Page 125 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

a multi-trillion dollar global stock market; an unprecedented concentration
of wealth in all countries leading to a situation in which the total income
of 582 million poor people in the developing countries is 10 percent of the
income of the top 200 billionaires ($1,135 billion) in 1999. The tendency is
to dissolve all into ‘networks’ in which the power of money and military
might is dissipated by ‘knowledge’ and information.
Castells’ cultural communitarianism also connects with multiple
modernity theory which preceded it, although multiple modernity theory
is more rationalistic in its line of argument. If this somewhat fashionable
term – multiple modernity – had any substance, it was not merely because
it drew attention to stylistic variations on the modernity theme. Why
should anyone care – except the Chinese people themselves – whether
capitalism or socialism had Chinese characteristics? It was rather that
these non-Western modernities (a polite term for monopoly capitalism)
were thought to hold out (or to have once held out!) the prospect that a
more just modern world was not only possible but also actually unfolding
in a materialist sense. In other words, what was of interest was the ques-
tion of whether these non-Western capitalisms had new and positive social
outcomes, whether they seemed to be solving some of the age-old prob-
lems of capitalism which had proved so intractable in the Western (espe-
cially Anglo-American) forms. In other words, we are back here to the
discussion of monopoly capitalism and how it can be overcome. Multiple
modernity theory in fact posited a cultural ‘solution’ to these long-standing
socio-economic and political contradictions.
This search for real existing alternatives within the framework of capi-
talism inevitably intensified after the collapse of socialism and with the
injustices of global free market monopoly capitalism becoming ever more
glaring. This led to the idea that the problem was not monopoly and finance
capital per se. The problem was the cultural traditions within which the
dominant (Anglo-American) forms of monopoly capitalism arose. In this
analysis the social and economic failures of Western forms of modernity
had to do with the incorrigible individualism of this tradition, especially in
its dominant Anglo-American version. Some Asian countries were thought
to be convincingly demonstrating that the old connection between indi-
vidualism and modernity was an ethnocentrism of modernization theory
and a peculiarity of Western history.
The apparently necessary connection, famously and grandly set out
by Weber in The Protestant Ethic was purely adventitious, contextual and
limited to the West. Asia was showing that, on the contrary, one could have
both community and modernity, no Protestant individualism, low unem-
ployment, limited economic inequality (relative to Anglo-America) and

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