Polemics against postmodernism

LOREN GOLDNER’S VANGUARD OF RETROGRESSION

It is seldom remembered today, but from the mid-eighties through the end of the millennium there
was a veritable flood of Marxist books about postmodernism. During the preceding decade, a wide
range of figures had proclaimed that modernity was at a close: Ihab Hassan in literature,1 Charles
Jencks in architecture,2 and Jean-François Lyotard in philosophy.3 Fredric Jameson led the charge
among the Marxists, diagnosing postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” in an influ-
ential 1984 lecture. Over the next fifteen years, he would release two essay collections on the topic.4
David Harvey examined The Condition of Postmodernity in 1989, looking at the shift from Fordism to
flexible accumulation within the global economy and the spatiotemporal texture that corresponded
to each.5 Alex Callinicos fulminated Against Postmodernism that same year, arguing that what felt like a
monumental change was in fact the simple result of political defeats.6 Terry Eagleton, after an initial
foray into the topic in 1985, sought to dispel the ideological Illusions of Postmodernism roughly ten years
later.7 Even Ellen Meiksins Wood weighed in on the debate in a 1997 piece.8 Perry Anderson gave a
synoptic overview of The Origins of Postmodernity in 1998, where he summarized the contributions of
Jameson, Harvey, Callinicos, and Eagleton.9 Although “postmodernism” may seem a dead letter at
present, it was very much on everyone’s mind.
Meanwhile, on a related front, a number of Marxist authors confronted a theoretical current
widely seen as adjacent to postmodernism: namely “poststructuralism,” a term encompassing every-
thing from deconstruction to schizoanalysis to epistemic archeology. Jürgen Habermas, the leading
spokesman of the Frankfurt School’s second generation, mounted a defense of the unfinished pro-
ject of modernity in 1980. He then tried to address the challenges posed by Friedrich Nietzsche and
Martin Heidegger, along with their followers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.10 Anderson had
likewise gone over the rise of Foucault and Derrida, as well as Jacques Lacan and Habermas himself,
seeing their theories as filling the void left by historical materialism in France and Germany.11 Peter
Dews painstakingly differentiated the thought of four French poststructuralists — Derrida, Lyotard,
1 Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press,
1987). This collection gathers pieces on postmodernism originally published between 1971 and 1987.
2 Charles Jencks, The Language of Postmodern Architecture [1977] (New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1984); Charles Jencks, What is

Postmodernism? [1986] (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).

3 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [1979], translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian

Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Cor-
respondence, 1982-1985 [1988], translated by Don Barry, Bernadette Maher, Julian Pefanis, Virginia Spate, and Morgan
Thomas (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
4 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991);

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (New York, NY: Verso, 1998).
5 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change [1989] (Malden, MA: Blackwell

Publishers Ltd., 1997).

6 Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism [1989] (London: Polity Press, 1991).
7 Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism,” New Left Review (Vol. I, № 152: July/August 1985), pp.

60-73; Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996).
8 Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Modernity, Postmodernity, or Capitalism?”, Review of International Political Economy (Vol. 4, № 3:

Autumn 1997), pp. 539-560.

9 Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity [1998] (New York, NY: Verso, 2006).
10 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Incomplete Project” [1980], translated by Seyla Benhabib, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays

in Postmodern Culture (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 3-15; Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity:
Twelve Lectures [1985], translated by Frederick Lawrence (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998).
11 Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1984).

1
Lacan, and Foucault — from the claims of German critical theory.12 Slavoj Žižek, fresh off the suc-
cess of his 1989 debut, launched entertaining Lacano-Hegelian broadsides against Derrida and De-
leuze.13 Many of the Marxian appraisals of postmodernity also engaged with these theorists en passant;
Jameson dealt with numerous poststructuralist motifs throughout his work, while Callinicos looked
to delineate the “aporias of poststructuralism.”
Besides postmodernism and poststructuralism, moreover, a feeling of posteriority seemed to
set in everywhere around this time. The critic Arthur Danto signaled the end of art in a 1984 paper,14
and in 1989 the philosopher Francis Fukuyama similarly declared that history had come to an end.15
(Jameson saw both of these quasi-Hegelian positions as symptomatic of the postmodern moment.)16
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many felt that the end of politics had finally arrived.17
A postartistic, posthistorical, and postpolitical age was thus at hand. Not all the Marxists mentioned
above shared the same assessment of this state of affairs. Harvey, Anderson, and especially Jameson
held an ambivalent attitude toward postmodernism, neither celebrating nor condemning it. Eagleton
and Callinicos were, by contrast, extremely hostile. Others, like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
embraced the postmodern turn, becoming unapologetic post-Marxists reliant on a “deconstructive”
approach to old historical materialist categories.18 Regardless of how they individually lined up, how-
ever, all of them agreed that things had changed.
Loren Goldner’s Vanguard of Retrogression: “Postmodern” Fictions as Ideology in the Era of Fictitious
Capital can be considered yet another attempt to reckon with the superstructural effects of the long
downturn.19 Published shortly before the September 11 terrorist attacks, it brought together articles
written between 1979 and 2001. The book went largely unnoticed upon its appearance, garnering at
most a handful of citations,20 but in many ways it is the best of the genre of Marxian interpretations
of postmodernism. It is useful to compare Vanguard of Retrogression with some of the other titles listed
above. Quite like Jameson, for example, Goldner grounded postmodern ideologies in material trans-
formations in the sphere of production. Unlike Jameson, he did not outsource his economic analysis
to Ernest Mandel.21 For Goldner, as for Harvey, the 1973 crisis marked a turning point in the history

12 Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Poststructuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (New York, NY: Verso, 1987).
13 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor [1991] (New York, NY: Verso, 2008);
Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences [2004] (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012).
14 Arthur Danto, “The End of Art” [1984], The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York, NY: Columbia University

Press, 1986); Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1996).
15 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest (№ 16: Summer 1989), pp. 3-18; Francis Fukuyama,

The End of History and the Last Man (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1992).
16 See Fredric Jameson, “‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History’?”, The Cultural Turn, pp. 73-92.
17 Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy [1995], translated by Julie Rose (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Uni-

versity Press, 1999), pp. 61-122; Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London: Verso,
1999), pp. 198-205.
18 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics [1985] (London:

Verso, 2001); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, “Post-Marxism without Apologies,” New Left Review (Vol. 1, № 166:
November 1987), pp. 79-106. Inspired by Laclau and Mouffe, Saul Newman proposed postanarchism a little over a dec-
ade later. See Saul Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Antiauthoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power [2001] (London: Lexing-
ton Books, 2007); Saul Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
19 The phrase is taken from Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long

Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005 (New York, NY: Verso, 2006). Goldner was acquainted with Brenner from his time in
the Independent Socialist Clubs in the early seventies. For his views on an earlier version of Brenner’s essay, published in
the New Left Review, see Loren Goldner, “‘Total Capital’ Rigor and International Liquidity: A Reply to Robert Brenner,”
Against the Current (№ 80: May/June 1999), pp. .
20 Mostly in writings by the (excellent) Argentine Marxist Guido Starosta and the British Marxist-humanist Cyril Smith.
21 Jameson finds in Mandel’s 1972 book Late Capitalism “a usably Marxian perspective,” in Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural

Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 400. Earlier on (pp. 35-36), he leaned on its notion of a “third stage” of capitalist development.

2
of capital accumulation. However, Goldner did not adopt the regulation school’s “Fordist”/“post-
Fordist” periodization,22 instead characterizing it in terms of a switch from formal to real subsump-
tion (or “domination,” to use his preferred translation).23 Similar to Callinicos, he had political objec-
tions to postmodernism. But whereas Callinicos came out of the British tradition of Cliffite Trotsky-
ism, Goldner was influenced by French neo-Bordigism. And although he shared many of Dews’ crit-
icisms of poststructuralist theory, the latter’s perspective was more akin to that of Theodor Adorno,
while the former leaned on Leszek Kołakowski.
Early in Vanguard of Retrogression, Goldner remarked that, already by 1971, “a sense of the end
of something was in the air.”24 The sixties, which had seen such upheaval, were over. Ranging effort-
lessly from politics and economics to philosophy and culture, his account of that turbulent decade in
the preface sets the tone for the rest of the book. (Here again it is interesting to read alongside Jame-
son’s “Periodizing the Sixties,” by contrast a much more anodyne essay.)25 Goldner would recall in a
subsequent chapter the dramatic changes that took place during this short stretch of time, all in one
breathless sentence:
Where there had been in 1960 earnest, crew-cut, and bobbed-hair liberal supporters of JFK
and Young Republicans, there were in 1970 Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, Young Lords,
Black Panthers, White Panthers, Hell’s Angels, Gypsy Jokers, Up Against the Wall Mother-
fuckers, Tim Leary, and Richard Albert (aka Baba Ramdass), Ken Kesey and his bus of
Merry Pranksters, Carlos Casteneda and Mescalito, Esalen, the Guru Maharaji, the Fabulous
Furry Freak Brothers, free-jazz black nationalists, the East Village Other, the Stonewall riots,
women’s consciousness-raising groups, Woodstock Nation, fragged Army officers in Viet-
nam, the death of George Jackson, Attica, the Chicano riots in LA, the Brown Berets, the
“army of 100,000 Villons,” as Saul Bellow called them, “modernism in the streets,” as Daniel
Bell put it.26
But even before the decade’s close, there was a liquidity crisis and other ominous signs that the post-
war boom was stalling out. Over and above this malaise, “sleaze and rot” set in.27 And then came the
turn into the seventies. “These years, 1971-1973, were eerie,” mused Goldner. “It seemed that all the
revolts of the previous three decades had faded away with remarkable speed, leaving behind only the
‘new social movements’ of women, blacks, Latinos, gays, and ecologists… battling their way into the

