I think some of the writers included under the names postmodernism , structuralism and post-structuralism made and make contributions to progressive political theory by their challenges to the "canon of Western Civilization" or whatever they call it. Nothing wrong with Derrida criticizing Platonism, or Heidegger looking at pre-Socratic thinkers, or all the challenges to white male bourgeoisiedom under a different name than Marxism.
The postmod challenges to Marxism as just another master narrative have been pretty harmless in effect, since Marxism is pretty reviled already in the bourgeois academy, at least in the U.S. Then to me , the "postmod" discussions made clear that the being determines consciousness, but intermittently ,not continuously. When there is a revolution in the mode of production it is grounded in the "base". But most of the time of history, when we are not in revolution, "base and superstructure" are reciprocally determining. So, postmod/structuralist analysis of superstructure has a potential poltical value in that way. I would just like to see more effective radical or even reformist propaganda coming from the postmodern projects. In other words, with their insights into superstructure, that it consists of structure, grand narratives/"stories", and metaphors, analogies, isomorphisms, ambiguities, puns, double and triple entendres should not only be fun, but a basis for influencing the way masses think so that they will change the world. Postmodernism has wonderful or "awesome" new interpretations of the world, but Marx's principle still applies: the thing is to use one's wonderful interpretations to change the world for the better. What are the people moving/world changing ideas that can be learned from the fact that texts have all the characteristics that postmods have discovered (and that "everything" is a text ?) ? That would be a radical political payoff from postmodernism/structuralism. Charles > Autoplectic writes, So if there are multiple readings of a text that's bad? And how is having multiple readings of a text not an ancient problem that continues into the contemporary era? What does using the word pomo in a sweeping, pejorative manner add to anything with regard to the problems of language-world dynamics. What specifically is pomo about Derrida? Surely he's not the first difficult -to- understand writer in the history of humankind. How a term first used in an article on architecture came to be a bogeyman in academic politics and the wider culture after the death of god and all his semantic substitutes escapes me. It looks/reads more and more as just not much more than an esoteric version of machismo one-upmanship about having the final word on various issues. The so-called problem of relativism/absolutism has been around for thousands of years. It will not be going away anytime soon.
