Reviewed: Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989) by Fredric Jameson

Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989) by Fredric Jameson

This is the most politically confusing and unMarxist of Jameson's books. It floats on a stream of euphemisms when scientific terms would have been simpler and clearer. Example: his use of "world system" instead of imperialism is especially grating. (At least we are spared "hegemony," "precariat," and "globalization").

The thesis: postmodernism is the post-1970 mode of capitalist "cultural production" -- in which superstructural factors are determinant even in the final instance over economics. 

(This yearning on the part of the middle class left to write-off the multinational US working class and workers and farmers around the world is even more widespread today than it was when this study came out).

And for a book on capitalist "cultural production" from 1989, there is remarkably little curiosity about some of the big events in the class struggle circa 1979-1989. Internationally, these include: the advances of the Cuban revolution; the Reagan-Thatcher anti-labor drive; the 1979 revolutions in Grenada, Iran, and Nicaragua; the battle of Cuito Cuanavale and the coming revolution in South Africa; the UK miners strike; the strike wave in the USSR and Eastern European workers states.

Notable labor milestones in the US that escape even parenthetical "mapping" by Jameson: the 1978-79 UMWA strike; the breaking of PATCO; the Hormel P9 strike, and the strikes in copper mining in the southwest. 

References to works by Marx are often to material of secondary importance: some journalism and the Grundrisse. The latter was an extensive notebook, but not a text prepared by Marx and Engels for publication, and so not as rigorously revised and edited as the initial volume of Capital. Jameson is much more comfortable with the theoretical wiggle-room offered by the earlier work's imprecisions. (Similar to academic Marxists who comb Lukacs and Gramsci after passing-by Lenin and Trotsky).

Many of Jameson's insights into cultural theory are clearly presented. But he has no nose for recognizing and assessing POLITICAL WEIGHT. There is not a more severe handicap for a Marxist of any type.

Jay

21 June 2024