here is a good deal of talk revolution; and new forms of the these days about 'new times'. spatial organisation of social processes. This discussion is of great An issue that must perplex us is how political significance, for two total or complete this transition to Treasons. 'New times' are associated post-Fordism is. But this may be a too with the ascendancy of the Right in all-or-nothing way of posing the ques- Britain, the US and many parts of tion. In a permanently transitional age Europe. But 'new times' will also we must expect uneveness, contradic- provide the conditions - propitious or tory outcomes, disjunctures, delays, unpropitious, depending on how we contingencies, uncompleted projects, judge them - for any renewal of the overlapping emergent ones. We know Left and the project of socialism. that earlier transitions (feudalism to However, there are some real problems capitalism, household production to with this discourse of 'new times'. How modern industry) all turned out, on 'new' are they? Is it the dawn of the new inspection, to be more protracted and age or only the whimper of an old one? incomplete than the theory suggested. How do we characterise what is 'new' We have to make assessments, not about them? How do we assess their from the completed base, but from the contradictory tendencies? Are they 'leading edge' of change. The food progressive or regressive? What prom- industry, which has just arrived at the ise do they hold out for a more point where it can guarantee worldwide democratic and egalitarian future? the standardisation of the size, shape What political meaning do they have? and composition of every hamburger What are their political consequences? and every potato (sic) chip in a So far as description is concerned, Macdonald's Big Mac from Tokyo to there are several terms which have Harare, is clearly just entering its been employed to characterise these Fordist apogee. However, motor cars, Brave transitional times. Potential candidates from which the age of Fordism derived would include 'post-industrial', 'post- its name, with its multiple variations on Fordist', 'revolution of the subject', every model and market specialisation 'post-modernism'. None of these is (like the fashion and software indus- New wholly satisfactory. Each expresses a tries), is at the leading edge of post- clearer sense of what we are leaving Fordism. The question should always behind ('post') than where we are be, where is the 'leading edge' and in heading. 'Post-industrial' writers, like what direction is it pointing. World Alain Touraine and Andre Gorz, start from shifts in the technical organisa- New Times are not just about tion of industrial capitalist production, 'Post-Fordism' is also associated with with its 'classic' large-scale labour broader social and cultural changes. post-Fordism as an economic system. processes, division of labour and class For example, greater fragmentation They are about reforging us as conflicts. They foresee a shift to new and pluralism, the weakening of older productive regimes - with consequ- collective solidarities and block identi- individuals, and transforming our ences for social structure and politics. ties and the emergence of new identi- identities in the process. Stuart Hall Touraine has written of the replace- ties associated with greater work flex- ment of older forms of class struggle ibility, the maximisation of individual argues it is the return of the by the new social movements. choices through personal consumption. subjective with a vengeance 'Post-Fordism' is a broader term, he wider changes remind us suggesting a whole new epoch distinct that 'new times' are both 'out from the era of mass production. there', changing our condi- Though the debate still rages as to tions of life, and 'in here', Tworking on us. In part, it is us who are whether 'post-Fordism' exists, most commentators would agree that it being 're-made'. A recent writer on the covers at least some of the following subject, Marshall Berman, notes that, characteristics: a shift to the new 'modern environments and experiences 'information technologies'; more flexi- cut across all boundaries of geography ble, decentralised forms of labour and ethnicity, of class and nationality, process and work organisation; decline of religion and ideology' - not des- of the old manufacturing base and the troying them entirely, but weakening growth of the 'sunrise', computer- and subverting them, eroding the lines based industries; the hiving-off or of continuity which hitherto stabilised contracting-out of functions and ser- our social identities. vices; a greater emphasis on choice and One boundary which 'new times' have product differentiation, on marketing, displaced is that between the 'objec- packaging and design, on the 'target- tive' and subjective dimensions of ing' of consumers by lifestyle, taste and change. The individual subject has culture rather than by the Registrar become more important. While our General's categories of social class; a models