Beyond Facticity and Post-Truth: Towards a Marxist Political Epistemology

Present-day debates on science are polarised between two official anti-theses. The respective competing positions can be read as a radicalisation of postmodern relativism in the direction of a post-truth framework, and defences of facticity based on the assumption of the abstract neutrality of objective facts. These two epistemological positions are only apparently independent from each other. Post-truth epistemology and facticity have complementary ideological functions despite their apparent contradictions: both exclude the possibility to address and transform the societal framework in which they are inserted. A critical theory – more precisely, a Marxist political epistemology – is necessary to address and to comprehend the ideological role of today’s epistemological dichotomies. These dichotomies jointly monopolise the cultural arena and hinder emancipatory imagination, thought and action.