Page 65 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

Politics in a Small World 51

postmodernity is capitalism with a new face, then the novelty of the situ-
ation warrants more than simply a return to business as usual. Without
denying the importance of the economic dimension of postmodernity, it
is important not to reduce the cultural and political dimensions to an
economistic determinism of capital accumulation and ceaselessly extend-

ing commodification (Kumar, 1995 : 1925). Despite his sensitivity to cul-
tural forms, from the position Harvey takes within a political economy
developed to deal with a very different kind of social life, one in which
signs were less obviously effective in identity formation and contestation
and in the structuring of social practices. In reducing cultural forms to
economic determinism, Harvey cannot engage with the potentially trans-
formational dimensions of cultural politics.
For Harvey, real politics is essentially class politics. Though on occa-
sion he commends social movements for “ changing the structure of
feeling ” and articulating the rights of the marginalized to speak in their
own voices ( “ women, gays, blacks, ecologists, regional autonomists, ”
Harvey, 1989 : 48), at the same time, he suggests that such movements
tend toward “ place - bound ” resistance which only serves the fragmenta-
tion upon which flexible accumulation feeds (1989: 3035). As Meaghan

Morris (1992) notes, he gestures toward acknowledging the equal impor-
tance of “ differences ” and “ otherness ” and the necessity of incorporating
them into a more inclusive historical materialism, but he continually re -
writes “ differences ” as “ the same, ” ; ultimately, all these groups are simply
further victims of capitalist exploitation. For Harvey, it is only class
politics that can be genuinely emancipatory (Harvey, 1989 : 355, 1993;
Morris, 1992 ).
In Economies of Signs and Space (1994), Scott Lash and John Urry
expound a similar argument to Harvey, using a Marxist framework to
explain globalization. Like Harvey, they also see the terms “ postmoder-
nity ” and “ postmodernism ” as usefully summing up new features of
contemporary life, while grounding them in the continuity of dynamic
capitalism as the driving force of history. However, Lash and Urry do
integrate these new features into their account of what they call alter-
natively “ disorganized capitalism ” and “ postmodernity ” to a greater
extent than Harvey. In fact, in this respect, their account breaks through
the modern Marxist paradigm to which they are anxious to remain
committed.
Lash and Urry give more emphasis than those who think in terms of

post - Fordism and flexible specialization to consumption as a leading
practice in contemporary capitalism. For them, it is consumption and
service industries rather than finance capital and post - Fordist production