Page 85 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

undermining many old verities of the post-war social democratic welfare
nation–state, at the same time was part of a new ‘organizing’ moment of
monopoly and finance capital on an unprecedented global scale. It was
therefore far from being the case that the hegemony of monopoly and
finance capital was being ‘disorganized’ by small-scale production of the
old liberal or ‘new economy’ sort. As Lash and Urry’s discussion of
finance capital itself indicated, what was really occurring (as far as the
British economy was concerned) was the subordination of British capital
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in the City of London by American and Japanese finance capital. What
was occurring was the displacement of an earlier, less ‘organized’ form of
what Cain and Hopkins famously characterized as ‘gentlemanly capital-
ism’ by an even more highly ‘organized’ form of finance and monopoly
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capital. It was not a matter of ‘disorganization’ but of the re-structuring
and re-organization of capitalism on a grander, global scale. This point is
easier to see now, when the economic consequences of the entire process
have played themselves out more fully and the geo-political conse-
quences as well. No great effort has to be mounted today to convince that
this entire process has culminated in a new round of naked imperialist
aggression. But when Lash and Urry wrote, the dot.com surge seemed
unstoppable and it was by no means obvious that this would be the
course which events would take.
Hence their work (both books taken together) stresses throughout the
chaotic and dissolving consequences of the radical free market policies of
Thatcher and even of the ‘new economy’. In the first work in particular,
Lash and Urry document in detail the dismantling of the post-war wel-
fare state then unfolding with full force in Britain and spreading to the
rest of the European continent. Their work is therefore characterized by
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the same profound pessimism which suffuses the work of Giddens and
which has already been noted. This is less so in the second work –
Economies of Signs and Space – than in the first. This difference between
the two works is important because this second work is conceived of as
having found a solution to the problems posed in the earlier work but
whose solution eluded Lash and Urry at that time. Here is a characteristic
passage:

The abstraction, meaninglessness, challenges to tradition and history
issued by modernism have been driven to the extreme in postmodernism.
On these counts neo-conservative analysts and many Marxists are in
accord. In any event not just are the analyses surprisingly convergent, but
so too are the pessimistic prognoses.
Now much of this pessimism is appropriate. But it is part of the aim of
this book to argue that there is a way out. It is to claim the sort of

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