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.