Abstract

This paper argues that the Marxist theory of the proletariat in many ways projects a romanticized self-description or 'false shadow' of its revolutionary spokesmen, and hence more proximately describes the missionary complex and Bohemian life-style of marginalized political intellectuals than a 'really existing' working class. This 'mistaken iden tity play' between spokespersons and their favourite sociological con stituency, which is already alluded to in various historical left-wing and right-wing 'farewells to the proletariat', is more systematically criti cized in recent reassessments by, for example, Bahro, Gouldner, Gorz, or Bauman. Next to its psychological and sociological infrastructure, classical proletarian standpoint theory has also attracted critical atten tion because of its suggestive epistemological linkage between the con dition of estrangement and claims for scientific objectivity. This connection is reasserted by recent feminist and postcolonial standpoint epistemologies - which, however, also tend to repeat the logic of classi cal Marxism's metonymic 'identity play'. The paper concludes with a defence\of the idea of 'situated knowledges', which wishes to preserve the classical liaison between objectivity, distanciation and marginality, while simultaneously rendering it more reflexive in critical confron tation with the ubiquitous 'spokesperson problem'.