Page 90 - Culture Society and Economy

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CAPITALISM ORGANIZED AND DISORGANIZED

of ‘reflexivity’, they sense that, as usual and paradoxically, it is the very
development of capitalism itself – this time on a global and truly vast social
scale – which is laying the foundation for a new social order in which indi-
vidual freedom thrives on a very broad social basis. But they do not see
that the bars of our contemporary global iron cage are even ‘harder than
Krupp steel’.
Lash and Urry are prevented from seeing this by the abstraction of the
concept of ‘organized’ capitalism which fails to deeply capture the pecu-
liar combination of monopoly and competition which is the hallmark of
monopoly capitalism. Such theories overlook the fact that capitalism is at
one and the same time both ‘organized’ and ‘disorganized’. It is organized
in that, since the nineteenth century and especially today, it has achieved
unprecedented levels of concentration of capital, of a far deeper interna-
tional division of labor – an immense level of socialization of production.
On the other hand, it is ‘disorganized’ by the persistence of private own-
ership of the means of production and by the world market. The acuteness
of this contradiction – at a pitch never seen in human history before – is at
the root of the problems of our age.
In this connection and as an aside, it is worth noting that too much
attention has been riveted on the issue of free versus regulated trade.
Monopoly and finance capital proceeds and dominates in both, prefers
now one, now another, as the conditions of market competition change.
In the United States – since the 1980s the bastion of neo-liberalism and
the Washington Consensus – the tradition of economic policy historically
has been a protectionist one. One only has to go back to the McKinley
Tariff in the nineteenth century for this to become clear. Today, opposi-
tion is growing to Free Trade in the bourgeoisie itself – for example, in
the group around the financier George Soros – as these lines are being
written. Much is being made of the necessity to have ‘fair’ and not sim-
ply ‘free’ trade and of the need to regulate the global financial markets
because of the fear of ‘contagion’ – the dangerous experiences of the
Mexican Crisis of 1994–95 and of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1998.
When one develops a balance of trade deficit of over $500 billion dollars
($120 billion with China alone in 2003) and one’s currency begins
the inevitable slide, neo-liberal free trade dogmas suddenly lose their
attractiveness!
Because Lash and Urry characterize the state of affairs abstractly in a
manner which misses the critical features of the modern economy, they
are unable to understand how this globalization is also a process of the
extension of the social division of labor on a global scale which opens the
door to a solution to the problem which grips them. When to this is

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