Page 243 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE MEANING OF NEW TIMES 231

glacial or ‘passive’ about the Thatcherite revolution, which seems by
contrast brutally abrupt, concise and condensed.
Nevertheless, from the perspective of the longer durée of new times,
Thatcherism’s project can be understood as operating on the ground of
longer, deeper, more profound movements of change which appear to be
going its way, but of which, in reality, it has been only occasionally,
and fleetingly, in command over the past decade. We can see Thatcherism
as, in fact, an attempt to hegemonize these deeper tendencies within its
project of ‘regressive modernization’, to appropriate them to a reactionary
political agenda and to harness to them the interests and fortunes of
specific and limited social interests. Once we have opened up this gap,
analytically, between Thatcherism and New Times, it may become possible
to resume or re-stage the broken dialogue between socialism and
modernity.
Consider another question with which people on the left perpetually
tease and puzzle one another: what kind of ‘transition’ are we talking
about and how total or how complete is it? This way of posing the
question implies an all-or-nothing answer. Either it is a New Epoch, or
nothing at all has changed. But that is not the only alternative. We are
certainly not debating an epochal shift, of the order of the famous
transition from feudalism to capitalism. But we have had other transitions
from one regime of accumulation to another, within capitalism, whose
impact has been extraordinarily wide-ranging. Think, for example, of the
transition which Marx writes about between absolute and relative surplus
value; or from machinofacture to ‘modern industry’; or the one which
preoccupied Lenin and others at the turn of the century and about which
Gramsci was writing in ‘Americanism and Fordism’. The transition which
New Times references is of the latter order of things.
As to how complete it is: this stand-and-deliver way of assessing things
may itself be the product of an earlier type of totalizing logic which is
beginning to be superseded. In a permanently Transitional Age we must
expect unevenness, contradictory outcomes, disjunctures, delays,
contingencies, uncompleted projects overlapping emergent ones. We know
that Marx’s Capital stands at the beginning, not the completion, of the
expansion of the capitalist ‘world market’; and that earlier transitions (such
as that from household to factory production) all turned out, on
inspection, to be more protracted and incomplete than the theory
suggested.
We have to make assessments, not from the completed base, but from
the ‘leading edge’ of change. The food industry, which has just arrived at
the point where it can guarantee worldwide the standardization of the size,
shape and composition of every hamburger and every potato (sic) chip in a
Macdonald’s Big Mac from Tokyo to Harare, is clearly just entering its
‘Fordist’ apogee. However, its labour force and highly mobile, ‘flexible’