Page 25 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

United States, these goods assembled in China and imported into the
United States are by no means unequivocally ‘Chinese’ in any simple sense.
The label ‘American’ and the label ‘Chinese’ no longer refer to sealed, self-
subsistent realms as in the past. Tradition-minded Americans and Chinese
experience the erosion of these old securities and do not like it. If one
extends this example around the world, then what we realize is that the
individual is already constituted by a global sociality in his or her inner-
most self. This sociality is the distinctive feature of the modern self and
is the secret of its enhanced capacity for life as well of the unfulfilment
of this promise. Truncate and distort this sociality and it is the individual
who inevitably is truncated and distorted. There can be little doubt that
this sociality will only grow and become deeper as the global division
of labor itself grows. This new kind of socially-rooted individuality has
enormous implications for liberal democracy and notions of the absolute
autonomy of the individual on which it is based.
Neo-liberals write as if the market – any market – per se creates choice.
Actually the market is not the source of choice as such, only the mecha-
nism through which choice is exercised by those who have money to buy
the goods and services available. It is a truism which bears repeating that
before goods can be exchanged, they first have to be produced. And not
produced in any old fashion but in an increasingly sophisticated system
of the global division of labor in which outsourcing is growing in scale
and complexity. 12 The actually vast existing range of product choice is
thus far from being the creation of the market. It is the fruit of this inter-
nationally divided social labor. It is this global division of labor which
creates the necessity for exchange. The overwhelming majority of this
product is exchanged through the global market – creating both the pos-
sibility of choice between a vast range of products and the market mech-
anism through which this choice is exerted. It is a mistake to think that the
global division of labor necessarily implies free trade or purely market
regimes. The enormous possibilities for the development of individual
talent and abilities which now exist (at least for some and in the abstract)
only exist because of this variegated global specialization in production
and global demand in consumption, including productive consumption.
One must distinguish this process from the free market process both
analytically and in practice. The capitalist form is one thing, the social
substance another.
Because this enormous extension of sociality is mediated by the mar-
ket, it presents itself either as consumerist plenitude or, what may well
be considered another side of the same phenomenon, as an opportunity
for privileged selves to expand their quantity and range of consumption.

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