Page 100 - Culture Society and Economy

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CAPITALISM ORGANIZED AND DISORGANIZED

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Right. But this term fails to appreciate that the hostility to globalization
in the United States has a very broad social base. There is a growing per-
ception that, as Harold Meyerson put it in a column in The Washington
Post, ‘in the age of globalization, the interests of many U.S.-based corpo-
rations grow increasingly divergent from those of the American people’. 40
The social and economic consequences of corporate globalization are
only too painfully real, as even the most powerful economy in the world
is now realizing. Nor is this process confined to the economic sphere as
scholars such as Apparadurai and Hannerz have repeatedly pointed out. 41
One does not have to agree with their particular conception of the
specifics of the process (‘hybridity’, ‘ethnoscapes’) to see that their gen-
eral argument that broad global cultural forces are abroad on a scale and
comprehensiveness hitherto unknown is incontestable. For example, point-
ing out that this internationalization of culture is an unequal and uneven
process which is driven by power and reproduces exploitation and elitism
is true but does not undermine their core argument. How else could
global cultural processes unfold under corporate capitalism?
Likewise, to point out in contestation of Hannerz’s notions of the
‘creole’ or ‘hybrid’ nature of important segments of contemporary world
culture, that all cultures have always been hybrid and that Hannerz’s
arguments only make sense if one assumes a closet essentialism – this
too misses the central point. Only cultural nationalists and the anti-
immigrant racist Right argue from an essentialist position of the ‘purity’
of local cultures. It cannot be doubted that all cultures, especially
Sweden’s, has a centuries-old history of hybridity and intermixture. What
Hannerz is pointing to, however, is something different. His point is that
this time-honored and very human process of cultural mixing is now not
simply taking place between a single culture or number of cultures and
others. The process is not taking place on a bilateral but on a global scale –
as is conceptualized in Featherstone’s concept of the emergence of ‘third
cultures’ which Lash and Urry cite approvingly. 42 This therefore is an
altogether more far-reaching process than the complex interactions across
continental distances which have always taken place in world cultural
history.
Alongside national cultures, a global culture is struggling to emerge.
That this global culture is unequal, commercialized, dominated by pusil-
lanimous media corporations seeking only their selfish interests, is diffi-
cult to deny. Indeed, one of the most effective parts of Lash and Urry’s
argument is their critique of Baudrillard which makes precisely this
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point. The cunning of the ‘reason’ of the transnational cultural corpora-
tions and the many devious ways in which they are able to commodify

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