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Abstract

If there still is a hegemony of postmodernism in today’s leftist academia, and if it can be analysed as the spirit of contemporary capitalism, then this poses a problem for nowadays’ leftist academia itself. I start with the premise that the just mentioned hegemony exists and present its analysis in neo-Marxist historical-materialist fashion. The argument runs as follows. Throughout the 20th century, there happened a shift from bourgeois to what I call “post-bourgeois” capitalism. This led into the agony of the radical kernel of modern-bourgeois values, ranging from humanism’s autonomy via enlightenment’s rationality to romanticism’s individuality or non-identity – ending in the 21st century’s “new spirit” of capitalism as the “cultural logic” of post-bourgeois capital. That shift towards the post-bourgeois commenced at the threshold from the 19th to the 20th century as a period which moved from terrestrial imperialism (or exo-colonisation) to the colonisation on the plane of culture (or endo-colonisation). Whereas both exo- and endocolonisation are caused by capital’s logic to further disembed beyond the confines of its differentiated economic sphere in order to accumulate itself, the shift was necessitated by the saturation of exocolonisation in the late 19th century. Yet, for capital to disembed into the cultural dimension, a collapse of the superstructure into the base was enforced, or the collapse of culture into the economy. In this post-dualising process of the economisation of culture and the culturalisation of the economy, culturalised capital-value itself became the prime new cultural meta-value. Now, since the radical kernel of bourgeois-modern values remains of prime relevance to resist and tackle the further colonisations by capital, it needs to be defended against a self-fashioned progressive postmodernism that simply mimics the blind progressions of post-bourgeois capitalism.