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 identity play' between spokespersons and their favourite sociological constituency, which is already alluded to in various historical left-wing and right-wing 'farewells to the proletariat', is more systematically criticized 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 attention because of its suggestive epistemological linkage between the condition 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 classical 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 confrontation with the ubiquitous 'spokesperson problem'.