of 'the subject' have altered. We decline in the proportion of the skilled, can no longer conceive of 'the indi- male, manual working class, the rise of vidual' in terms of a whole and the service and white-collar classes and completed Ego or autonomous 'self. the 'feminisation' of the workforce; an The 'self is experienced as more economy dominated by the multination- fragmented and incomplete, composed als, with their new international divi- of multiple 'selves' or identities in sion of labour and their greater auton- relation to the different social worlds omy from nation-state control; the we inhabit, something with a history, 'globalisation' of the new financial 'produced', in process. These vicissi- markets, linked by the communications tudes of 'the subject' have their own histories which are key episodes in the

24 MARXISM TODAY OCTOBER 1988 passage to 'new times'. They include the cultural revolutions of the 1960s; '1968' itself, with its strong sense of politics as 'theatre'; feminism's slogan that 'the personal is political'; psychoanalysis, with its rediscovery of the unconscious roots of subjectivity; the theoretical revolutions of the 60s and 70s - semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism - with their concern for language and representation. This 'return of the subjective' aspect suggests that we cannot settle for a language in which to describe 'new times' which respects the old distinc- tion between the objective and subjec- tive dimensions of change. But such a conceptual shift presents problems for the Left. The conventional culture of the Left, with its stress on 'objective contradictions', 'impersonal structures' and processes that work 'behind men's (sic) backs', has disabled us from confronting the subjective in politics in any very coherent way. n part, the difficulty lies in the very words and concepts we use. For long, being a socialist was synonymous with the ability to translatI e everything into the language of 'structures'. In part, the difficulty lies in the fact that men, who so often provide the categories within which everybody experiences things, even on the Left, have always found the specta- cle of the return of the subjective dimension deeply unnerving. The prob- lem is also theoretical. Classical marx- ism depended on an assumed corres- pondence between 'the economic' and 'the political': one could read off our political attitudes, interests and motivations from our economic class interests and position. This correspond- ence between 'the political' and 'the economic' is exactly what has now disintegrated - practically and theore- tically. This has had the effect, inter alia, of throwing the language of politics more over to the cultural side.

'Post-modernism' is the term which signals this more cultural character of 'new times'. The modernist movement, it argues, which dominated the art and architecture, the cultural imagination, of the early decades of the 20th century, and came to represent the look and experience of 'modernity' itself, is at an end. It has declined into the international style of expressway, slab skyscraper and international airport. Its revolutionary impulse has been tamed and contained by the museum. 'Post-modernism' celebrates the penetration of aesthetics into everyday life and the ascendancy of popular culture over the high arts. Theorists like Frederick Jameson and Jean-Francois Lyotard agree on many of the characteristics of 'the post- modern condition'. They remark on the dominance of image, appearance, sur- face-effect over depth (is Ronald Reagan a president or just a B-movie actor, real or cardboard cut-out, alive or Spitting Image?); the blurring of

25 MARXISM TODAY OCTOBER 1988 image and reality (is the contra war with their train of venerable ideas and cies of 'new times', especially on the real or only happening on tv?); the opinions, are swept away, all new- Left. Are they to be welcomed for the preference for parody, nostalgia, formed ones become obsolete before new possibilities they open? Or re- kitsch and pastiche over more positive they can ossify. All that is solid melts jected for their threat of horrendous modes of artistic representation (like into air'. disasters (the ecological ones are up- realism or naturalism); a preference Indeed, as Berman points out, Marx permost in our minds just now) and for the popular and the decorative over considered the revolution of modern final closures? We seem, especially on the brutalist or the functional in industry and production the necessary the Left, permanently impaled on the architecture and design. They also precondition for that promethean or horns of these extreme and irreconcil- comment on the erasure of a strong romantic conception of the social indi- able alternatives. sense of history, the slippage of hither- vidual which towers over his early t is imperative now for the Left to to stable meanings, the proliferation of 'The Left writings, with its talk of the all-sided get past this impossible impasse, difference