Page 103 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

simply of ‘flows’. Lash and Urry argue that the future of radical politics lies
in alliances with the new social movements which are arising alongside
and partly as a consequence of the new cultural, economic and political
forces. They have in mind in particular the environmental movement.
Lash and Urry obviously entertain the hope that such an alliance can pro-
vide a social and political basis for the reconstitution of the social democ-
ratic agenda in the new global conditions which have emerged.
Striking here is the fact that these are social movements which have
arisen overwhelmingly in the developed capitalist countries, especially in
Western Europe. One also cannot help noting that these new social move-
ments in Europe, in particular the environmental movement, are domi-
nated by members of the professional middle and upper middle class.
Indeed, in his emphasis on new notions of citizenship and of democracy,
it could be argued that this is the Global Civil Society agenda in which
the radical working-class movement is swallowed up by the interests and
aspirations of the liberal urban upper middle classes which dominate the
contemporary British Labour Party.
One would have thought that the very analysis of Lash and Urry would
have led them further afield both socially and politically – to a politics
beyond the boundaries of the nation–state. Both in End of Organized
Capitalism and Economies of Signs and Space they point to the global reach
of contemporary economic relations and the spread of capitalist manufac-
turing in particular to parts of the developing world – especially to Asia.
At the same time, they repeatedly make the point that this new wave of
capitalism spreading rapidly in parts of the developing world is accompa-
nied by a closer integration of the developed capitalist economies – the
European Union being the most obvious by no means only example. Yet
Lash and Urry do not see these processes as providing the basis for the
construction of a new progressive politics. Although there have been
many examples of the importance of transnational solidarity – either in
transportation strikes in Europe or in the inter-locking parts of the
European motor car industry or in the international farmer movements –
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the issue of a transnational strategy for a global progressive movement
is not raised, much less discussed. The importance of such an alliance is
even greater if one considers the issue of the export of jobs and capital
from developed to developing countries and the ‘race to the bottom’
between developing and, for that matter, developed capitalist countries, in
their competition to attract capital. Again, Lash and Urry’s work does not
conceive of the development of such an alliance between various social
movements in developed and developing countries as a priority. In short,
Lash and Urry under-estimate the potential for progressive transnational

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