dealt with rationally.
This book is an excellent primer on the dangers presented by postmodernism and its acolytes from academia to journalism. I recommend it highly, particularly to young people.
October 17, 2020
This book is a compilation of articles and letters with a common theme, written many years apart. It took me some time to decide how to respond to it, because the letters and a book review especially are argumentative and point scoring, written to respond in detail to hostile commentators on the policies and theories of a Trotskyist party, so they come across as sectarian and dogmatic, while I had no special interest in the parties to the disputes.
In the event, I found a way to enjoy the book by treating it as a dialogue, in which critical voices are employed to ask the awkward questions from which useful answers can arise. I was also converted by the excellent quality of many of the explanations offered and the way they were backed up with evidence. David North increasingly impressed me as a competent and well informed guide through some scrappy terrain.
Still, the book never ceased to strike me as poorly structured, arbitrary and random. There is no survey of the Frankfurt School, which is what I wanted when I bought the book, based on its reviews. There is a chapter, late in the book, which helpfully reviews the background to what North defines as the pseudo left, but I expected more. The final effect probably does achieve the book’s objective, which is to convince readers that people who claim to be of the left or even Marxists must be subjected to scrutiny, because they are sometimes capable of being reactionary and often they are misleading. Conversely, it proposes a positive concept of what authentic Marxism and revolutionary socialism should look like and how to test for this. However, most of this requires readers to pick out the bones from a messy background. Maybe the struggle is part of the message.
In a simplistic form (which is about my level I admit) these were some of the random lessons I can bring to mind from the book:
Did Marx want to abolish marriage? No, what he rejected was bourgeois marriage, which commodifies women and children.
Did Marx claim that socialism would solve all the problems between men and women? No. North writes: “The vast complexity of social life and the pressure it places upon families, requires not the invention of a new family form but, rather shifting the weight of the burdens now falling more or less entirely upon individuals to society as a whole.” [p96]
Do workers have the capacity to undertake effective revolution, to understand what they would change and what they might build? Yes they do, since they already produce the wealth which capitalism exploits.
Do workers need a highly trained elite to guide them towards true socialism? No, this can become a con trick to benefit a bureaucracy, such as a reactionary trade union leadership that sells out its members. Socialism must be truly democratic and under the workers' full control.
Can Marxism really be scientific, in that it can use history to predict and shape the future? [Popper made much of the argument that history gives no grounds for predicting the future.] Yes. This topic gets its own chapter which is interesting. It's not a matter of magically reading the future but of understanding the processes at work and exercising judgement.
For example? Workers are pressed to support the middle class in social democratic parties but they are routinely betrayed. The middle class will never sacrifice their relative affluence for the benefit of workers. [Marx would not be surprised at the way the Labour Party treated Corbyn or the Democratic Party treated Bernie Sanders. Perhaps they should have prepared for this better.]
Did Engels distort Marx's theories after Marx died, and was this because Engels lacked philosophical skills or had different beliefs to Marx? No. They collaborated for four decades. Engels wrote on Hegel and understood his philosophy very well. Marx himself gave Engels credit for many contributions. I think I have been cured of accepting that the problem with Marxism was that is was often Engelism; I must check where this started for me.
Some Quotes
The theoretical work of Marx and Engels between 1843 and 1847 – whose greatest achievement was the critique of Hegelian idealism and, on this basis, the elaboration of the materialist conception of history – ...culminated in the writing of the Communist Manifesto. During the next twenty years Marx devoted his energies almost entirely to the scientific substantiation of the revolutionary perspective that it advanced. This substantiation consisted principally of: (1) the successful utilization of the materialist conception of history as an instrument of political analysis (making possible the demystification and rational comprehension of political developments... (2) the discovery of the economic laws governing the motion of capitalist society, culminating in the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867. [p79]
The understanding that this world, in which we live today, contains within it the real potential for a social revolution, which will cleanse the world of all violence and inhumanity, is the source of a genuine optimism that has no need for the supplementary pseudo-utopian anti-depressants. [p132]
The victory of the Nazis in 1933 resulted in the crushing of the most politically experienced and largest workers movement in Europe... In the Soviet Union, the Stalinist terror resulted in the annihilation of virtually the entire Marxist cadre and socialist intelligentsia that had led the October Revolution and secured the survival of the USSR. ... In the face of the political defeats suffered by the working class, the left intelligentsia grew increasingly sceptical towards the prospects for, and even the possibility of, socialist revolution. [p205]
The events of 1953 opened up a thirty-two year civil war within the Fourth International. The immense difficulties that confronted the defenders of Trotskyism flowed from the fact that the interests of real social forces, operating on a world scale, were involved, and that the struggle was waged under conditions highly unfavourable to those who upheld a revolutionary line based on the interests of the working class. Keep in mind the international forces that were involved: the Stalinist regimes in power in the USSR and Eastern Europe, the Maoist regime in China, the bourgeois national movements of the “Third World,” and, in the advanced capitalist countries, the social democratic, Stalinist and trade union bureaucracies, along with the rapidly expanding and relatively privileged petty-bourgeois stratum in the universities and other higher paid professions. [p212]