and the end of what Lyotard seems not development of human capacities. It these irreconcilable either/or's. calls the 'grand narratives' of progress, just was not the things which the There are few better (though development, enlightenment and bourgeoisie created so much as 'the manIy more fashionable) places to begin rationality, which until recently were displaced by processes, the powers, the expressions than with Gramsci's 'Americanism and the foundations of all modern philoso- Thatcherism, of human life and energy; men work- Fordism' essay, which is of seminal phy and political theory. but disabled, ing, moving, cultivating, communicat- importance for this debate, even if it is Both Jameson and Baudrillard see flattened, ing, organising and reorganising nature also a broken and 'unfinished' text. This post-modernism as part of a 'new becalmed by and themselves...' Of course, Marx also represented a similar effort to describe cultural logic of capital' - 'the purest understood the one-sided and distorted the dangers and possibilities for the form of capital yet to have emerged, a the very character of the modernity and type of Left of the birth of that epoch - prodigious expansion into hitherto un- prospect of modern individual produced by this Fordism - which we are just supposed commodified areas'. This brings home change' development - how the forms of to be leaving: and in very similar the fact that one term which is no bourgeois appropriation destroyed the circumstances - retreat and retrench- longer much in use, though popular in human possibilities it created. But he ment of the working class movement, the 50s and 60s, is 'post-capitalist'. For did not refuse it. What he argued was ascendancy of fascism, new surge of the very good reason that the dynamic that only socialism could complete the capital 'with its intensified economic we are trying to characterise is con- revolution of modernity which capital- exploitation and authoritarian cultural nected with the revolutionary energy ism had initiated. He hoped 'to heal the expression'. of modern capital - capital after what wounds of modernity through a fuller If we took our bearings from 'Amer- we used to call its 'highest stages'. and deeper modernity'. icanism and Fordism', we would be ere are different ways of obliged to note that Gramsci's 'cata- explaining this dramatic, Now here exactly is the rub about 'new logue of ...most important or interest- even brutal, resumption of times' for the Left. The 'promise' of ing problems' relevant to deciding the link between modernity modernity has become, at the end of the 'whether Americanism can constitute a anhd capitalism. Some argue that, 20th century, considerably more ambi- new historical epoch' begins with 'a though Marx may have been wrong in guous, its links with socialism and the new mechanism of accumulation and his predictions about class as the motor Left much more tenuous. We have distribution of finance capital based of revolution, he was right - with a become more aware of the double- directly on industrial production'. But vengeance - about capital: its global edged and problematic character of it also includes: the rationalisation of expansion, transforming everything in modernity; what Theodore Adorno cal- the demographic composition of its wake, and subordinating every led the 'negative dialectics' of enlight- Europe; the balance between endoge- society and relationship under the law enment. Of course, to be 'modern' has nous and exogenous change; the phe- of commodification and exchange always meant 'to live a life of paradox nomenon of mass consumption and value. Others argue that, with the and contradiction... alive to new possi- 'high wages'; 'psychoanalysis and its failures of the Stalinist and social bilities for experience and adventure, enormous diffusion since the war'; the democratic alternatives, capital has frightened by the nihilistic depths to increased 'moral coercion' exercised acquired a new lease of life. Some which so many modern adventures lead by the state; 'modernism'; what he calls economists believe that we are simply (the line from Nietzsche and Wagner to 'super-city' and 'super-country'; femin- in the early, upbeat half of a new the death camps?), longing to create ism, masculinism and 'the question of Kondratiev 'long wave' of capitalist and hold on to something real even as sex'. Who, on the Left, now has the expansion. The American social critic, everything melts'. confidence to address the problems and Marshall Berman, relates 'new times' ut today, the paradoxes promise of 'new times' with a matching to 'the ever-expanding, drastically seem even more extreme. comprehensiveness and range? fluctuating capitalist world markets'. ('Modernity' has acquired a This lack of boldness is certainly, in However, whichever explanation we relentlessly uneven and part, attributable to the fact that the finally settle for, the really startling contradictory character. Abundance contradictory forces associated with fact is that