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FIVE Capitalism Organized and Disorganized

Third Way or Global Civil Society theory is an attempt to formulate
theoretical and political positions which address the tensions arising from
the impact of globalization on contemporary society without addressing the
roots of these tensions. Theories of ‘disorganized capitalism’, of ‘economies
of signs and space’ and of ‘network society’ are closely connected to risk
society theory but go further. These theories have the advantage that at
least implicitly they accept the reality of the emergence of monopoly and
finance capitalism since the beginning of the twentieth century as the
dominant national and global political and economic reality. Although
these theories do not discuss monopoly capitalism at length, nevertheless
the very concept of a capitalism which is now ‘disorganized’ presupposes
the prior domination of the ‘organized’, monopoly capital variety. The
main point of these theories now becomes the argument that this mono-
poly capitalism – glossed as ‘organized capitalism’ – is only one version
of modernity and, moreover, one that is being superseded by the reasser-
tion of neo-liberalism, recent technological developments and the ‘flows’
of globalized capitalism. It is because network society theory and theo-
ries of ‘disorganized capitalism’ share the common assumption that, pace
Dicken, an economic (and implicitly, political and social) path is unfold-
ing which supersedes monopoly capitalism that they justify being treated
together.
The most important and unacknowledged version of these theories is
that associated with the work of Lash and Urry, reviving the idea of
Hilferding and others about ‘organized’ versus ‘disorganized capitalism’
and proposing notions of the emergence of new ‘economies of signs and
1
space’. In many quarters – especially in the United States – this body
of theory, under the rubric ‘network society theory’, is associated with
the work of Manuel Castells. But in fact, Lash and Urry – publishing in