Page 64 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

50 Politics in a Small World

the global financial market so that capital flow is now to a large extent
outside the control of nation - states (though they are called upon to

intervene in new ways, in unstable financial markets, where currency is
in danger, for example).
We are currently in a period of transition, then, to a fl exible postmo-
dernity characterized by post - Fordist techniques and relations of produc-

tion. Most importantly, for Harvey, finance capital has been empowered
at the expense of the state and organized labor. The nation - state has lost
a good deal of the control over economic policy and labor relations it
enjoyed in Keynesian corporatism. It has been forced to become “ entre-
preneurial, ” disciplining workers and curbing the power of trade unions
in order to attract capital investment (Harvey, 1989 : 168). Flexible post-
modernity is a new, more virulent form of capitalism in which the state

and organized labor are at the mercy of finance capital. The state remains
a powerful actor for Harvey, however, working virtually exclusively for
capitalism. In a more recent book, The New Imperialism , Harvey argues
that we are now seeing states engaging in a new form of “ capitalist -
imperialism, ” using military, diplomatic, and political strategies to extend
its interests and achieve its goals outside its own territory. We will con-
sider this argument in the next section (Harvey, 2003 ).

According to Harvey, flexible postmodernity produces a postmodern

culture. Following Jameson ’ s (1984) influential argument that postmod-
ernism is the “ cultural logic of late capitalism, ” he sees cultural produc-
tion as increasingly integrated into commodity production, resulting in a
new aesthetic sensibility. The relentless search for new markets, the rapid
turnover of goods, and the constant manipulation of taste and opinion in
advertising produces the postmodern celebration of ephemerality, of
surface images rather than depth of meaning, of montage and juxtaposi-
tion of styles rather than authenticity, and of heterogeneity, pluralism,
discontinuity and chaos rather than meta - narratives of reason and prog-
ress (Harvey, 1989 : chapter 3 ). For Harvey, postmodernism is epiphe-
nomenal, a by - product of a new stage of the capitalist mode of production
dependent on the accelerated consumption of signs and services, rather
than on manufactured goods. Nothing more than “ froth and evanes-
cence, ” it does not require the development of new theoretical tools since
it can be understood entirely from within the terms of Marxist political
economy.
In fact, as Krishan Kumar (1995) points out, it is possible to read
Harvey ’ s work against his own conclusions. Rather than seeing postmod-
ernism as simply a change of style, a surface gloss on capitalism as
the driving force of contemporary social life, we might conclude that if