1/ Liz Truss speech signals Tories planning a sustained onslaught on anti-racism, feminism, LGBTQ+ ... but I'm not going to resist it by defending Foucault. Postmodernism was a dead end for the left, as I said in #ClearBrightFuture...

2/ Truss claims modern anti-racism/feminism and therefore socialism has "no space for evidence" as truth and morality are relative... she's wrong because we didn't need pomo to be anti-racists... here's Lewisham 1977...

3/ I entered left politics in 1976 and I can tell you that the dominant rationale for feminism, black liberation politics and gay liberation had nothing to do with pomo... it was the Marxism of CLR James, Fanon, Rowbotham, Thompson, Berger...

4/ Also, by coincidence, my job in the 1980s/90s was doing the thing Truss doesn't like: specifically teaching ethnic minority students to read and write under "Section 11"... I didn't need Foucault or Derrida to tell me why that was important...

5/ As for morality, take a look at the pictures in this link, of the Penally migrant detention centre... disgusting, immoral, racist and inhuman: happening today, under Liz Truss and Priti Patel... https://corporatewatch.org/camp-residents-of-penally-an-interview-with-refugees-organising-inside-the-home-offices-military-camp/

6/ But here's the irony: Foucault, funnily enough, did make moral statements, as in the intro to D&G's Anti-Oedipus... it's just that they're (a) inadequate and (b) not grounded in truth claims about reality

7/ Postmodernism was the slave ideology of neoliberalism; a justification for our atomisation; the denial of objectivity and a profound anti-humanism. It led, naturally, to the disaster of critical post-humanism and Neo-vitalism...

8/ Class is the key: not class reductionism, but what Truss calls "geographic inequality" is about class: exploitation, oppression, wealth extraction, generational inequality - the very concept pomo tried to obliterate...

9/ So to people leaping to Foucault's defence... don't waste your time. He did some interesting lectures at the CDF, fine. There is a humanist Marxism that arms us with a moral defence of class politics and support for the scientific method...

10/ I know that for Gen-X ers this means realising a bunch of stuff you were taught at college is wrong, but that's not a disaster. For more on the humanist and Aristotelian renewal of Marxism go here... https://www.waterstones.com/book/clear-bright-future/paul-mason//9780141986722?awaid=3787&utm_source=redbrain&utm_medium=shopping&utm_campaign=css&gclid=Cj0KCQiAw_H-BRD-ARIsALQE_2MR-k15450TRvNBb8GQb1adp1QhYxnle6EXjQ9IW4gebNUygjOt8dMaAny0EALw_wcB&awc=3787_1608280462_5f205f67d03d9c446652b18cdca5a13c

11/ Final thought for the remaining pomo adherents on the left. This century is gonna be Marx vs Nietzsche: planetary human liberation or climate Nihilism. Leave Nietzsche to the fash: there's zero value in anti-rationalist nihilism... (as I say, again, in How to Stop Fascism)