these 'new times' clearly here, producing poverty there. Greater 'new times' are, just now, and have belong to a time-zone marked by the diversity and choice - but often at the been for some time, firmly in the march of capital simultaneously across cost of more fragmentation and isola- keeping and under the tutelage of the the globe and through the Maginot tion. More opportunities for participa- Right. The Right has imprinted them Lines of our subjectivities. tion - but only at the expense of with the inevitability of its own politic- The title of Berman's book reminds us subordinating oneself to the laws of the al project. This, may have obscured the that Marx was one of the earliest market. Novelty and innovation - but fact that what is going on is not the people to grasp the revolutionary con- driven by what appear to be false unrolling of a singular, unilinear logic nection between capitalism and mod- needs. The rich West and the famine- in which the ascendancy of capital, the ernity, as well as the dialectical rela- stricken South. Development which hegemony of the Right and the march tionship between the 'outside' and the destroys faster than it creates. The of commodification are indissolubly 'inside' of the process. In the Commun- city, privileged scenario of the modern locked together. They may be different ist Manifesto, he spoke of the 'constant experience for Baudelaire or Walter processes, with different timescales, revolutionising of production, uninter- Benjamin - transformed into the which the dominance of the Right has rupted disturbance of all social rela- anonymous city, the sprawling city, the somehow naturalised. tions, everlasting uncertainty and inner city. However, one of the lessons of 'new agitation' which distinguished 'the times' is that history does not consist of bourgeois epoch from all earlier times'. These stark paradoxes project uncer- what Benedict Anderson calls 'empty, 'All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, tainty into any secure judgement or homogeneous time', but of processes assessment of the trends and tenden-

27 MARXISM TODAY OCTOBER 1988 with different timescales, all convened and white, who can't even spell 'post- points of power and conflict. More and in the same conjuncture. Political time, modernism' but have grown up in the more of our everyday lives are caught the time of regimes and elections, is age of computer technology, rock-video up with these forms of power, and their short: 'a week is a long time in polities'. and electronic music, already inhabit lines of intersection. Far from there Economic time, sociological time, so to such a universe in their heads. being no resistance to the system, there speak, has a longer duree. Cultural time ommodified consumption? has been a proliferation of new points is even slower, more glacial. Trivial pursuits? Yes, much of antagonism, new social movements There is nothing slow, glacial or of the time. But underlying of resistance organised around them 'passive' about Thatcherism. Neverthe- that, have we missed the and, consequently, a generalisation of less, Thatcherism's project is operating Copening up of the individual to the 'politics' to spheres which hitherto the on the ground of longer, more profound transforming rhythms and forces of Left assumed to be apolitical; a politics movements which appear to be going modern material life? Have we become 'Are new of the family, of health, of food, of its way, but of which it is only bewitched by who, in the short run, times to be sexuality, of the body. What we lack is occasionally in command. Thatcherism reaps the profits from these transac- welcomed for any overall map of how these power is, in fact, an attempt to hegemonise tions, and missed the deep democra- relations connect and of their resist- these tendencies within its project of tisation of culture which is also part of the new ances. Perhaps there isn't, in that 'regressive modernisation', to their hidden agenda? Can a socialism of possibilities sense, one 'power game' at all, more a appropriate them to a reactionary the 21st century revive, or even sur- they open? network of strategies and powers and politics. Once we have opened up this vive, which is wholly cut off from the Or rejected their articulations - and thus a politics gap, analytically, it may be possible to landscapes of popular pleasures, which is always positional... resume the broken dialogue between however contradictory a terrain they for their socialism and modernity. are? Are we thinking dialectically horrendous One of these critical 'new' sites of enough? disasters and politics is the arena of social reproduc- But at this point, we encounter an even Yet another strategy for getting at the final tion. On the Left, we know about the deeper problem. The Left seems not more cultural and subjective dimen- reproduction of labour power. But what just displaced by Thatcherism, but sions of change would be to start from closures?' do we really know - outside of femin- disabled, flattened, becalmed