For worthwhile critiques of this book by Mandel, see Paul Mattick Sr., “Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism” [1974], Economic
Crisis and Crisis Theory (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), pp. 165-227; and Moishe Postone, “Contemporary Historical
Transformations: Beyond Postindustrial Theory and Neo-Marxism,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 19 (Stamford,
CT: JAI Press, 1999), pp. 3-53.
22 Harvey relies on the twin concepts of “mode of regulation” and “regime of accumulation,” coined by Michel Aglietta

and popularized by Alain Lipietz. For a critique of the regulation school, see Robert Brenner & Mark Glick, “The Regu-
lation Approach: Theory and History,” New Left Review (Vol. 1, № 188: July/Aug. 1991), pp. 45-119. To his credit, Har-
vey recognizes that “[t]here is, within the regulation school, little or no attempt to provide any detailed understanding of
the mechanisms and logic of transitions,” and tries to furnish deeper concepts. Harvey, op. cit., pp. 176-179.
23 “We translate Marx’s term ‘subsumption’ throughout the text as ‘domination,’ e.g. formal, real domination. We do so

because ‘subsumption’ also often used in English, strikes us as a somewhat clumsy word. We wish to point out, how-
ever, our reluctance to spread confusion with Frankfurt School or Weberian notions of domination, which come from
the German word Herrschaft, and which refer to a notion of force which seems to us external to Marx’s theory of value.”
Loren Goldner, The Remaking of the American Working Class: The Restructuring of Global Capital and the Recomposition of Class
Terrain (published as a manuscript in 1979, reissued in 1999).
24 Loren Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social: Deconstruction and Deindustrializa-

tion” [2001], Vanguard of Retrogression: “Postmodern” Fictions as Ideology in the Era of Fictitious Capital [2001] (West Somerville,
MA: Queequeg Publications, 2011), p. 6.
25 Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the Sixties” [1984], The Ideologies of Theory (New York, NY: Verso, 2008), pp. 483-503.
26 Loren Goldner, “The Online World Is Also On Fire: How the Sixties Marginalized Literature in American Culture

(and Why Literature Mainly Deserved It)” [1995], Vanguard of Retrogression, p. 58.
27 Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social,” p. 7.

3
mainstream.”28 Corresponding to these movements was an intellectual outlook that Goldner dubbed
“middle-class radicalism,” which conceived of freedom as mere transgression and the refusal of con-
straints.29 Earlier enthusiasms for existentialism, Beatnik poetry, and French New Wave cinema were
abandoned,30 or replaced by structuralism and schlock. Such was “the social and ideological world of
the radicalized middle classes in the early 1970s.”31
Many of the essays in Vanguard of Retrogression focus on what Goldner took to be the theoret-
ical underpinnings of postmodernism. As the subtitle to his polemical opener suggests, “Ontological
‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social: Deconstruction and Deindustrialization,” he drew
“a parallel between the economic trend of deindustrialization… and the academic fad of deconstruc-
tion.”32 Though this theme is left somewhat underdeveloped, it was the attenuation of the proletariat
as the Lukácsian “identical subject-object of history,”33 its fracturing into so many disparate subjects,
that motivated the cultural turn. Goldner saw the poststructuralist emphasis on the “new Nietzsche”
and the “late Heidegger” — in contrast to the earlier existentialist Nietzsche and Heidegger of dread
and angst — as providing the justification for this move.34 In Goldner’s view, this was especially true
of the latter thinker:
Heidegger, like Foucault after him, [aimed] his critique directly at dialectical thought, against
the reason that tends to absorb the other into itself, that understands all “otherness” as alien-
ation. (Or as Marx said, “nothing human is alien to me” [humani nihil a me alienum].) Against
this kind of rationality, Heidegger tried to erect the wall of Differenz, difference that was not
dialectically mediated or superseded by any historical process.35
It was precisely “Heidegger’s attempt to found an irreducible, antidialectical difference (Derrida later
called it différance)” that theoretically underwrote the practical fragmentation of politics in this period.
Postmodernism required a new (ir)rationality, to rationalize “the death of the subject.” Goldner per-
sonally suspected that
behind the all-too-facile attacks on “master narratives” and “bureaucracy,” the capitalists and
their ideologues, the theoreticians of “difference,” were after the real game of the unitary
working-class “subject,” which had seriously frightened them from 1968 to 1973. The pul-
verization of anything that might be construed as a “general interest,” the breaking up of the
big “worker fortresses” of Detroit, Manchester, Billancourt, and Turin, the staggering rever-
sal throughout the West, after 1968, of earlier postwar trends toward greater income equality,
the “identity politics” of various groups asserting that they have nothing in common with

28 Ibid., pp. 12-13.

29 Strangely, he associates this second attitude with Situationism. Ibid., p. 8.
30 “One fundamental shift that has been almost totally forgotten today is the disappearance of the climate associated, for

better or worse, with the word ‘existentialism’ that reigned from the early 1940s to ca. 1965. This mood was articulated
in the works of authors who have for the most part faded away: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty,
Dostoyevsky, Heidegger, Jaspers, Unamuno, Maritain… ‘Existentialism’ seemed, in those years, to overlap, or to be on a
continuum with, various contemporary ‘avant-gardes’ of the 1945-1965 period, including the American beats, the British
‘Angry Young Men,’ Paris Latin Quarter cellar nightclubs, bebop and free jazz, serial music, the films of directors such
as Bergman, Antonioni, Godard, the theater of Pinter, Beckett, and Ionesco. The popularized watchwords of ‘existential-
ism’ were despair, angst, death, despair, nausea, absurdity, meaninglessness, alienation.” Ibid., p. 10.
31 Ibid., p. 16.
32 Loren Goldner, “Multiculturalism or World Culture? On a ‘Left’-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown”

[1991], Vanguard of Retrogression, p. 90. Published in 1993 at Against the Current as “Postmodernism vs. World History.”
33 “Only when the consciousness of the proletariat is able to point out the road along which the dialectics of history is

objectively impelled, but which it cannot travel unaided, will the consciousness of the proletariat awaken to a conscious-
ness of the process, and only then will the proletariat become the identical subject-object of history whose praxis will
change reality.” Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” History and Class Consciousness: Stud-
ies in Marxist Dialectics [1924], translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971), pp. 197-198.
34 Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social,” pp. 11-12.
35 Ibid., p. 14.

