ABSTRACT
Affirmative postmodernists can be subdivided into "New Age" postmodernists or political activists. In a short confessional piece written as an introduction to a jointly edited work on identity politics, Steven Seidman explains why he stopped being a Marxist and became a postmodernist. By the 1980s, only a few "fringe" leftist organizations were still insisting that nothing in America could change fundamentally until business and politics were transformed as a whole. The affirmativists exist both inside and outside the American system of higher education, the skeptics are largely confined within the academy—the familiar refuge of choice for all who have failed to accommodate themselves to existing social and economic relations. In the 1980s and 1990s, Ernesto Laclau's and Chantal Mouffe's version of postmodern radical democracy has been pursued most vigorously by the affirmativist new social movements. The postmodern liberals nonetheless maintain important career-boosting ties with the new social movements and the new academic programs.
