Page 235 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE MEANING OF NEW TIMES 223

conditions of existence, for any political strategy, whether of the right the
or left. From this position, Thatcherism represents, in fact, in its own
way,an attempt (only partially successful) to harness and bend to its
political project circumstances which were not of its making, which have a
much longer history and trajectory, and which do not necessarily have a
‘New Right’ political agenda inscribed in them. Much turns on which
version of ‘New Times’ one subscribes to.
If we take the ‘New Times’ idea apart, we find that it is an attempt to
capture, within the confines of a single metaphor, a number of different
facets of social change, none of which has any necessary connection with
the other. In the current debates, a variety of different terms jostle with one
another for pride of place, in the attempt to describe these different
dimensions of change. They include ‘post-industrial’, ‘post-Fordist’,
‘revolution of the subject’, ‘postmodernism’. None of these is wholly
satisfactory. Each expresses a clearer sense of what we are leaving behind
(‘post’ everything?) than of where we are heading. Each, however, signifies
something important about the ‘New Times’ debate.
‘Post-industrial’ writers, like Alain Touraine and André Gorz start from
shifts in the technical organization of industrial capitalist production, with
its ‘classic’ economies of scale, integrated labour processes, advanced
division of labour and industrial class conflicts. They foresee an increasing
shift to new productive regimes—with inevitable consequences for social
structure and politics. Thus Touraine has written of the replacement of
older forms of class struggle by the new social movements; and Gorz’s
most provocative title is Farewell to the Working Class. In these forms,
‘New Times’ touches debates which have already seriously divided the left.
There is certainly an important point about the shifting social and
technical landscapes of modern industrial production regimes being made
in some of these arguments, though they are open to the criticism that they
fall for a sort of technological determinism.
‘Post-Fordism’ is a broader term, suggesting a whole new epoch distinct
from the era of mass production, with its standardized products,
concentrations of capital and its ‘Taylorist’ forms of work organization and
discipline. The debate still rages as to whether ‘post-Fordism’ actually
exists, and if it does, what exactly it is and how extensive it is, either within
any single economy or across the advanced industrial economies of the
West as a whole. Nevertheless, most commentators would agree that the
term covers at least some of the following characteristics of change. A shift
is taking place to new ‘information technologies’ from the chemical and
electronic-based technologies which drove the ‘second’ industrial revolution
from the turn of the century onwards—the one which signalled the advance
of the American, German and Japanese economies to a leading position,
and the relative ‘backwardness’ and incipient decline of the British
economy. Second, there is a shift towards a more flexible specialized and