Page 92 - Culture Society and Economy

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CAPITALISM ORGANIZED AND DISORGANIZED

Thus, ‘agency is set free from structure’ and their problematic of rescuing
the liberal subject is apparently resolved.
But only apparently. For this is hardly a convincing account of the
conditions of the subject in modern global capitalist society – neither of
the bourgeois nor of the proletarian subject. Such conclusions are colos-
sally premature. They are based on an elementary misconception about
the character of the latest phase of capitalist development which bears
little relationship to the real-life experiences of billions of people in either
the developed or developing world. Lash and Urry disregard the obvious
fact that the technical changes in productions systems are occurring
within the framework of the enormous growth in the power of global cor-
porations and of international finance. This power dwarfs the govern-
ments of powerful nation–states, much less the detached ‘reflexive’
individuals of whatever social class in the corporation-dominated capitalist
marketplace. Let us set aside the question of the agency of a member of
the working class in the developed countries or of a member of the urban
poor in the Third World in the contemporary conditions of global corpo-
rate capitalism. It is obvious that the power of ‘knowledge’, ‘meaning’, or
of ‘aesthetic’ agency here celebrated by Lash and Urry is a feeble thing
indeed when confronted with the immense resources of transnational
corporations, the trillions of dollars traded daily on international currency
markets, or the military might and Realpolitik of an international state
system dominated by a ‘hyperpower’.
Their highly unrealistic analysis bears little relationship to the real
powerlessness which hundreds of millions of working-class and poor
people tangibly feel everyday worldwide. More interesting, however, is
that this profound sense of powerlessness and lack of agency is not con-
fined to the proletariat or to small farmers. On the contrary, large numbers
of middle and upper middle-class persons in the developed world have
this same sense of their inability to influence the central social and polit-
ical decisions which have a powerful effect on their lives. The greater
sociality contained in contemporary capitalist production forces (rightly
identified by Lash and Urry as having a liberating human potential) can-
not realize itself as long as it is trapped within the iron cage of corporate
capital. No solution to the crisis of the subject and the inner incoherence
of life in contemporary bourgeois society can be found as long as the
social forces which contain the possibility for solution remain the private
property of a few. To be a consistent liberal today requires liberals to
become socialists, as Lukes concluded. 23
It becomes clear that Lash and Urry themselves sense the weakness in
their own arguments – they display little confidence in their own solution –
that ‘reflexivity’ by itself will rescue the modern liberal subject. They

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