Vanguard of retrogression - Loren Goldner

Vanguard of Retrogression cover

Collection of essays from 1979 to 1998 critiquing postmodernism and defending the Marxian project of the abolition of value, commodity production, wage labour and the proletariat.

These essays critique postmodernism as the latest episode of middle-class radicalism, and they explore the alternatives, namely a unified view of history and nature, drawing in part on a recovery of the neo-Platonic sources of Hegel and Marx, which postmodernism, rooted in Nietzsche and Heidegger, has been crowding out for three decades.

Author
Loren Goldner
Submitted by Fozzie on February 12, 2026

Contents

  • Preface: Ontological “Difference” and the Neoliberal War on the Social – Deconstruction and Deindustrialization

  • Race and the Enlightenment I: From Anti-Semitism to White Supremacy, 1492-1676 – Pre-Enlightenment Phase: Spain, Jews and Indians
  • Race and the Enlightenment II: The Anglo-French Enlightenment and Beyond
  • The Online World Is Also On Fire: How the Sixties Marginalized Literature in American Culture (and Why Literature Mainly Deserved It)
  • The Renaissance and Rationality: The Status of the Enlightenment Today
  • The Nazis and Deconstruction: Jean-Pierre Faye’s Demolition of Derrida
  • Multiculturalism or World Culture?: On a “Left”-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
  • Postmodernism Meets the IMF: The Case of Poland
  • The Universality of Marx
  • The Fusion of Anabaptist, Indian and African as the American Radical Tradition Marxism and the Critique of Scientific Ideology
  • From National Bolshevism to Ecologism
  • History and Realization of the Material Imagination: On the Origins of Modern Science in Neo-Platonism, the Kabbala and the Works of Hermes Trismegistes, and the Implications of these Origins for the Development of a Self-Reflexive Theory of Global Praxis

Attachments

Goldner - Vanguard of Retrogression.pdf (1016.88 KB)

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