Page 84 - Culture Society and Economy

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CAPITALISM ORGANIZED AND DISORGANIZED

1994 – were the first to work out a general sociological theory of the effect
of new manufacturing methods and information technology on society as
a whole. Castells developed similar ideas at about the same time but his
full exposition in his three volumes came two years later. It is evident that
Castells was aware of the arguments of Lash and Urry since he makes the
same reference to one of their main works towards the end of the first
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volume of his trilogy as well as in the second volume. Later I shall discuss
the work of Castells – the idea of a ‘network society’ – and the important
way in which it differs from the theory of Lash and Urry. 3
The two books by Lash and Urry – The End of Organized Capitalism
(1987) and Economies of Signs and Space (1994) – have to be taken together
as one is clearly a sequel to the other. Published in 1987 and 1994, the
works by Lash and Urry present the crisis of the contemporary world
as resulting from the ‘disorganization’ of modern capitalism. They argue
that one can distinguish between a capitalism which is ‘organized’ and
one which is ‘disorganized’ – with the first case representing a monopoly
capitalism combined with the post-war social democratic state and the
second, resembling more a technologically updated reprise of the liberal
English small and medium-sized enterprise economy of the middle of the
nineteenth century. This latter ‘new economy’ – a term not used by Lash
and Urry – is held to be the state of affairs evolving at the end of the
twentieth century.
To understand the work of Lash and Urry one has to appreciate
its context. It arose at the height of the ‘disorganizing’ Thatcherite neo-
liberal moment – after the decisive defeat of the 1984 miners strike – and
the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Above all, it is an
expression of the collapse of the Keynesian social democratic compro-
mise between labor and capital which arose out of the defeat of fascism
in World War II and which more or less persisted into the 1970s. It also
embodies the end of the post-war boom which the Keynesian compro-
mise had produced and the intensification of the assault by capital on the
positions won by labor as their rate of profit diminished. Both ‘disorga-
nizings’ loom large in the books, with hope found in a third ‘disorganizer’ –
Japanese flexible specialization production systems, information technology
and global flows of capital.
The second work in particular – Economies of Signs and Space – reflects
what one could call the dot.com moment. It is suffused with illusions
about the emergence of a ‘new economy’ which ran rampant during the
frenzied bubble economy of the 1990s. The weakness of both books lies
in their failure to grasp that this global triumph of neo-liberalism, while
undoubtedly ‘Undoing Culture’ as Featherstone memorably put it, and
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