4
 anyone else, the seemingly limitless ability of capital to attack, outsource, and downsize,
without encountering any “contradiction” undermining it, all create the climate for the post-
modern derision of such “metaphysics”… while hope for a higher organization of society
beyond capitalism seems to fade away by the day… What was ending then and there was the
world-historical career of “negation,” theorized for modern history by Hegel.36
All this high theory, itself a reflection of the sociohistoric shift Goldner identified, eventually trickled
down into political practice. “The big debate on the American left in the late 1980s and early 1990s,”
he thus observed, “was about the ‘difference’ of the ‘identity’ of every oppressed group, with the no-
table exception of the working class as a whole.”37
Of course, Goldner was well aware of the different layers of mediation through which these
concepts had passed before arriving on the shores of the United States in the waning decades of the
twentieth century. He pointed out that Nietzsche, in particular, would have found the poststructural-
ist deployment of “difference” unrecognizable side-by-side with his own.38 Both Nietzsche and Hei-
degger had aimed their attacks primarily at socialism — at the arguments of Proudhon, Bakunin, and
Dühring in Nietzsche’s case, and at those of Marx in Heidegger’s — using Hegel’s philosophical sys-
tem as a proxy. Goldner claimed their post-soixante-huitard epigones shared this hostility toward Marx-
ism, even if they otherwise disclaimed any overtly reactionary stance. “The meaning of the currently
fashionable word ‘deconstruction’ is a distillation of their effort to overthrow dialectical reason,” he
maintained. “What they attack in Hegel is subliminally imputed to Marx.” (Parenthetically, he added
that “the occasional assertion that Marxian and deconstructive theories are compatible is like saying
that Marxism and monetarist economics are compatible.”)39 But there were two intermediary figures
whom Goldner saw as shaping the American reception of their thought: “The two major mediators
of Nietzschean-Heideggerian ‘difference’ to North American postmodern academia are Michel Fou-
cault and Jacques Derrida. In France, ‘difference’ became, with Foucault, differences of ‘desire’ and,
with Derrida, of ‘other voices’; in America it became, in pseudoradical guise, the ideological counter-
point to the [assault on] the social in the era of high-tech neoliberalism.”40 For Goldner, the concept
was subtly transformed along the way. Recounting the story of its transatlantic migration, he thereby
reminded readers that
the ideology of “difference” began with Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s attack on the universal
claims of dialectical reason and its drive to make the “other” into a moment of the “same.”
In France, through Foucault and Derrida, this “deconstruction” of the unitary subject of
Western philosophy (culminating in Hegel’s world-historical subject, the latter often seen as
a stand-in for Marx’s proletarian subject) led to a view of a “plurality of discourses” or “mul-
tiple voices,” that were never mediated in a higher unity, understood as illusory by definition.
Finally, in America, these currents became the extremely esoteric veneer of what amounts to

36 Ibid., p. 16.
37 Goldner, “Multiculturalism or World Culture?”, p. 89.
38 “What is today called ‘difference’ with distinctly populist emphasis was, ironically, first articulated by Nietzsche as a

radical aristocratic refusal of the culmination of history in a ‘closed system’ of egalitarianism, liberalism, democracy, sci-
ence, and technology, or socialism, which for him were so many manifestations of a ‘slave morality,’ the leveling wish for
sameness which the ‘weak’ foist upon the ‘strong.’ That such an idea, one hundred years later, would become the basis
for vaunting the radical ‘difference’ of a gay black woman of the underclass did not, in all probability, occur to Nie-
tzsche.” Ibid., p. 92.
39 “While socialism was the culmination of the trend they denounced, Nietzsche knew next to nothing of Marx or Marx-

ism (although he did brilliantly intuit the bourgeois character of the German Social Democrats, long before most Marx-
ists did). Heidegger was more familiar with Marx — above all through his student Herbert Marcuse — he but rarely
treats Marx directly in his work. For both of them, Hegel was a totem for the kind of historical rationality which culmi-
nated in socialism… Their target is a rationality for which all ‘otherness,’ i.e., difference, is sooner or later subsumed in a
higher synthesis or supersession.” Ibid., p. 93.
40 Ibid., p. 95.

5
 a radical restatement of American pluralism, radical only in the radicalism of its insistence
that people of various races, ethnicities, and sexual preferences in fact have nothing of im-
portance in common with one another. In this view, in opposition to Marx, even “class” be-
comes just one more difference, not a unifying element whose emancipation is the sine qua
non of all emancipation… For Hegel and Marx, difference is contradiction, pointing to a higher
synthesis; for the postmodernists, difference is irreducible difference, and a higher synthesis
is just a new discourse of power, a new “master narrative.” The high irony is that for Hei-
degger, such qualities as class, race, ethnicity, and sexual preference are precisely in the fallen
realm of a “metaphysics of presence,” images “beneath” which real authenticity, always to-
tally individual… is discovered. The current theorists of “identity” who base themselves on
collective categories… have completely inverted the source. But in such a way do ideas mi-
grate, particularly to America.41
Jameson also spoke of “the ideology of difference” in his book on Postmodernism, connecting it to the
death of the subject, the promotion of marginalized groups instead of the proletariat, and incredulity
toward metanarratives.42 Like Goldner, who similarly deplored “the ‘cultural studies’ scene today,”43
in a 1993 essay “On Cultural Studies” he entertained “the possibility that the various politics of Dif-
ference — the differences inherent in the various politics of ‘group identity’ — have been made pos-
sible only by the tendential leveling of social Identity generated by consumer society.”44 Moishe Pos-
tone, whose magnum opus Goldner critically (if appreciatively) reviewed in 2005,45 expressed an almost
identical sentiment:
Postmodernism could be understood as a sort of premature postcapitalism, one that points
to possibilities generated, but unrealized, in capitalism. At the same time, because postmod-
ernism misrecognizes its context, it might function as an ideology of legitimation for the re-
configuration of capitalism of which it is a part. The contemporary hypostatization of differ-
ence, heterogeneity, and hybridity, doesn’t necessarily point beyond capitalism, but can serve
to veil and legitimate a new global form that combines decentralization and heterogeneity of
production and consumption with increasing centralization of control and underlying homo-
geneity.46
Goldner’s attitude toward postmodernism was doubtless more polemical than that of either Jameson
or Postone, but he would likely have agreed with their assessment. Still further, he regarded the turn
toward identity as symptomatic of the broader “NGOization” of politics, as part of the aftermath of
1968. “Postmodernism and ‘cultural studies’ today still live off of the sixties or, more specifically, the
defeat of the sixties,” Goldner bitterly remarked.47

41 Ibid., p. 97.
42 See the subsection titled “The Ideology of Difference” in the final chapter, where he writes: “[T]he ideology of groups
comes into being simultaneously with the well-known ‘death of the subject’ (of which it is simply an alternate version)…
This is, of course, one of the things that problematize the visions of history or ‘master narratives’ of either bourgeois or
socialist revolution… for it is hard to imagine such a master narrative without a ‘subject of history.’ Virtually Marx’s first
published essay… in a remarkable philosophical leap discovered just such a new subject of history — the proletariat.
Marx’s early format was then maintained for other such now marginal subjects — blacks, women, the Third World,
even, somewhat abusively, students — in the rewriting of the doctrine of ‘radical chains’ during the 1960s. Now, how-
ever, in the pluralism of the collective groups, and no matter how ‘radical’ the immiseration or the marginalization of the
group in question, it can no longer fill that structural role, for the simple reason that the structure has been modified and
the role suppressed.” Jameson, The Postmodern Condition, p. 348.
43 Loren Goldner, “The Online World is Also on Fire: How the Sixties Marginalized Literature in American Culture (and

Why Literature Mainly Deserved It)” [1995], Vanguard of Retrogression, p. 64.

44 Fredric Jameson, “On ‘Cultural Studies’” [1993], The Ideologies of Theory, p. 619.
45 Loren Goldner, “The Critique of Pure Theory: Moishe Postone’s Dialectic of the Abstract and the Abstract” [2005],

Break Their Haughty Power.

46 Moishe Postone, History and Heteronomy: Critical Essays (Tokyo: University of Tokyo, 2009), p. 106.
47 Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social,” p. 18.

6
 Beyond the bastardization of their ideas in the United States, though, a fair amount of vitriol
is reserved in Vanguard of Retrogression for Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault themselves. Heidegger in
particular is excoriated for his reactionary politics. Victor Farías’ admittedly mediocre book came out
in 1987,48 making clear that Heidegger’s membership in the Nazi party had lasted all the way through
1945. It sparked a major controversy in France between his detractors and defenders. Not long after,
an antisemitic article written by the Belgian critic Paul de Man for a collaborationist paper during the
war was unearthed.49 Given the influence of Heidegger, and de Man’s stature, these revelations scan-
dalized the public. (This was all well before the former’s notorious Black Notebooks were published in
2014.)50 Whereas Jameson sought to shield his late friend de Man from charges of Nazism, believing
that “these twin… ‘scandals’ [had] been carefully orchestrated to delegitimate Derridean deconstruc-
tion,”51 Goldner delighted in these discoveries. He skewered Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, without ever
mentioning him by name,52 for suggesting that “Nazism is a humanism.”53 Fluent in French and con-
versant with the writings of Henri Simon, Gilles Dauvé, and Jacques Camatte, all of whom he met in
the early seventies, Goldner was unimpressed by the radical postures coming out of elite universities
in Paris around this time. Reviewing a book by Jean-Pierre Faye, he highlighted the perverse “vacilla-
tions” of the poststructuralist milieu.54 “There’s a deep critique to be made of Heidegger, the French
Heideggerians, Foucault, Derrida, and their latter-day bastard progeny the postmodernists,” Goldner
wrote. “Faye has made a huge contribution to it.”55
Derrida certainly receives more abuse in Vanguard of Retrogression than his erstwhile friend and
later rival Foucault, but the latter does not escape unscathed. Goldner found some of Foucault’s ear-
lier studies interesting, particularly Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things, but thought that his
rejection of totalizing logics led him to dismiss Marxism as a just another system aspiring to absolute
48 Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism [1987], translated by Paul Burrell and Dominic di Bernardi (Philadelphia, PA: Tem-
ple University Press, 1989).
49 Paul de Man, “The Jews in Contemporary Literature” [4 March 1941], translated by David Lehman in Signs of the Times:

Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York, NY: Poseidon Press, 1992), pp. 287-288.
50 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI: The Black Notebooks [1931-1938], translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Indianapolis, IN:

Indiana University Press, 2016).

