Page 27 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

Attempts to draw such a line reveal a profound lack of understanding
of the degree of integration of small, medium and large business into a
single web of economic relationships.
Yet, instead of seeing this enormous enhancement of the underlying
sociality of life, contemporary social and cultural theory simply seizes on
and celebrates the opportunities for increased consumption, self-cultivation
and reflexivity which this sociality presents to those with the wherewithal to
consume. Consciousness, especially Western intellectual as well as popular
consciousness, misses the underlying social reality which is the differentia
specifica of our time, clings to the surface of modern life and hedonistically
celebrates the self with ever greater determination. It refuses to perceive
that there is a new social self which is abroad whose individuality lies in
and derives from its deepened sociality. Where it perceives this new social-
ity, it fails to see its significance or potential. It is portrayed negatively –
as a ‘risk’ or as a force which ‘“distanciates” social relationships’ leading to
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‘a runaway world’. As Lash and Urry observed, globalization is presented
as a dystopia. Pessimism prevails.
In the socialist movement which developed in Europe in the second
half of the nineteenth century, and, especially after the Russian Revolution
of 1917, this was not how the process was supposed to unfold. The ‘social’
in socialism was to be realized by social revolution and the construction
of national and global socialist economies under the leadership of the
proletariat. For many reasons which need not detain us here, this project
failed. Instead it is global capitalism which has constructed this new
global social. The ‘real existing sociality’ of this capitalist world is not easily
recognizable because it is not embodied in the old factory sociality of the
industrial proletariat. That, we can now see, was a more local and national
phenomenon. What we are dealing with today is a far more broad-based
sociality engulfing nearly all groups in society, especially increasingly, the
middle and upper middle strata. Global capitalism – transnational corpo-
rations and their network of subcontractors – has been driven to implement
what, according to much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century radical
theory, was supposed to have been the mandate of socialism. Because of this
profoundly unexpected, unpredicted – indeed, unpredictable – turn in
history, many seem not to perceive what has occurred. This conscious-
ness does not see that this growth in global sociality and mutual depen-
dence in fact is not simply an economic opportunity or threat. It is not
simply the erosion of the old solidarities. It is at the same time laying the
foundation for something new, in however contradictory and unequal a
fashion. It is the beginning of the extension of human social and individual
existence in the only manner which offers the real possibility for human

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