Page 96 - Culture Society and Economy

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CAPITALISM ORGANIZED AND DISORGANIZED

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a reflection of the phase of disorganized capitalism’. But they persist in
what is at its core a reductionist argument nevertheless.
From a purely empirical, historical, point of view it is impossible to link
postmodernism to changes in production techniques in this direct and
mechanical sense – wherein ‘flexible’ production systems show them-
selves, if you will, in ‘flexible’ imaginations. Such mechanistic notions
reflect a profound lack of grasp of the Hegelian nature of Marx’s argument.
The simple empirical fact is that modernist disenchantment began to
develop many decades before the emergence of new production techniques
while the liberal bourgeois economy was still the order of the day or just
beginning to be superseded by monopoly. Modernist angst and postmod-
ernist nihilism are a much broader and deeper phenomenon than simply
a reflection of a change in production technique or in the scale and charac-
ter of global capital flows. In the case of modernism what was at stake was
precisely the collapse of liberal democratic ideals which began to occur
even before the rise of monopoly capitalism. Even before then in Western
Europe, with the failure of the 1848 revolutions and the suppression of the
Paris Commune, it became apparent that bourgeois society not only could
not make good substantively on its promises of freedom, but that the bour-
geoisie would fight to defeat the very ideals which it once championed. The
rise of global corporate capitalism and imperialism brought this crisis to a
boil as Weber’s own work and life demonstrate most vividly. The carnage
of World War I was the culmination of this very broad cultural crisis –
expressing itself in all areas of intellectual, political and aesthetic life.
Likewise for postmodernism. We are here confronted with a cultural
expression not of a production technique but of something much deeper.
This is the deeply intractable contradictions of the broad way of life
created by a system of monopoly capital and the complete failure of all
attempts to resolve the social and psychological contradictions and crises
which it generates – including crises for the well-heeled bourgeois per-
sonality far removed from the production process. The social and per-
sonal contradictions generated (crime, social bitterness, personal
emptiness) are such that especially for the well-provided for, life has to
be lived in a state of relative social seclusion which, however, offers no
real respite – simply making bad worse. For the rest of us, it is the despair
generated by the repeated failure of the remedies for capitalism – each of
which seemed to hold such promise and then turned out to be at least as
bad as the disease, if not worse – which is one major sources of the post-
modern turn. Such an acute, sense of despair had developed even while
‘real existing socialism’ seemed to have some viability in the world. The
collapse of bureaucratic socialism in the Soviet Union in 1989 was perhaps

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