51 “[F]or [Paul de Man] the thing dramatically called ‘collaboration’ was simply a job… [A]s long as I knew him person-

ally [he] was simply a good liberal.” Jameson, The Postmodern Condition, p. 257.
52 “[I]n the 1987-1988 Heidegger and de Man controversies… such formulations [surfaced] as ‘Is Nazism a Humanism?

(Le Nazisme est-il un Humanisme?) The argument was as follows: Humanism was the Western metaphysic of the ‘subject,’
culminating in Hegel and reshaped by Marx. Trapped in and constituted by the metaphysics of ‘presence,’ the reduction
of everything to a ‘representation’ (image), humanism was the ideology of the subjection — the pomos would, of course,
write (subject)ion — of the entire earth to ‘representation,’ in what Heidegger called the worldwide domination of ‘tech-
nological nihilism’ (Nietzsche had already arrived at important anticipations of this analysis). For a certain ‘post-1945’ (!)
Heidegger, Nazism had culminated this drive to ‘technological nihilism.’ (When he was a Nazi, up to 1945, Heidegger
had gamely argued that liberal capitalism was the culmination of ‘technological nihilism.’) The French Heideggerians
thus argued that Nazism was a humanism in its drive to complete Western ‘technological nihilism,’ and that the appar-
ently Nazi Heidegger, by attempting to ‘deconstruct’ humanism, was thereby ‘subverting’ Nazism. Meanwhile, of course,
the opponents of Nazism, of whatever political stripe, were trapped in ‘humanism,’ and therefore trapped on Nazism’s
terrain, similarly facilitating the worldwide victory of ‘technological nihilism.’” Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and
the Neoliberal War on the Social,” pp. 9-10.
53 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political [1988], translated by Chris Turner (Cam-

bridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 95.

54 “Faye [tracks] the oscillation whereby, in 1987-1988, it became possible for Derrida, Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe, and

others, to say, in effect: Heidegger, the Nazi ‘as a detail,’ by his unmasking of the nihilistic ‘metaphysics of the subject’
responsible for Nazism, was in effect the real anti-Nazi, whereas all those who, in 1933-1945 (or, by extension, today)
opposed and continue to oppose fascism, racism, and antisemitism from some humanistic conviction, whether liberal or
socialist… were and are in effect ‘complicit’ with fascism. Hence the calls for an ‘inhuman’ thought.” Loren Goldner,
“The Nazis and Deconstruction: Jean-Pierre Faye’s Demolition of Derrida” [1994], Vanguard of Retrogression, p. 85.
55 Ibid., p. 86.

7
knowledge (a synonym, in his vocabulary, for power).56 Like Dauvé, who saw Foucault’s substitution
of “discourse” for “ideology” — and hence, discourse-analysis for ideology-critique — as itself ideo-
logical,57 Goldner regarded this move as mirroring a deeper social mutation. “It is not often appreci-
ated in the US,” Goldner pointed out, “that Foucault, in France, anticipated both the media event of
the ‘new philosophers’ (André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy) in 1977, but also the neoliberalism
that first gained currency under Giscard d’Estaing and then became an international tidal wave in the
eighties, fervently embraced by the ‘socialist’ Mitterand government.”58 Recently, the relationship be-
tween Foucault and neoliberalism has been hotly debated, but Goldner already made this connection
several decades ago. He did not even mention Foucault’s glowing 1977 review of Glucksmann’s exe-
crable survey of The Master Thinkers,59 a screed against Plato, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, et al. Or how Fou-
cault told Lévy in an interview the same year that revolution was not simply impossible, but undesir-
able, and that all of politics might vanish as a result.60 Goldner reiterated his suspicion that these fig-
ures’ anti-Hegelianism was coded anti-Marxism.61

56 “At the beginning of [The Order of Things] (1966), the book that established Michel Foucault as a major figure in France,
there is a fascinating analysis of Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, which contains in some sense the whole Foucauldian
project. In this analysis, Foucault identifies the king as the linchpin in the whole game of representation, which is the real
subject of the painting. In all of Foucault’s early work, and above all in his innovative (but problematic) early studies of
medicine and of madness, the project is the identification of Western reason with the ostensibly omniscient vantage
point of the king, of representation, and of power. This project is the ultimate source of Foucault’s conception that all
‘representational’ discourses of ostensibly universal knowledge — including Marxism — actually conceal discourses of
separate power. For Foucault, any attempt at such a universal ‘discourse,’ and by implication a universal class, which at-
tempts to unite the different fragments of social reality, or the different oppressed groups of capitalist society (particu-
larly one which privileges the working class), must necessarily be a separate discourse of power, the game of representa-
tion centered on the ‘king’ — a master discourse.” Goldner, “Multiculturalism or World Culture?”, pp. 94-95.
57 See the section “Class Analysis vs. Discourse Analysis, or the Flaw in Foucault,” where Dauvé writes: “[Foucault]

trawled through a vast archive of memory artefacts, he equated power techniques with power discourses, as if society
were ruled by what it says and believes about itself. It is significant that in the last decades the word discourse has by and
large replaced ideology. However pompous and formulaic ‘ideology’ often was (targeting ‘bourgeois ideology’ at every
turn), at least it tried to remain connected to some elemental social realities, whereas ‘discourse’ can and indeed must
pertain to just about anything.” Gilles Dauvé, Your Place or Mine? A Twenty-First Century Essay on (Same) Sex (Oakland, CA:
PM Press, 2022), p. 18.
58 Goldner, “Multiculturalism or World Culture?”, p. 96.
59 Michel Foucault, “The Great Rage of Facts: A Review of André Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers” [1977], translated

by Michael Scott Christofferson, Foucault and Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016), pp. 170-175.
60 “As you know, it’s the very desirability of revolution which is a problem nowadays… Perhaps we’re living through the

end of politics. For if it is true that politics is a field which was opened up by the existence of revolution, and if the ques-
tion of revolution can no longer be posed in these terms, then politics could disappear.” Michel Foucault, “The History
of Sexuality: An Interview with Bernard Henri-Lévy” [12 March 1977], translated by Geoff Bennington, Oxford Literary
Review (Vol. 4, № 2: 1980), p. 12.
61 “Foucault’s ‘decentering’ of the Hegelian subject, aimed at ‘Western’ Marxism of the fifties and sixties, and, beyond

that, at Marxism generally, …carried out ideologically what d’Estaing and then Mitterand carried out practically, the dis-
mantling of the French mercantilist development tradition. The final connection was made by the ‘new philosophers,’
who popularized Foucault in their slick paperbacks and media happenings. At the cutting edge of this development were
figures such as Glucksmann and Lévy, both of whom had once been ultra-Stalinist militants of France’s post-1968 Mao-
ist movement. The appearance, in 1974, of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was the moment of truth with their ostensi-
ble earlier ‘Marxism.’ After a decade of glorifying the most elephantine totalitarian state in modern history, Mao’s China,
the ‘new philosophers’ became famous by proclaiming, in the newly receptive neoliberal climate, that all Marxists, in-
cluding those who had been combating Stalinism fifty years before them, were of necessity totalitarians too. What they
took from Foucault was the notion of the ‘master discourse,’ the philosophy of the Hegelian or Marxist type which at-
tempts, or purports, to unify fragmentary realities into higher, universal syntheses. Within a decade, suspicion of univer-
salizing ‘master discourses’ had become rife in American academia, tantalizingly parallel to Reaganism’s ideological dis-
mantling of big statism and decentralization of poverty and austerity to states and cities.” Goldner, “Multiculturalism or
World Culture?”, pp. 98-99.