by the the objective characteristics of post- ism - about ideological, cultural, sexual very prospect of change; afraid of Fordism and simply turn them inside reproduction? One of the characteris- rooting itself in 'the new' and unable to out. Take the new technologies. They tics of this area of 'reproduction' is that make the leap of imagination required not only introduce new skills and it is both material and symbolic, since to engage the future. And nowhere practices. They also require new ways we are reproducing, not only the cells more so than in this difficult area of of thinking. Technology, which used to of the body but also the categories of finding a language in which to address be 'hard-nosed', is now 'soft'. And it no the culture. Even consumption, in some the more subjective and cultural longer operates along one, singular line ways the privileged terrain of repro- dimensions of the revolution of our or path of development. 'Planning', in duction, is no less symbolic for being times. this new technological environment, material. In a world tyrannised by ne strategy might be for the has less to do with absolute predictabil- scarcity, people nevertheless express Left to accept this breaking- ity and everything to do with instituting in their practical lives not only what down of an objectivist poli- a 'regime' out of which a plurality of they need for material existence but tical logic. All human action outcomes will emerge. One, so to speak, some sense of their symbolic place in Ohas both its subjective and its objective plans for contingency. This mode of the world, of who they are, their side. Once we accept the collapse of thinking signals the end of a certain identities. One should not miss this any automatic linkage between econo- kind of deterministic rationality. drive to take part in the theatre of the mic class position and political con- Or consider the proliferation of mod- social. sciousness, we have to recognise that els and styles, the increased product f course, the preoccupation all commitments to act in politics have differentiation, which characterises with consumption and style subjective as well as objective roots. post-Fordist production. We can see may appear trivial - though All interests, including class ones, are mirrored there, too, wider processes of more so to men, who tend to culturally and ideologically defined. cultural diversity and differentiation, have themselves 'reproduced' at arm's And though individuals are not the related to the multiplication of social length from the grubby processes of 'authors' of ideology, in the sense of worlds and social 'logics' typical of shopping and buying and getting and producing it out of nothing from inside modern life in the West. therefore take it less seriously than our heads, ideologies must work on and There has been an enormous expan- women, for whom it was destiny, life's through the subject, subject-ing us to sion of 'civil society', caused by the 'work'. But the fact is that greater and their play, if they are to have force or diversification of the different social greater numbers of people (men and effect. 'New times' require us to worlds in which men and women can women) - with however little money - radically rethink the link between operate. At present, most people only play the game of using things to signify history and subjectivity. relate to these worlds through the who they are. Everybody, including Another strategy would be to open our medium of consumption. But, each of people in poor societies whom we in the minds to the deeply cultural character these worlds also has its own codes of West frequently speak about as if they of the revolution of our times. If behaviour, its 'scenes' and 'economies', inhabit a world outside of culture, 'post-Fordism' exists then, it is as much and (don't knock it) its 'pleasures'. knows that today's 'goods' double up as a description of cultural as of economic These allow the individual some space social signs and produce meanings as change. Indeed, that distinction is now in which to reassert a measure of well as energy. There is no evidence quite useless. Culture has ceased to be, choice and control over everyday life that, in a socialist economy, our propen- if ever it was, a decorative addendum and to 'play' with its more expressive sity to 'code' things according to to the 'hard world' of production and dimensions. This 'pluralisation' of so- systems of meaning, which is an things, the icing on the cake of the cial life expands the roles and identities essential feature of our sociality, would material world. The word is now as available to ordinary people (at least in necessarily cease-or, indeed, should. 'material' as the world. Through de- the developed world). Such opportuni- sign, technology and styling, 'aesthe- ties need to be more, not less, widely tics' has already penetrated the world available across the globe. They imply This recognition of the expanded of modern production. Through a 'socialism' committed to, rather than cultural and subjective ground on marketing, layout and style, the 'image' scared of, diversity and difference. which any socialism of the 21st century provides the mode of representation of Of course, 'civil society' is no ideal must stand, relates, in a significant the body on which so much of modern realm of pure freedom. Its micro- way, to feminism, or better still, what consumption depends. And kids, black worlds include the multiplication of we might call 'the feminisation of the social'. We should distinguish this from