...Many of the political themes that would come to define what we now quite correctly refer to as the “pseudo-left” politics of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s – centred on individual identity and lifestyle – emerged within the milieu of Pablosim and the petty bourgeois left in the 1950s and 1960s. This was the era when Freud and psychology especially as interpreted by Marcuse were hailed as the alternative to Marx and materialism. Marcuse’s pessimistic rejection of the revolutionary capacities of the working class sanctioned, even demanded, a search for alternatives to the class struggle as the basis for personal liberation within a supposedly omnipotent oppressive society. [p212]
The 1960s witnessed a significant radicalization of middle-class youth. Large sections of these youths identified themselves as socialists, even Marxists. But what they mean by this was something quite different to what those terms meant in classical Marxism... Their theoretical objections to classical Marxism – which they cloaked with denunciations of supposedly “vulgar” materialism – merely repeated longstanding idealist criticisms of Marxism that dated all the way back to the 1890s... [p214]
In May-June 1968, the petty –bourgeois intelligentsia looked over the abyss and they were terrified. Their brush with revolution set into motion a sharp movement to the right. The so-called “new Philosophers” ... embraced anti-communism under the hypocritical banner of “human rights.” But another group of philosophers ... justified their repudiation of Marxism with the intellectually nihilistic formulations of postmodernism. .... Lyotard, a former member of the communist party, announced the arrival of the era of postmodernism, which he defined as as “profound incredulity towards all metanarratives.” What Lyotard meant by “metanarrative” was an approach to history as a law governed process. Marx and Engels developed the fundamental “metanarrative” in their elaboration of the materialist conception of history. In the twentieth century, the most enduring of all “metanarratives” was presented by Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution... The refutation of this analysis required an attack on all the central elements of the materialist conception of history. As one specialist in intellectual history [David West] has recently noted, “Marxism is arguably the most frequent, if not always the explicit, target of post-modernist critics of modernism.” [p215,216]
The political process that we are examining is not merely the outcome of theoretical inconsistencies. Spurred on by its own increasingly substantial material affluence, the petty-bourgeois left’s long-standing scepticism in the revolutionary capacities of the working class has acquired new and distinct socioeconomic and political characteristics. As .... it becomes ever more openly integrated into the political structures sanctioned by the ruling establishment, the affluent left’s hostility to the struggles of the working class can no longer be concealed with empty pseudo-socialist phrase-mongering, its ideologists are compelled to argue openly for a definition of “left” politics that excludes the working class from any independent, let alone revolutionary, role. [p219]
In the event, I found a way to enjoy the book by treating it as a dialogue, in which critical voices are employed to ask the awkward questions from which useful answers can arise. I was also converted by the excellent quality of many of the explanations offered and the way they were backed up with evidence. David North increasingly impressed me as a competent and well informed guide through some scrappy terrain.
Still, the book never ceased to strike me as poorly structured, arbitrary and random. There is no survey of the Frankfurt School, which is what I wanted when I bought the book, based on its reviews. There is a chapter, late in the book, which helpfully reviews the background to what North defines as the pseudo left, but I expected more. The final effect probably does achieve the book’s objective, which is to convince readers that people who claim to be of the left or even Marxists must be subjected to scrutiny, because they are sometimes capable of being reactionary and often they are misleading. Conversely, it proposes a positive concept of what authentic Marxism and revolutionary socialism should look like and how to test for this. However, most of this requires readers to pick out the bones from a messy background. Maybe the struggle is part of the message.
In a simplistic form (which is about my level I admit) these were some of the random lessons I can bring to mind from the book:
Did Marx want to abolish marriage? No, what he rejected was bourgeois marriage, which commodifies women and children.
Did Marx claim that socialism would solve all the problems between men and women? No. North writes: “The vast complexity of social life and the pressure it places upon families, requires not the invention of a new family form but, rather shifting the weight of the burdens now falling more or less entirely upon individuals to society as a whole.” [p96]
Do workers have the capacity to undertake effective revolution, to understand what they would change and what they might build? Yes they do, since they already produce the wealth which capitalism exploits.
Do workers need a highly trained elite to guide them towards true socialism? No, this can become a con trick to benefit a bureaucracy, such as a reactionary trade union leadership that sells out its members. Socialism must be truly democratic and under the workers' full control.
Can Marxism really be scientific, in that it can use history to predict and shape the future? [Popper made much of the argument that history gives no grounds for predicting the future.] Yes. This topic gets its own chapter which is interesting. It's not a matter of magically reading the future but of understanding the processes at work and exercising judgement.
For example? Workers are pressed to support the middle class in social democratic parties but they are routinely betrayed. The middle class will never sacrifice their relative affluence for the benefit of workers. [Marx would not be surprised at the way the Labour Party treated Corbyn or the Democratic Party treated Bernie Sanders. Perhaps they should have prepared for this better.]
Did Engels distort Marx's theories after Marx died, and was this because Engels lacked philosophical skills or had different beliefs to Marx? No. They collaborated for four decades. Engels wrote on Hegel and understood his philosophy very well. Marx himself gave Engels credit for many contributions. I think I have been cured of accepting that the problem with Marxism was that is was often Engelism; I must check where this started for me.
