- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226072791
- eISBN:
- 9780226072814
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226072814.003.0019
- Subject:
- History, Historiography
The contest of ideas between Marxism and poststructuralist postmodernism has been especially tumultuous because its issues were of large proportions, involved sharply antagonistic positions, and ...
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The contest of ideas between Marxism and poststructuralist postmodernism has been especially tumultuous because its issues were of large proportions, involved sharply antagonistic positions, and touched many lives directly. Marxists defended their versions of the progress theory, which had a theoretical structure honed in decades of conflicts, discussions, and revisions. Against them, poststructuralist postmodernists put an antiprogressive theory to end all systematic theories, especially those marked by a telic linearity. At stake in the struggle was the elaborate and dogmatic Marxist scheme of history affirmed by the Second International (1889) and subsequently refined and revised by theoreticians and regimes. According to that orthodoxy, changing production relations shaped history. Its teleological course displayed a fixed sequence of periods leading from primitive communism to industrial capitalism and onward to an end stage of fully realized economic justice.Less
The contest of ideas between Marxism and poststructuralist postmodernism has been especially tumultuous because its issues were of large proportions, involved sharply antagonistic positions, and touched many lives directly. Marxists defended their versions of the progress theory, which had a theoretical structure honed in decades of conflicts, discussions, and revisions. Against them, poststructuralist postmodernists put an antiprogressive theory to end all systematic theories, especially those marked by a telic linearity. At stake in the struggle was the elaborate and dogmatic Marxist scheme of history affirmed by the Second International (1889) and subsequently refined and revised by theoreticians and regimes. According to that orthodoxy, changing production relations shaped history. Its teleological course displayed a fixed sequence of periods leading from primitive communism to industrial capitalism and onward to an end stage of fully realized economic justice.
