system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What Is Post-modernism And How Does it Relate To Marxism?

I often see this term used alongside Marxism, but what is it?
gpt
Postmodernism is hard to define, because its not really anything. Its a term used to describe a certain collection of philosophers, or a vague overall view, but that's not even what the term was originally used for. It is most often used to describe poststructuralists. But poststructuralists aren't really anything either, because its a term used to lump together a group of vaguely related people who criticized structuralism.

Structuralism, most simply is a certain lens of viewing the reality that revolves around structure. Basically saying that you have to understand society not as a kind of set of atomistic things, but things can only be understood as entrenched in a bigger picture that you can't really isolate specific things from. And so you have to kind of view these structures as a whole. Poststructuralism can be various critiques of this, such as saying that ideas and structures are malleable / that there's inherent uncertainty involved in this process due to the changing nature of how different ideas are seen, etc. Since things are subjectively defined or involve binaries of ideas that have value systems read into them, then there's an unavoidably subjective element to your endeavors that is hard to escape from.

When described as *postmodernism*, the term basically is used to imply a kind of skepticism that there can be any overarching grand narratives that always hold true. But this description is a very vague one, and trying to cram together all the people called poststructuralists under this label is something seen as relatively sketchy. Often since they don't necessarily have all that much in common.

It has nothing at all to do with marxism. Marxism is a regular modernist philosophy that very much uses grand narratives of the kind that postmodernism would call into question. And in fact, marxists and postmodernists are often at odds for this reason. Some of them are influenced by eachother, but generally they are two different things. Lumping them together is basically done by people who don't really understand much about either of them, and so rather than caring who in particular they are referring to is making a kind of word salad of vaguely leftist sounding terms that they assume all blur together on the left.