Some Quotes
The theoretical work of Marx and Engels between 1843 and 1847 – whose greatest achievement was the critique of Hegelian idealism and, on this basis, the elaboration of the materialist conception of history – ...culminated in the writing of the Communist Manifesto. During the next twenty years Marx devoted his energies almost entirely to the scientific substantiation of the revolutionary perspective that it advanced. This substantiation consisted principally of: (1) the successful utilization of the materialist conception of history as an instrument of political analysis (making possible the demystification and rational comprehension of political developments... (2) the discovery of the economic laws governing the motion of capitalist society, culminating in the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867. [p79]
The understanding that this world, in which we live today, contains within it the real potential for a social revolution, which will cleanse the world of all violence and inhumanity, is the source of a genuine optimism that has no need for the supplementary pseudo-utopian anti-depressants. [p132]
The victory of the Nazis in 1933 resulted in the crushing of the most politically experienced and largest workers movement in Europe... In the Soviet Union, the Stalinist terror resulted in the annihilation of virtually the entire Marxist cadre and socialist intelligentsia that had led the October Revolution and secured the survival of the USSR. ... In the face of the political defeats suffered by the working class, the left intelligentsia grew increasingly sceptical towards the prospects for, and even the possibility of, socialist revolution. [p205]
The events of 1953 opened up a thirty-two year civil war within the Fourth International. The immense difficulties that confronted the defenders of Trotskyism flowed from the fact that the interests of real social forces, operating on a world scale, were involved, and that the struggle was waged under conditions highly unfavourable to those who upheld a revolutionary line based on the interests of the working class. Keep in mind the international forces that were involved: the Stalinist regimes in power in the USSR and Eastern Europe, the Maoist regime in China, the bourgeois national movements of the “Third World,” and, in the advanced capitalist countries, the social democratic, Stalinist and trade union bureaucracies, along with the rapidly expanding and relatively privileged petty-bourgeois stratum in the universities and other higher paid professions. [p212]
...Many of the political themes that would come to define what we now quite correctly refer to as the “pseudo-left” politics of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s – centred on individual identity and lifestyle – emerged within the milieu of Pablosim and the petty bourgeois left in the 1950s and 1960s. This was the era when Freud and psychology especially as interpreted by Marcuse were hailed as the alternative to Marx and materialism. Marcuse’s pessimistic rejection of the revolutionary capacities of the working class sanctioned, even demanded, a search for alternatives to the class struggle as the basis for personal liberation within a supposedly omnipotent oppressive society. [p212]
The 1960s witnessed a significant radicalization of middle-class youth. Large sections of these youths identified themselves as socialists, even Marxists. But what they mean by this was something quite different to what those terms meant in classical Marxism... Their theoretical objections to classical Marxism – which they cloaked with denunciations of supposedly “vulgar” materialism – merely repeated longstanding idealist criticisms of Marxism that dated all the way back to the 1890s... [p214]
In May-June 1968, the petty –bourgeois intelligentsia looked over the abyss and they were terrified. Their brush with revolution set into motion a sharp movement to the right. The so-called “new Philosophers” ... embraced anti-communism under the hypocritical banner of “human rights.” But another group of philosophers ... justified their repudiation of Marxism with the intellectually nihilistic formulations of postmodernism. .... Lyotard, a former member of the communist party, announced the arrival of the era of postmodernism, which he defined as as “profound incredulity towards all metanarratives.” What Lyotard meant by “metanarrative” was an approach to history as a law governed process. Marx and Engels developed the fundamental “metanarrative” in their elaboration of the materialist conception of history. In the twentieth century, the most enduring of all “metanarratives” was presented by Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution... The refutation of this analysis required an attack on all the central elements of the materialist conception of history. As one specialist in intellectual history [David West] has recently noted, “Marxism is arguably the most frequent, if not always the explicit, target of post-modernist critics of modernism.” [p215,216]
The political process that we are examining is not merely the outcome of theoretical inconsistencies. Spurred on by its own increasingly substantial material affluence, the petty-bourgeois left’s long-standing scepticism in the revolutionary capacities of the working class has acquired new and distinct socioeconomic and political characteristics. As .... it becomes ever more openly integrated into the political structures sanctioned by the ruling establishment, the affluent left’s hostility to the struggles of the working class can no longer be concealed with empty pseudo-socialist phrase-mongering, its ideologists are compelled to argue openly for a definition of “left” politics that excludes the working class from any independent, let alone revolutionary, role. [p219]
March 13, 2022
Not the best book to read this early in my Marxist self-education but I didn’t disagree with any of the ideas. And though I can appreciate why it’s necessary, it wasn’t super entertaining to read two full essays written by the author in defence against criticisms made by others; I felt like I was watching a sport I don’t really know the rules to. But the good parts (the bits I understood) were very good.
July 26, 2025
This book is 50% a takedown of the Frankfurt School, which never tried to be a political party; and 50% a polemic involving personal attacks on two of the author's political enemies. If you are looking for a book that treats the subject of the title, keep looking.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews