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ABSTRACT
It is being increasingly recognized that a post-truth phenomenon has arrived where lies and deception inform politics and everyday life as a normal state of affairs in (advanced) capitalist societies. In the post-truth world, feelings are more accurate than facts, and lies are constantly told for the purpose of the political subordination of reality. The post-truth condition is deeply skeptical of objective truth and experts/scientists. This article discusses the various traits of the post-truth phenomenon, explains its connection to post-modernist idealist philosophy, and its association with Far Right politics. It also explains the post-truth phenomenon in terms of the crisis-ridden bourgeois political economy and bourgeois politics, including the contradictions of imperialism. It argues that the post-truth phenomenon is only partly because of Far Right politics and that its ultimate cause lies in the capitalist system as a whole. This article concludes by pointing out what is to be done to counter the post-truth condition.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This does not mean that individual-level natural differences are not a reason for inequality. They are in capitalism. Marx (Citation1875) does recognize this.
2 See Oxford Dictionaries. 2016. “Word of the Year.” https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/.
3 The ideological purpose refers to the fact that post-truthers want people to have specific beliefs (wrong beliefs or half-truths) that reinforce or justify the political supremacy of one group over another.
4 McIntyre (Citation2018, xiv) said: “[Lying has always posed challenges] but never before have such challenges been so openly embraced as a strategy for the political subordination of reality.”
5 In a tweet he said, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally” (quoted in Barry Citation2017).
6 Trump is “the most mendacious president in US history” (Kessler Citation2020, x–xi).
7 Alan Sokal is famously known for the Sokal hoax that revealed the emptiness of postmodernist thinking that has contributed to post-truth (as discussed below).
8 The response of the physicist, Alan Sokal, was provocative: “anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. I live on the twenty-first floor” (Sokal and Bricmont Citation1998, 269).
9 That is when workers are paid a wage that allows them to meet their average needs. In this sense, there is an equal exchange: wages paid equal the cost of production of labour power as a commodity.
10 On the various contradictions of capitalism, see Harvey (Citation2014).
11 In capitalism, even the environmental damage has been commodified, as in carbon markets.
12 These commodities (e.g., tobacco) are also different from, say, arms which are not for individual consumption but which are harmful for society.
13 Lying is one of the three “essential elements that are barstools of corruption and distort policy-making process and support groups that fight on behalf of financial or ideological interests”; the other two are money and lobbying (Rabin-Havt Citation2016, 4).
14 In a recent poll, approximately 67% of Americans do not have a positive view of either of the two parties (Choi Citation2022).
15 The media may itself produce lies and be a part of “Lies, Incorporated.”
16 It is like the poor white identifying themselves with rich whites for a psychological compensation as Du Bois (Citation1935) had explained: whiteness serves as a public and psychological wage, a kind of mental compensation, delivering to poor whites, exploited by capitalism, a valuable social status derived from their being treated as “not-black.” Of course, this idea does not explain why Black workers do fight capitalism on a regular basis.
17 At the same time, lies about the regimes which falsely call themselves socialist must also be exposed.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Raju Das
Raju Das is a Professor at York University, Toronto. He is on the graduate programs in social & political thought, geography, environmental studies, and development studies. His teaching and research interests are in political economy, class theory, the capitalist state, and international development. His recent books include Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World (Brill, 2017) and Marx’s Capital, Capitalism, and Limits to the State: Theoretical Considerations (Routledge, 2022). He is editorially associated with a number of scholarly journals: Dialectical Anthropology; Race, Class and Corporate Power; Critical Sociology; Human Geography; and Science and Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis.