Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition)

by Stephen R.C. Hicks

Having created a monolithic technocracy—the machines and the bureaucracies and the mass man and the self-serving ideology—capitalism can pretend to be open to criticism by allowing some radical intellectuals to dissent. In the name of “tolerance,” “open-mindedness,” and “free speech,” a few lonely voices will be permitted to raise objections and challenges to the capitalist behemoth.[284] But everyone knows full well that nothing come of the criticisms. Worse still, the appearance of having been open and tolerant will serve only to reinforce capitalism’s control. Capitalist tolerance, then, is not real tolerance: it is “Repressive Tolerance.”[285] So was Horkheimer’s early pessimism right? Was the lesson thirty years later still the same—that the prospect for socialism is totally hopeless? If capitalism’s control extends even to co-opting the dissent of its strongest critics, what weapons are left to the revolutionary? If there is a chance for socialism, then more extreme tactics will be necessary.