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Review of International Political Economy
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Review of International Political Economy 4:3 Autumn 1997: 539-560
Modernity, postmodernity or
capitalism?
ABSTRACT
KEYWORDS
Since about the early 1970s, we are supposed to have been living in a
new historical epoch. That epoch has been variously described. Some
accounts emphasize cultural changes ('postmodernism'), while others
focus more on economic transformations, changes in production and
marketing or in corporate and financial organization ('late capitalism',
'multinational capitalism', 'flexible accumulation', 'globalization' and so
on). These descriptions have in common a preoccupation with new tech-
nologies, new forms of communication, the internet, the 'information
superhighway'. All these factors - cultural and economic, with their
technological foundations - have been brought together in the concept
of 'postmodernity' and the proposition that in the past two or three
decades we have witnessed a historic transition from 'modernity' to
postmodernity.
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ARTICLES
540
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MODERNITY, POSTMODERNITY OR CAPITALISM?
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MODERNITY, POSTMODERNITY OR CAPITALISM?
543
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MODERNITY, POSTMODERNITY OR CAPITALISM?
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MODERNITY, POSTMODERNITY OR CAPITALISM?
547
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At any rate, my main point is that the ideology of the French bour-
geoisie in the eighteenth century had not much to do with capitalism and
much more to do with struggles over non-capitalist forms of appropria-
tion, conflicts over extra-economic powers of exploitation. I have no wish
to reduce the Enlightenment to crude class ideology; but the point is
that in this particular historical conjuncture, in distinctly non-capitalist
conditions, even bourgeois class ideology took the form of a larger vision
of general human emancipation, not just emancipation for the bourgeoisie
but for humanity in general. In other words, for all its limitations, this
was an emancipatory universalism - which is, of course, why it could
be taken up by much more democratic and revolutionary forces.
548
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MODERNITY, POSTMODERNITY OR CAPITALISM?
AN EPOCHAL SHIFT?
549
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MODERNITY, POSTMODERNITY OR CAPITALISM?
551
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GLOBALIZATION OR UNIVERSALIZATION?
552
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MODERNITY, POSTMODERNITY OR CAPITALISM?
553
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MODERNITY, POSTMODERNITY OR CAPITALISM?
555
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MODERNITY, POSTMODERNITY OR CAPITALISM?
557
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MODERNITY, POSTMODERNITY OR CAPITALISM?
NOTES
1 See, for example, Fredric Jameson in 'Five theses on actually existing marx-
ism', Monthly Review 47 (11) (May 1996); and David Harvey, The Condition
of Postmodernity (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
2 For the theory of 'disorganized capitalism', see S. Lash and J. Urry, The End
of Organised Capitalism (Oxford, 1987).
3 I have developed some of the arguments in this section in 'From oppor-
tunity to imperative: the history of the market', Monthly Review 46 (3)
(July/August 1994).
4 Roger Burbach, 'For a Zapatista style postmodernist perspective', Monthly
Review 47 (10) (March 1996): 37.
5 I have discussed some of the points in this paragraph at greater length in
The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern
States (London, 1991).
6 Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(New York, 1982).
7 ibid., p. 18.
559
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ARTICLES
8 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New
York, 1995), pp. 8, 289.
9 See Leo Panitch, 'Globalisation and the state', in R. Miliband and L. Panitch
(eds) Socialist Register 1994: Between Globalism and Nationalism (London, 1994).
10 On this latter point, see 'An interview with Aijaz Ahmad', Monthly Review
48 (5) and 'The politics of literary post-coloniality', Race and Class 36 (3)
(1995): 10-12 especially.
11 I have developed this argument about Polanyi in 'From opportunity to
imperative'.
12 A much more detailed discussion of the relations between the 'economic'
and the 'political', as well as arguments that have a bearing on the discus-
sion of democracy which follows here, appears in my book, Democracy
Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, 1995), espe-
cially Chs 1, 7 and 8.
560
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