8
 No matter the allure such ideas held in France, their spread to the US had even more delete-
rious consequences. Here they enabled the laziest cultural relativism, in literature as in other realms.
“While the American population as a whole falls to forty-ninth place in comparative global literacy,”
lamented Goldner, “purveyors of the postmodern ‘French disease’ continue the frenzied production
of self-involved books and posh academic journals, which communicate nothing so much as a basic
ignorance of real history and the pathetic belief that the deconstruction of literary works amounts to
serious political activity.”62 From the mid-eighties through the early nineties, the “canon wars” raged
in the public sphere. On one side were the unabashed Eurocentrists, authors like Hilton Kramer and
Allan Bloom, while on the other were the multiculturalists. Goldner refused to accept the very terms
of this dispute, however, counterposing an emergent world culture to both the haughty parochialism
of the official canon and the shallow inclusivity of expanded curricula. He had nothing but contempt
for the conservatives who now canonized Joyce, Proust, or Kafka, but would have been incapable of
recognizing the merit of these novelists in their day. But Goldner focused his ire on the advocates of
multiculturalism, who wrote off the Western tradition as an endless parade of “dead white European
males.” Even beyond this peremptory dismissal, they remained ignorant of the real roots of the orig-
inality of the West:
[W]hat do the ostensibly radical postmodern multiculturalists tell us about all this? Precisely
nothing! And why? Because, through Nietzsche and Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida, they
have swallowed the Hellenophile romance whole, except to change the plus and minus signs.
They ignore the Arabic and Persian sources of the Renaissance, and thus obscure the Alex-
andrian and Muslim mediation, and further development, of the Greek legacy. Further, they
agree with the Eurocentrists across the board that “Western” culture, like all “cultures,” is a
self-contained phenomenon. Do they tell us that French Provençal poetry, from which mod-
ern Western literature begins, borrowed massively from Arab poetry, and particularly the
erotic mystical poetry of Islamic Spain? Do they tell us that Dante was steeped in the work
of the Andalusian Sufi Ibn Arabi? That some of the greatest Spanish writers of the sixteenth-
century siglo de oro, like St. John of the Cross and Cervantes, drew heavily on Islamic and Jew-
ish sources? Do they tell us about the Franciscan heretics in sixteenth-century Mexico who
attempted to build, together with the Indians, a Christian communist utopia in defiance of a
hopelessly corrupt European Catholicism? Do they tell us about the belief in the Egyptian
sources of Western civilization which held sway from the ancient Greeks, via the Florentine
Academy, to the eighteenth-century Freemasons? They tell us nothing of the kind, because
such syncretistic cross-fertilization of cultures flies in the face of their relativistic assumption
that cultures confront each other as so many hermetically sealed and invariably distorting
“texts.” So many “dead white European males” turn out to have massive debts to dead
males (and in the case of Arabic poetry, females) of color! The postmodernists are so busy
exposing the “canon” as a litany of racism, sexism, and imperialism that they, exactly like the
explicit Eurocentrists, fail to notice that some of the canon’s greatest works have roots in the
very cultures they supposedly “erase.”63
One of the critics Goldner blamed for this blindness was the Columbia University professor Edward
Said, whose “omnipresent book, Orientalism, virtually founded the genre.”64 Said forgot to mention in
his account that the Islamic world prior to the Renaissance had for centuries surpassed Christendom
in science, mathematics, technology, and culture. Muslim travelers to Europe like the Arab Ibn Sa’id,
for example, described the eleventh-century Franks as “resembling animals more than men,” lacking
“keenness of understanding and acuteness of mind.” He even justified this prejudice climatologically
by saying that “[t]he cold air and cloudy skies [cause] their temperaments to become frozen and their

62 Ibid., p. 91.
63 Ibid., pp. 103-104.
64 Ibid., p. 104.

9
humors to become crude,” with the result that “they are dominated by ignorance and stupidity,” in a
very early instance of geographic determinism.65 For Goldner, such condescending attitudes were the
effect of being culturally more advanced than the Europeans of this period. Relativists like Said were
for obvious reasons “loath to admit that some cultures are, in the context of world history, at certain
moments more dynamic, in fact superior to others.”66 Goldner had already dealt with Said in passing
in his brilliant 1989 essay on “The Universality of Marx,” a tour de force polemic against not just multi-
culturalism but culturalism as such. In this piece, he reproached Said for denying any aspect of socie-
tal advancement:
[S]ince Said does not even entertain the possibility of world-historical progress, the idea that
Renaissance Europe represented an historical breakthrough for humanity, which was, by the
fifteenth century, superior to the social formations of the Islamic world, is not even worth
discussing. Such a view not only trivializes the breakthrough of Renaissance Europe; it also
trivializes the achievements of the Islamic world, which from the eighth to the thirteenth
centuries towered over the barbaric West, as well as the achievements of Tang and Song
China, which during the same centuries probably towered over both of them. One would
also never know, reading Said, that in the thirteenth century the flower of Islamic civilization
was irreversibly snuffed out by the “text” of Mongol hordes (presumably also Oriental) who
leveled Baghdad three times. Were Said somehow transported back to the wonder that was
Islamic civilization under the Abbasid caliphate, the Arabs and Persians who helped lay the
foundations for the European Renaissance would have found his culturalism strange indeed,
given the importance of Plato and Aristotle in their philosophy, and of the line of prophets,
from Moses to Jesus, in their theology. Said’s text-bound view of the [impermeable] relations
between societies and in world history (which for him cannot meaningfully exist) is the quin-
tessential statement of a culturalism, which is a pretense of radicalism, that has become ram-
pant in the past two decades.67
Famously, Said’s book also included an aside castigating Marx for his supposed reliance on Oriental-
ist tropes in a few articles on the British presence in India.68 Postcolonial theory would get far worse,
of course, after Said. Dipesh Chakrabarty used Marx’s name in Provincializing Europe to signify univer-
sal history (“History 1”), while Heidegger’s name stood for historical difference (“History 2”).69 As if
to confirm Goldner’s hunch about the Heideggerian provenance of these concepts, the second form
of history is irreconcilable with the first — “History 2 cannot sublate itself into History 1.”70 Though
there have been Marxian criticisms of postcolonial thought, many of these have proved conceptually
impoverished. Vivek Chibber’s polemical disquisition against subaltern studies a decade ago scored a
number of solid hits on its target,71 as did a more recent article he wrote on Orientalism,72 but his own
brand of analytic Marxism offered little in the way of an alternative.73 Goldner by contrast gave a far
65 Quoted in ibid., pp. 104-105.
66 “To acknowledge this would open the way to acknowledging the unacceptable, unrelativist idea that in the seventeenth
century, the situation had reversed itself and that some cutting edge of world-historical ascendancy and superiority had
passed to the West.” Ibid., p. 105.
67 Loren Goldner, “The Universality of Marx” [1989], ibid., pp. 130-131.
68 Edward Said, Orientalism [1978] (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994), pp. 153-157. Later in the book, on p. 325, he

anachronistically condemns “Marx’s own homogenizing view of the Third World [sic].”
69 “Marx [is] a classic exemplar of [the] tradition [of universal humanity]… Heidegger is my icon for [a] second tradition

[of historical difference].” Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 18.
70 Ibid., p. 62.
71 Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Thought and the Specter of Capital (New York, NY: Verso Books, 2013); Vivek Chibber, Partha

Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, et al., The Debate on Postcolonial Thought and the Specter of Capital (New York, NY: Verso, 2017).
72 Vivek Chibber, “Orientalism and Its Afterlives,” Catalyst (Vol. 4, № 3: Fall 2020), pp.
73 For a very sharp critical review of Chibber’s latest book, see Russell Jacoby, “Shadowboxing? A review of Vivek Chib-

ber’s The Class Matrix,” Platypus Review (№ 152: December 2022-January 2023).

