Page 23 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

service enterprise or a large transnational corporation. The source of this
new sociality is not, as older Marxist theory often implied, the size of the
enterprise for which one worked. That was and is an altogether too narrow
and local notion of the social. It is the scale of the international division
of labor which is the crux of the matter. Without this global sociality, two
things become immediately impossible, indeed, inconceivable: first, the
individual in the world today could not consume the range of goods
which she or he does as a matter of course; second, the individual could
not produce the range of goods currently produced. Either as consumer
or producer, the individual’s individuality is a social product. The indi-
vidual exists as an aspect of the social and can have no other existence in
practice, even were he or she to withdraw to a hermit world. This is
true not simply for activity in the economic field. It is so for the creative
social, cultural and personal life of the individual in the broadest sense.
In other words, the striking feature of present-day individualism is
how much it rests completely on a shifting but immense social foundation –
on the integration of a global division of labor. Any constriction of this
global division of labor would therefore have the inevitable effect of
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narrowing the individuality of the individual. You would no longer be
You nor Me, Me. This is the paradox of our times which Marx pointed
to in the Grundrisse of 1857. Modern-day individualism rests on a pro-
foundly different foundation from the liberal individualism of someone
like Adam Smith or even Mill. Marx long ago pointed out that Adam
Smith envisages an economy in which there is still considerable subsistence
production as well as local production for local consumption with only
the surplus being traded – an economy of limited commodification and
restricted exchange – limited local, national and international markets. 8
In such a context, individualism did have a considerable individual and
local foundation and one’s personal culture necessarily had a limited
local and national horizon. Indeed, nationalism, when it first arose, often
represented a broadening of personal and social horizons from the purely
ethnic or local.
Today, however, the extension of production on a global scale means
that in nearly every corner of the globe the market and commodity
production prevails. A global interdependence mediated by the global
market as well as by global inter-state and inter-firm relations is emerging,
albeit in its early stages and very unevenly and unjustly. This necessarily
undermines the local and the national, and offers, very unevenly and
unequally, new opportunities for the development of a genuinely human
culture which supersedes narrow local and national loyalties. This is why
those, such as Gray, who have deep conservative attachments to the local

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