Page 11 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

This leads to the third point. I argue that this transformation of
capitalism from its liberal to its corporate form provides a new basis for
individualism which cannot now be understood on the old liberal basis.
Individualism no longer rests on the private acts of purchase in the mar-
ket by the formally free individual consumer of classical liberal theory. 8
It rests on a global division of labor. It is the scale and scope of this divi-
sion of labor which make it possible for modern individualism to flourish.
In this sense, individuality rests on large-scale global sociality and is
clearly in need of being re-theorized.
The fourth point is the failure of modern civil society theory – especially
the work of Anthony Giddens and his associates in the Global Civil Society
group at the London School of Economics – to grapple with the collapse of
real existing liberal economy in its economic, political and social dimen-
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sions. I argue that while this group is right to emphasize the overwhelming
significance of global social and economic relations and the need to go
beyond ‘methodological nationalism’, 10 its principal weakness lies in its
abstraction of the market from the production relations from which it arises.
This results in a failure to place the rise of corporate capital and of bureau-
cracy at the center of its concerns. The work of this group has much to say
about the emergence of a global civil society but not much about the fact
that this society rests on an uncivil finance capital. In sociological terms,
they have rejected Weber for Durkheim. In other words, they downplay
Weberian realism – that Nietzschean tendency in Weber’s work in which he
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stares the contradictions of capitalism in the face. This fearless honesty is
the quality which makes Weber appealing to Marxists and liberals alike.
Weber’s focus on the rationalistic transformation of capitalism from its indi-
vidualistic, Protestant origins into bureaucratic collective organization – an
‘iron cage of serfdom’ – is a critical part of the thought of this ‘class con-
scious bourgeois’, as Weber once described himself. But Giddens and his
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group do not focus on this aspect of Weber – the inescapable triumph of
bureaucracy and its irresistible authoritarianism. They prefer Durkheimian
assurances that ‘organic solidarity’ can be made to prevail in national and
global society, profound contradictions notwithstanding. This group does
not ignore the economy as is the case with the practitioners of cultural stud-
ies. But when they discuss the economy, they abstract trade from the global
system of production relations – from transnational corporate dominance. 13
While important points are made about trade, this abstraction of the market
from the hidden abode of production contributes little to the debate on how
these Behemoths may be tamed.
This leads to the fifth main argument. Here I attempt to take up the
work of the theorists of network society and of ‘economies of signs and

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