10
richer rendition of the materialist dialectic in Vanguard of Retrogression than Chibber. In any case, there
were other, and older, rejoinders to Said. Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm’s early critique,74 cited by Goldner,75 was
particularly trenchant. Much better than Orientalism, in Goldner’s estimation, was Samir Amin’s Euro-
centrism. Despite his dependentist Maoism, which led to certain blindspots, Amin correctly diagnosed
Eurocentric conceits as insufficiently universal. The problem was not that the Enlightenment was too
“universalistic,” but that it fell short of this ideal.76
On that note, Goldner addressed the question of the Enlightenment in several chapters from
the book. Although it is clear from the above that he defended the concept of progress in world his-
tory, Goldner did not endorse some unidirectional, gradualist vision. “Marx… wrote, against the En-
lightenment’s simple-minded linear view of progress, that short of the establishment of communism,
all historical progress was accompanied by simultaneous retrogressions,” he explained.77 Even if lim-
ited by certain assumptions about how society would inevitably improve, Goldner took exception to
the postmodernists’ casual deprecation of Enlightenment philosophy. During the eighties, this entire
body of thought was put on trial, convicted of all manner of offenses.78 He was therefore quite sym-
pathetic to the aforementioned efforts by Habermas to rescue it from certain oblivion, even if Gold-
ner felt these efforts did not grasp the seriousness of the situation. In one of his articles, he indicated
that by the nineties
[f]ew people on the Western left… are very enthusiastic about defending the Enlightenment
per se. And with good reason: its social legacy is in shambles… A vigorous defense of the En-
lightenment, as put forward by figures such as Habermas and his followers, might seem a
breath of fresh air in the contemporary climate of postmodernism and “identity politics,”
whose hostility to the Enlightenment, drawing on Nietzsche and Heidegger (often without
knowing it), the Habermasians rightly decry. To seriously defend the Enlightenment today
means to draw on a historical culture that is totally unfashionable, suspiciously “white male,”
in the parlance of the trendy academic radicalism of today. But such defenses also show
signs of not realizing how serious the problem is. One cannot today defend the Enlighten-
ment (and we agree that a defense is necessary) with the ideas of the Enlightenment alone.
However unpalatable it may be to do so in the contemporary climate, where the Enlighten-
ment project is everywhere under attack by Nietzscheans, “cultural studies” ideologues,
Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists, Foucauldians, Afrocentrists, and (most) ecol-
ogists, it is necessary to discuss the limits of the Enlightenment in order to defend it and go
beyond it.79

74 Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin: Journal of Revolutionary Socialists of the Middle East
(№ 8: 1981), pp. 4-26. See also Mahdi Amel, “Marx in the Orientalism of Edward Said” [1985], translated by Angela Gior-
dani, Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings (Boston, MA: Brill, 2020), pp. 99-110.
75 Goldner, “The Universality of Marx,” p. 131.
76 The criticisms Goldner leveled at the Monthly Review school and its notion of “delinking” are still well worth reading,

however. Ibid., pp. 131-137.

77 Ibid., p. 129.
78 “The 1980s were clearly a ‘trial of the Enlightenment,’ and all the more so for those strands of Marxism which saw

only continuity between the Enlightenment and Marx… Out of this ‘trial of the Enlightenment’ in the West and else-
where have emerged the ‘new social movements’ and, in less activist intellectual milieux invariably tied to academia, such
movements’ more esoteric ideological expression, increasingly known under the rubric of ‘postmodernism.’ Their contri-
bution to clarifying the reigning malaise maybe stated succinctly. To those ideologues and dullards, still benighted
by the ‘canons’ of the ‘nineteenth century,’ who lament or work to rectify the current loss of a ‘roadmap,’ these bright-
eyed junior professors rush, like so many latter-day Zarathustras with their lanterns in daytime, to announce the good
news that there is no roadmap, but rather many maps, and more important, that there is no road. Or better still: there are
many roads, not necessarily connected to each other, not necessarily leading anywhere, and, lo!, they are to be found
more or less exactly where the mapmakers ‘desire’ them to be.” Loren Goldner, “Postmodernism Meets the IMF: The
Case of Poland” [1990], ibid., pp. 109-110.
79 Goldner, “The Renaissance and Rationality: The Status of the Enlightenment Today” [1995], ibid., p. 71.

11
Among other crimes, the Enlightenment stood accused of racism. Goldner acknowledged that there
was something to this accusation in his magisterial two-part essay on “Race and the Enlightenment,”
originally published in Race Traitor, but not at all in the way usually imagined. “In the current climate,
in which the Enlightenment is under attack from many specious viewpoints, it is important to make
clear from the outset that the thesis here is emphatically not that the Enlightenment was ‘racist,’ still
less that it has validity only for ‘white European males,’” he explained. “Rather, it is that the concept
of race was not accidentally born simultaneously with the Enlightenment.”80 He granted that various
philosophes had excused slavery and harbored abhorrent opinions about nonwhites, but insisted that it
was misguided to fixate on such matters. Though Goldner listed some examples of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century treatises written by celebrated thinkers proposing racial hierarchies, from William
Petty and François Bernier to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Immanuel Kant,81 he was neverthe-
less adamant that
[t]his kind of polling of Enlightenment figures for their views on slavery and race is an ex-
tremely limited first approach to the question, easily susceptible to the worst kind of anach-
ronism. What was remarkable about the Enlightenment, seen in a world context, was not
that some of its distinguished figures supported slavery and white supremacy but that signifi-
cant numbers of them opposed both… Slavery as an institution flourished in the colorblind
sixteenth-century Mediterranean slave pool, and no participating society, Christian or Mus-
lim, European, Turkish, Arab, or African, questioned it.
Despite its opposition to irrational ideologies, however, there was something about how it conceived
of man and nature that led it to embrace white supremacism. “On one hand, the Western Enlighten-
ment in its broad mainstream was indisputably universalist and egalitarian, and thus created powerful
weapons for the attack on any doctrine of racial supremacy,” argued Goldner. “[O]n the other hand,
the Enlightenment just as indisputably gave birth to the very concept of race, and some of its illustri-
ous representatives believed that whites were superior to all others.”82 It was this double-edged char-
acter that he sought to explicate. Early on, biblical critics like Isaac de La Peyrère had to invent alter-
nate, pre-Adamite genealogies of mankind to claim that the races were unrelated.83 (Various Anabap-
tist currents in North America — from the Mennonites to the Quakers — would resist this interpre-
tation, making common cause with black freedmen and indigenous tribes.)84 Nineteenth-century bio-
logical racism, having left religion behind, could dispense with such textual hermeneutics in postulat-
ing polygenetic descent.85 For Goldner, it was the Enlightenment’s scientistic propensity to quantify,
classify, and taxonomize disparate phenomena, combined with the accidental ascendance of Europe,
that lent itself to the racializing anthropologies of the age. Yet he recognized the historically progres-
sive function this scientism served in dispelling feudal superstitions, and passionately defended those
elements of Enlightenment thought that inspired the transatlantic revolutions. Goldner summed this
all up marvelously:
Nowhere did the radical Enlightenment program of “Liberty-Equality-Fraternity” acquire
such concreteness as a program for mass action as in Santo Domingo after 1791 and in Paris
in 1793-1794; Toussaint L’Ouverture had himself studied French Enlightenment thought.
Thus the “best of the Enlightenment” is revealed precisely by the actions of people who,

80 Loren Goldner, “Race and the Enlightenment, Part 1: From Antisemitism to White Supremacy, 1492-1676” [1997],
ibid., p. 22.
81 Loren Goldner, “Race and the Enlightenment, Part 2: The Anglo-French Enlightenment and Beyond” [1998], ibid., p.

45.
82 Ibid., p. 46.
83 Goldner, “Race and the Enlightenment, Part 1,” pp. 31-32.
84 Loren Goldner, “The Fusion of Anabaptist, Indian, and African as the American Radical Tradition” [1987], ibid., pp.

145-146.
85 Goldner, “Race and the Enlightenment, Part 2,” p. 51.

12
 influenced by it, were already in the process of going beyond it, with practice (as always) well
in advance of theory. This realization of the Enlightenment, as the revolution ebbed, was
also the end of the Enlightenment… The Enlightenment had foreseen neither the Jacobin
Terror nor Napoleon, and could only be salvaged by figures such as Hegel and Marx, who
subsumed the Enlightenment into a new historical rationality.86
The “worst of the Enlightenment,” to Goldner’s mind, was an expression of what Hegel had termed
schlechte Unendlichkeit: the boundless numeric divisibility of the Newtonian infinitesimal. Marx’s break-
through was to give practical shape to the idea of “actual infinity,” a phrase which recurs throughout
Vanguard of Retrogression.87 Since this is perhaps the central motif in the book, it deserves to be spelled
out. Goldner believed that, beyond just the Hegelian heritage of the Marxian dialectic emphasized by
numerous interwar revolutionaries and scholars, there was a recovery of its “Neoplatonic sources.”88
A thread ran from Philo, Plotinus, Augustine, and Pseudo-Dionysius in antiquity, through John Sco-
tus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, and Nicholas of Cusa in medieval times, down to Paracelsus, Marcelo
Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, John Dee, Robert Fludd, Johannes Kepler, and Jakob
Böhme in the Renaissance.89 During the Enlightenment, their cosmobiological view of an organically
united nature and culture was overshadowed by more mechanistic conceptions until being picked up
again by Hegel. Kepler in particular was held up by Goldner as representing a path not taken, even if
he also thought highly of Newton’s neglected alchemical writings.90 Neoplatonists anticipated Marx’s
doctrine of “sensuous human praxis” and “the active side of idealism” in stressing the role played by
the imagination in transforming material reality.91
Inspiration for Goldner’s reading of “actual infinity” was principally drawn from the mystical
German Marxist Ernst Bloch and the Polish Marxist Kołakowski, mentioned above. Both traced the
origins of dialectical thought to Neoplatonism.92 While a student at Berkeley in the late sixties, Gold-
ner had attended Kołakowski’s lectures on the topic.93 His review of the translation of Bloch’s Princi-
ple of Hope trilogy once again underscored the link between Renaissance-era metaphysics and Marxian
theory.94 For Goldner, this was furthermore connected to the view of nature as a creative process (or

