Page 101 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

and render harmless even tendencies to ‘resistance’ in popular culture and
movements is one of the most telling points that Lash and Urry make.
Nevertheless, none of this should lead one to overlook the fact that this
global culture has emerged, warts and all, in complex interactions with
national and sub-national cultures and this is a positive development of
world historical significance. This is the crucial point.
The interesting question therefore is not the existence of this extremely
important global phenomenon but one’s attitude to it. Lash and Urry treat
new cultural trends as prime instances of the deeply ‘disorganizing’ effects
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of contemporary capitalism. Despite the calm language, they seem seized
by the innumerable instances of brazen manipulations of popular culture
and the multiple misuse of modern technology by the transnational and
corporate media. The substitution of ‘image’ for ‘product’; the promotion of
shallow spectacle instead of meaningful art; the deliberate merging of fan-
tasy and reality via the proliferation of a world of images and media – all
these and more are instanced by Lash and Urry as examples of the nefar-
ious cultural maneuvers of contemporary ‘cultural’ corporate capitalism –
global panem et circenses.
Their concern in End of Organized Capitalism is that all of this has inten-
sified changes in economic, social and political life – especially in the area
of industrial relations and collective bargaining – which have completely
undermined the power of the organized industrial working class in the
developed capitalist countries, Britain in particular. Lash and Urry are
deeply concerned with this historic loss which they rightly regard as irre-
versible. The old factory proletariat concentrated in council housing in
large cities which was the foundation of the British trade union move-
ment, the British Labour Party and the social democratic British state is
no more. But this approach is very one-sided. The fundamental weakness
in Lash and Urry’s attitude to the collapse of ‘organized capitalism’ lies
in its uncritical attitude to the long-term sustainability of the post-war
Keynesian social democratic compromise. This unsustainability was not
anticipated by social democrats or the Left as a whole during that period
and is still not clearly grasped by Lash and Urry in their work. Yet the
Keynesian compromise, with its high level of social concessions from cap-
ital to labor, although leading to an unprecedented post-war boom, also
led to an over-capacity crisis and an eventual decline in the rate of profit
for capital. This crisis showed itself in the prolonged ‘stagflation’ of the
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1970s. Such a crisis had to be resolved, either by a rolling back of the his-
toric concessions to labor or a further encroachment on the rights of cap-
ital. Given the balance of forces in the world at that time, capital almost
inevitably won out.

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