Did Marxism-Leninism collapse into contemporary postmodernism?

After much thought for months, I saw a dim light at the end of the tunnel.

Contemporary postmodernism, in some ways, appears to be the product of extraordinary amounts of energy released, and dissipated, when the edifice of Marxism-Leninism collapsed from the late 1980s onward.

The contemporary urge on the Left to relativise everything, its tendency towards skepticism of what many regard as established empirical facts, and in a Western context, its relative scorn for Enlightenment values is, in my view, born out of the failure of Marxism-Leninism as a political and economic system (which of course, some postmodernists would tell you didn’t happen).

In a certain sense, the West won the Cold War, in that the Soviet empire collapsed, and other Communist dictatorships reformed economically. But a potentially more dangerous form of the old ideology came out of it, not just in the West but also in non-Western countries, in its contemporary postmodernist avatar — more dangerous because it is being operated by the people on the street.

This kind of postmodernism is now softly allied with Islamism, a marriage that should be shocking because of how much the two ideologies diverge. But if everything is to be about race, class and power relations, you can understand why they ally.

It is this relativistic tendency, and this bizarre marriage, that makes me more and more uneasy about my place on the Left-liberal side of the spectrum — because it has become painfully obvious by now that Left and (small l) liberal are not necessarily allied any more, as they were in non-Communist societies in the past.

P.S.: This is not to completely trash postmodernism, or even Marxism-Leninism, for both have their positives and they sometimes make sense. But it is the seepage of relativism into society and, now, its pressure on the sciences that truly upsets me.