Jordan Peterson, Marxism and Postmodernism

Jordan Peterson is a horse's ass, a pseudo-intellectual, someone that stupid people can follow and believe that they're engaging in intellectual discourse.

One of Peterson's favorite topics are the neo-Marxist postmodernists who have taken over our campuses and are busy enslaving the minds of our youth. Peterson goes into very great detail about the history, motives and goals of this movement of neo-Marxist postmodernists, as if he were a great authority on the subject of neo-Marxist postmodernism.

Here's an example of how far Peterson is from being a real intellectual, or a real authority on anything at all: there is no such thing as a Marxist postmodernist, neo-Marxist or not, and there is no such thing as a postmodernist Marxist. One of the most central and basic features of postmodernism is a skepticism toward all-encompassing theories of society. Marxism IS such an all-encompassing theory: namely, the theory that all human history has been the history of economic class struggle. Marxism insists that it all boils down to that. Postmodernism, in response to Marxism and to any other theory which insists that person A responds in manner X because of condition 1, for example, Freudianism and its insistence that all human behavior can be reduced, ultimately, to the sexual impulse, says that people are free and can respond differently, that they are not bound by economic or sexual forces or by any other universal conditions. Postmodernism is always insisting that things are a little more complicated.

As for historical context, postmodernism arose in the form of philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida in opposition to a Marxist domination of certain parts of French academia in the 1960's. At the time, the Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was about as popular as Peterson is in the US right now. Fortunately for France, Sartre was very far from being a horse's ass.

But why take my word for any of this? Some Marxist works written in opposition to postmodernism include Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism: The Cultural logic of Late Capitalism, David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, Perry Anderson's The Origins of Postmodernity, and Alex Callinicos' Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critque

As to Peterson's assertion that we can learn from the social hierarchies of lobsters, if you're not already laughing out loud, you can ask an evolutionary biologist about that one. Probably just about any evolutionary biologist would do.