86 Ibid., p. 48.
87 It appears twenty times in the book.
88 “[H]ard behind the Hegel renaissance in Marxism was the recovery (elaborated by Bloch, Kołakowski, and others) of

the more general Neoplatonic sources of the Marxian dialectic, in Plotinus, Erigena, Eckhardt, Cusa, Bruno, and Böhme;
of the natura naturans view of nature of the same tradition and, side by side with that, the idea of actual infinity first articu-
lated by Cusa and Bruno, and passing through Spinoza and Leibniz into Hegel and Marx.” Goldner, “Ontological ‘Dif-
ference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social,” p. 17.
89 Different names are given each time, with some repetition, but this is the most comprehensive list.
90 Goldner, “The Renaissance and Rationality,” pp. 75-77.
91 Marx’s notion of sinnliche umwälzende Tätigkeit, which appears four times in the book.
92 “What has also enriched our understanding of Marx has been the demonstration, by figures such as Kołakowski and

Ernst Bloch, that the ‘active side developed by idealism’ to which Marx refers in the Theses on Feuerbach comes straight
out of the Neoplatonism of late antiquity, and such medieval and early modern Neoplatonists as Eckhardt, Nicholas of
Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Jakob Böhme, all predecessors of Hegel and rarely, if ever, invoked by the ‘hardheaded material-
ists’ of the classical workers’ movement.” Loren Goldner, “Marxism and the Critique of Scientific Ideology” [1983], ibid.,
p. 154.
93 “In 1969, …the philosophy department [at Berkeley] brought in the eminent Polish thinker Leszek Kołakowski to

teach Marx, though by the time he arrived he had already turned away from the Marxist humanism for which he had be-
come famous in Eastern Europe. The opening lecture of his undergraduate Marxism class was packed with student mili-
tants, but Kołakowski’s talk on the origins of the dialectic in the Neoplatonic thinkers of late antiquity, above all Ploti-
nus, quickly cleared out the room. I stayed.” Loren Goldner, “Marx and Marxism in Berkeley in 1968,” Insurgent Notes: A
Journal for Communist Theory and Practice (№ 18: May 2018).
94 “Bloch shows that the active human constitution of the world through historical activity separates Marx from any pre-

vious ‘Democritean’ materialism… [H]e shows figures such as Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus, and Jacob Böhme to have
actually elaborated, in the Renaissance and Reformation periods, a view of humanity-in-nature as the reconciliation of

13
natura naturans, also crucial to Spinoza)95 with human consciousness at its center. This is all laid out in
his essay “History and the Realization of the Material Imagination,” which forms the methodological
core of Vanguard of Retrogression despite appearing at the end. Goldner saw the arc of history as bend-
ing toward a tripled self-development: “self-development of the universe…, self-development of the
biosphere, self-development of the species.”96 This would be exemplified by the oft-quoted formula,
from the young Marx, whereby man can fish the morning, hunt in the evening, and criticize at night.
Predicates could attach and detach without ever exhausting the limitless capacities of humanity. One
of Goldner’s other favorite quotes by Marx had to do with how nonhuman “animals only reproduce
their own nature, whereas man reproduces all of nature.”97 According to Goldner, “the Marxian pro-
ject of communism conceives of freedom… as the practical solution of a problematic which evolved
theoretically from Spinoza and Leibniz to Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach as the transformation of laws,
up to and including the physical laws of the universe, [as] man’s unique ‘Promethean’ capacity.”98 He
felt that human beings could consciously reshape their environs, bolstering his claims with a dizzying
array of allusions to modern science.99 Unlike the standard image of scientists as passive observers of
phenomena, they are instead active participants.100
Vanguard of Retrogression has tremendous range given its brevity. Despite occasional repetitive-
ness, unsurprising for any collection of essays written over the span of decades, it covers a great deal
of ground. Goldner discussed literature, pointing out that “no novel succeeded in telling the story of
real people coming of age in the sixties or what happened to them later,”101 as that generation shifted
its attention to theoretical texts. He touched upon architecture in passim, connecting the international
style to the high modernist technocracy of the fifties,102 even if the built environment was not as cen-
tral to him as it was to Jameson. Sprinkled throughout the book are innumerable insights. “Capital is
Hegel’s Spirit: totality apparently moving by itself,” Goldner alleged. “Marx’s Capital is nothing other
than the phenomenology of labor-power coming to its concept, discovering itself as the unconscious
mover of a seemingly autonomous world… The world of capital is the inverted world [verkehrte Welt]
described by Hegel.”103 In this passage he anticipated the infamous inversion of Lukács’ argument by
Postone, who held that capital — and not the proletariat — is the subject of history.104 But the word

natura naturans and natura naturata as discussed in theology and philosophy from Eriugena to Spinoza, a conception of an
active, living matter infused with imagination that was buried by Galilean-Newtonian physics.” Loren Goldner, “Ernst
Bloch’s The Principle of Hope,” German Politics & Society (№ 10: January 1987), p. 48.
95 The phrase appears nine times in the book.
96 Loren Goldner, “History and the Realization of the Human Imagination” [1979], Vanguard of Retrogression, p. 174.
97 The line about hunting, fishing, and criticizing came from The German Ideology, while the line about “all of nature” came

from Marx’s economico-philosophical Paris manuscripts. The second was quoted as an epigraph to two separate essays,
and appears five times in the book.
98 Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social,” p. 8.
99 “Humanity’s ‘sensuous transformative praxis,’ i.e., man’s anti-entropic role in the biosphere. Human history is the his-

tory of the creation of new… environments.” Goldner, “Marxism and the Critique of Scientific Ideology,” p. 156.
100 Goldner, “History and the Realization of the Human Imagination,” pp. 168-170.
101 Goldner, “The Online World is Also on Fire,” pp. 59-60.
102 “The future of the planet, everywhere, seemed to be high-modernist technocracy, materialized in the austere architec-

ture of the international style that had triumphed in the 1930s and in the giant industrial and infrastructural projects that
littered the ‘socialist’ bloc or the Third World (steel mills, dams, entire cities like Niemeyer’s Brasilia or his equally sinis-
ter French Communist Party headquarters in Paris).” Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the
Social,” pp. 9-10.
103 Goldner, “History and the Realization of the Human Imagination,” p. 171.
104 The explicit inversion of Lukács is made in Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of

Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press: New York, NY: 1993), pp. 71-83. But Postone originally sketched a
version of this argument in an earlier piece, just a year before Goldner. “If class is in fact a category of alienation, then
revolutionary class consciousness could only mean the desire to abolish and transcend itself. This position rejects the notion of
the proletariat as the historical Subject whose existence as such is veiled by fetishized forms of thought and appearance and

14
“apparently” marks a key difference between Goldner’s interpretation and Postone’s, as is clear from
the sentences that follow. As Goldner saw it, this automatic quality of capital as self-expanding value
is a fetishistic form of appearance disguising its necessary mediation by labor. Proletarian conscious-
ness, as Lukács argued in 1923, would be nothing other than the workers’ recognition of themselves
as commodities,105 which would then spur them toward their own self-annihilation as a class.106 Here
Goldner upheld the dialectical vision of Marxism.
One of the more perplexing aspects of this book for readers decades later must be its attacks
on ecologists, especially in light of the climatological crisis society is presently facing. Goldner’s brief
piece charting the path “From National Bolshevism to Ecologism” might seem an outlier, set against
the rest of Vanguard of Retrogression, but it makes sense insofar as it confronts romantic anticapitalism.
In it, Goldner examined a line of thought that ran from the Counter-Enlightenment of Hamann and
Herder through the Prussian geschlossene Handelsstaat proposed by Fichte, until arriving at the interwar
tendency of Wolffheim and Laufenberg. From there it was but a short distance, largely via the lyrical
antitechnologism of Heidegger, to the contemporary environmental movement.107 Goldner acknowl-
edged in other texts that “there is indeed an ecological crisis,” but regretted that so much opposition
to it was framed in Neo-Malthusian terms by groups like the Club of Rome or in terms of “Gaia” by
New Age mystics.108 While he thought that technology would be vital to overcoming the catastrophe
of uncontrolled climate change, he did advocate in his measures for the first hundred days of a post-
capitalist society a rapid “transition out of the automobile/oil economy” and a “phasing out of fossil
fuel use.”109 Recently the debate around the environment among Marxists has been staged in a rather
unhelpful manner, as a dichotomy between “ecomodernism” and “degrowth communism.” Looking
at the entirety of Goldner’s œuvre, it might seem as if he would side more with the former, but with-
out all of its reformist social-democratic trappings.
If the present reviewer were to take issue with anything espoused in Vanguard of Retrogression,
it would certainly be the snide offhand comments directed at the Frankfurt School. Compared to his
polemics against French poststructuralism, the remarks Goldner made seem relatively mild. But they
still betray a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of critical theory. For example, he drew
an analogy between Foucault’s Nietzschean gloss on Enlightenment thought and Adorno and Hork-
heimer’s Weberian critique of the same. Where the former equated knowledge with power, the latter