28 MARXISM TODAY OCTOBER 1988 the simplistic version of 'the future as After another of those meetings of the cultures and that everyone speaks from female', espoused by some tendencies Left where the question of sexuality positions within the global distribution within the women's movement, but has run like an electric current which of power. Because these positions recently subject to Lynn Segal's per- nobody knows how to plug into, one is change and alter, there is always a suasive critique. It arises from the tempted to say especially the resist- politics of position. remarkable - and irreversible - trans- ances to change on the Left. This insistence on 'positioning' pro- formation in the position of women in Thatcherism is certainly fully aware vides people with co-ordinates, which modern life and the rebirth of a modern of this implication of sexuality and are specially important in the face of feminism itself. identity in politics. It has powerfully the enormous globalisation and trans- eminism and the social move- organised itself around particular national character of many of the ments around sexual politics forms of patriarchy and cultural or processes which now shape their lives. have thus had an unsettling 'Is Ronald national identity. Its defence of 'En- The 'new times' seem to have gone effect on everything once Reagan a glishness' is a key to some of the 'global' and 'local' at the same moment. thoughFt of as 'settled' in the theoretical president unexpected sources of Thatcherism's And the question of ethnicity reminds universe of the Left. And nowhere or just a popularity. For that very reason, 'En- us that everybody comes from some more dramatically than in its power to glishness', as a privileged and restric- place - even if only an 'imagined decentre the characteristic conversa- B-movie tive cultural identity, is becoming a site community' - and needs some sense of tions of the Left by bringing on to the actor, real or of contestation from those ethnic and identification. A politics which neglects political agenda the question of sexual- cardboard racial groups who insist on cultural that moment is not likely to be able to ity. This is more than the Left being cut-out, alive diversity as a positive goal. command the 'new times'. 'nice' to women or lesbians or gay men The Left should not be afraid of this Could there be 'new times' without or beginning to address their forms of or Spitting surprising return of ethnicity. Though 'new subjects'? Have the forces remak- oppression. It has to do with the Image? ethnicity has sometimes been a power- ing the modern world left the subjects revolution in thinking which follows in fully reactionary force, the new forms of that process untouched? Is change the wake of the recognition that all of ethnicity are articulated, politically, possible while we remain untrans- social practices and forms of domina- in a different direction. By 'ethnicity' formed? It was always unlikely and is tion - including the politics of the Left - we mean the commitment to those certainly an untenable proposition now. are always inscribed in and to some points of attachment which give the It is one of those many 'fixed and extent secured by sexual identity and individual some sense of 'place' and fast-frozen relationships, venerable positioning. If we don't attend to how position in the world, whether these be ideas and opinions' which, as Marx gendered identities are formed and in relation to particular communities, predicted, 'new times' quietly melted transformed and how they are de- localities, territories, languages, reli- into air. • ployed politically, we simply do not gions or cultures. These days, black Books and articles referred to include: Frederick have a language of sufficient explana- writers and film-makers refuse to be Jameson 'The Cultural Logic of Capital1, New Left Review 146; Marshall Berman All That Is Solid Melts tory power at our command with which restricted to only addressing black Into Air (1983); Jean-Francois Lyotard Post-Modern to understand the institutionalisation of subjects. But they insist that others Condition (1982); Jean Baudrillard The Mirror of Production (1979); Andre Gorz Farewell to the power in our society and the secret recognise that what they have to say Working Class (1982); Antonio Gramsci Selections sources of our resistances to change. comes out of particular histories and from the Prison Notebooks (1971).

29 MARXISM TODAY OCTOBER 1988