whose ‘task’ is to emerge openly as the Subject. The problem with the proletariat as ‘dogmatic subject’ is basically due to
defining the proletariat as Subject. This not only does not allow for a concept of socialist revolution as the self-overcom-
ing of proletarian labor by the proletariat, but — what is related — necessarily posits a static, nonhistorical proletariat…
In the position here developed, the proletariat is considered as the source of the alienated Subject — capital — which, in
its interaction with the latter, is the essential driving force of the historical development of the capitalist social formation,
leading to the historical possibility that it abolish itself — and therefore capital — thereby allowing humanity to become
the historical Subject.” Moishe Postone, “Necessity, Labor, and Time: A Reinterpretation of the Marxian Critique of
Capitalism,” Social Research (Vol. 45, № 4: 1978), pp. 781-782.
105 “[T]he worker can only become conscious of his existence in society when he becomes aware of himself as a com-

modity… Inasmuch as he is incapable in practice of raising himself above the role of object his consciousness is the self-
consciousness of the commodity; or in other words it is the self-knowledge, the self-revelation of the capitalist society founded
upon the production and exchange of commodities.” Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletar-
iat,” p. 168.
106 “[W]e must never overlook the distance that separates the consciousness of even the most revolutionary worker from

the authentic class consciousness of the proletariat… The proletariat only perfects itself by annihilating and transcending itself, by
creating the classless society through the successful conclusion of its own class struggle.” Georg Lukács, “Class Consciousness” [March
1920], History and Class Consciousness, p. 80.
107 Loren Goldner, “From National Bolshevism to Ecologism” [1980], Vanguard of Retrogression, pp. 161-165.
108 Loren Goldner, “Social Reproduction for Beginners: Bringing the Real World Back In,” Break Their Haughty Power (27

August 2008). This piece also features the line about humans reproducing all of nature as an epigraph.
109 Loren Goldner, “Fictitious Capital and the Transition Out of Capitalism,” Break Their Haughty Power (26 August 2005).

15
equated instrumental rationality with domination.110 Despite the Frankfurt School’s antipathy toward
Heidegger, Goldner felt that they were operating along similar lines.111 Adorno once wrote a letter to
Horkheimer where he suggested that Heidegger’s pursuit of “false trails [Holzwege]” was “not so very
different from our own,”112 yet too much has been made of this throwaway remark. His book-length
reproach to The Jargon of Authenticity and settling of scores with fundamental ontology in Negative Dia-
lectics ought to suffice to distinguish the two, even if Goldner believed he was a “Mandarin” who had
regressed to the Young Hegelian standpoint of “critical criticism.”113 Though Dialectic of Enlightenment
is undoubtedly an “odd book,”114 as Habermas later said, it never took leave of its object, attempting
an Enlightened critique of the Enlightenment. “Today as in Kant’s time,” Adorno consistently main-
tained, “philosophy demands a rational critique of reason, not its banishment or abolition.”115 Unlike
the poststructuralists, moreover, and in contradistinction to many of his followers at the Institute for
Social Research, he refused to renounce Marxism.
Should Vanguard of Retrogression ever be reissued, which it hopefully will (along with any num-
ber of Goldner’s other writings), emendations and expansions will have to be made. Of course, there
are the misspellings and grammatical errors that attend most self-published texts. Queequeg Publica-
tions was a one-man press, so such editorial oversights are to be expected. There are also unintended
repetitions in a couple places, as well as a chronological chart of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
theories of race missing from part two of “Race and the Enlightenment.”116 Beyond such minor cor-
rections, however, the biggest change to the book would be the addition of one of Goldner’s articles
on fictitious capital. Although the phrase appears in the subtitle, none of the chapters seek to unpack
its meaning. Goldner’s understanding of this concept was doubtless idiosyncratic. Usually “fictitious
capital” refers to claims on future income streams, on surplus-value that may or may not materialize.
In the third volume of Capital, Marx discussed it in connection with credit.117 Now Goldner accepted
this definition, but he hoped to further ground it in the two sides of the organic composition of cap-
ital. On the variable side of living labor, he looked to the proliferation of unproductive jobs, the faux
frais of management that has ballooned in recent decades. On the constant side of dead labor, he saw
it as stemming from technological depreciation, from the obsolescence of productive machinery and
equipment. His unusual interpretation of fictitious capital was the occasion of a controversy with the
British ultraleft journal Aufheben, in which contributors from Internationalist Perspective eventually inter-
vened. All this could be clarified by a new introduction discussing this dispute, along with Goldner’s
2002 piece “Fictitious Capital, Real Retrogression.”118

110 Goldner cautioned readers “not to fall into a Foucauldian view of the Enlightenment as about nothing but ‘power,’
nor is it to echo a Frankfurt School view of the Enlightenment as mere ‘domination.’ One is quite right to reject these
Nietzschean and Weberian views of rationality.” Goldner, “The Renaissance and Rationality,” p. 74.
111 “Heidegger’s musings are today taken up by many theoreticians of the Frankfurt School, who criticize classical Marx-

ism for having no critique of the ‘domination of nature’ by human technology.” Goldner, “From National Bolshevism to
Ecologism,” p. 164.
112 Theodor Adorno to Max Horkheimer [26 November 1949], quoted in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its His-

tory, Theories, and Political Significance [1986], translated by Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 593.
113 Goldner thus criticized Adorno’s “essentially Mandarin world outlook”: “Western Marxists [are] currently in disarray

after having, consciously or unconsciously, reproduced the errors of the Young Hegelians and taken the step back to
‘critical criticism’ to which they were invited by Adorno at the beginning of Negative Dialectics.” Goldner, “Ernst Bloch’s
The Principle of Hope,” p. 50.
114 Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 106.
115 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics [1966], translated by E.B. Ashton (New York, NY: Continuum, 1973), p. 85.
116 It should appear somewhere between pp. 45-46. The original chart can be found in Race Traitor (№ 10: Winter 1999),

p. 53.
117 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3 [written 1860s-1870s, published 1894], translated by David

Fernbach (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 525-542.

118 Loren Goldner, “Fictitious Capital, Real Retrogression,” Break Their Haughty Power (6 August 2002).

16
 Postmodernism today may seem passé, forgotten after the War on Terror that followed 2001.
But the President-Elect of the most powerful country in the world, Donald Trump, is a former real-
ity TV star who first made a name for himself in the eighties, during the heyday of the pomo period.
His gaudy towers, with their eclectic interiors, evince nothing so much as a postmodernist sensibility,
reminiscent of the later works of Philip Johnson (whose firm he commissioned to build a skyscraper
castle in 1984).119 Some commentators have called him the first postmodern president,120 though that
title rightly belongs to Reagan. Meanwhile, his main opponent this last election cycle, Kamala Harris,
is the living embodiment of neoliberal postpolitics. She was clearly selected as nominee on the basis
of her identity as a black woman, despite her deep unpopularity. The Democrats are the party of cre-
dentialed, university-educated professionals and the technocratic elite; they stand for nothing but the
perpetuation of the status quo. Leftists for their part remain shackled to what Goldner regarded as the
pseudoradicalism of race/gender/class, which despite sounding vaguely Marxian only served to bury
Marx.121 They are unequipped to face the rightwing populism of a demagogue like Trump. Goldner’s
book is thus much timelier than one might expect.

119 Bruce Handy, “Trump Once Proposed Building a Castle on Madison Avenue: A Brief History of the President’s Un-
fulfilled Architectural Dreams,” The Atlantic (April 2019).
120 Jeet Heer, “America’s First Postmodern President,” New Republic (8 July 2017).
121 “[T]he relative eclipse of Marx has been carried out largely in the name of a ‘race/gender/class’ ideology that can

sound, to the uninitiated, both radical and vaguely Marxian.” Goldner, “The Universality of Marx,” p. 129.

17