(THEOMAI Journal - Society, Nature and Development Studies, number 8, second semester of 2003) http://revista-theomai.unq.edu.ar/numero8/arttakis8.htm
Postmodern Myths
TAKIS FOTOPOULOS
I. Has there been a break with modernity?An obvious criterion one can use to assess whether there has been a shift from modernity to a new era of postmodernity is to examine whether a break with modernity could be stablished in the political, economic, scientific and cultural spheres, similar to the one that marked the shift from traditional to modern society. This is the aim of this part of the paper, whereas in the the second part, the post-modern theoretical paradigm and politics will be assessed and in the final part the Inclusive Democracy approach on the issues raised by postmodernists will be discussed.
1. Political and economic structuresThe emergence of the main political and economic institutions of modernity
As it is well known, modern society emerged, very unevenly, out of a system of rural societies that had endured 5,000 years. In fact, one may argue that the technology and social organization of the Neolithic revolution remained the basis of all civilization until the coming of industrialism, which then spread, always very unevenly, from Europe to the rest of the world. However, as I attempted to show in Towards An Inclusive Democracy)[1] (TID), industrial production constituted only the necessary condition for the shift to modern society. The sufficient condition was the parallel introduction —through decisive state help— of the system of the market economy[2] that replaced the (socially controlled) local markets that existed for thousands of years before. It was the institutionalisation of this new system of economic organisation that set in motion the marketisation process,[3] whose main characteristic is the attempt to minimise effective social controls over markets for the protection of labour and the environment. In fact, one could argue that had a social revolution accompanied the Industrial Revolution —so that the use of machines, in conditions of large-scale production, could have been made compatible with the social control of production— the present marketisation of society would have been avoided, as well as the huge concentration of income, wealth and economic power that was related to the market-based industrialisation. But, given the class structure of the commercial society which characterised several European societies during the Industrial Revolution, it was not surprising that the organisation of the supply of the services of ‘labour’ and ‘land’ was based on the transformation of human activity and natural resources into commodities, whose supply did not depend on the needs of human beings and the ecosystem respectively, but on market prices.
Furthermore, neither was the system of the market economy the outcome of some sort of an evolutionary process, as Marxists usually assume, nor was its political complement, representative ‘democracy’, the result of some kind of evolution in political institutions. The institutionalisation of both the market system and representative ‘democracy’ was the result of deliberate action by the state, which was controlled by the merchant class --the new economic and political elite that emerged during the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the USA. It can , also, be shown that there was nothing ‘evolutionary’ about the emergence of the merchant class either. As Polanyi, quoting Pirenne, points out: ‘It would be natural to suppose, at first glance, that a merchant class grew up little by little in the midst of the agricultural population. Nothing, however, gives credence to this theory”.[4]As I described elsewhere[5] in detail the establishment of modernity’s main economic and political institutions, i.e. the market economy and representative ‘democracy’ I will only summarise here the argument. As regards, first, the institutionalisation of the market system, the nation-state, which was just emerging at the end of the Middle Ages, played a crucial role in creating the conditions for the `nationalisation' of the market (mercantilism) and in freeing the market from effective social control (liberal modernity). The emergence of the nation-state, which preceded the marketisation of the economy, had the effect not only of destroying the political independence of the town or village community but, also, of undermining their economic self-reliance.
Thus, it was only by virtue of deliberate state action in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that the `nationalisation' of the market and the creation of internal trade was achieved[6]. In fact, the 16th century can be summed up by the struggle of the nascent state against the free towns and their federations, which was followed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by further state action involving the confiscation, or `enclosure' of communal lands —a process that was completed in Western Europe by the 1850s[7]. But, the `freeing' of trade performed by mercantilism merely liberated trade from localism; markets were still an accessory feature of an institutional set-up regulated more than ever by society. Up until the Industrial Revolution, there was no attempt to establish a market economy in the form of a big, self-regulating market. In fact, it was at the end of the eighteenth century that the transition from regulated markets to a system of self-regulated ones marked the `great transformation' of society, that is, the move to a market economy. Up until that time, industrial production in Western Europe, and particularly in England where the market economy was born, was a mere accessory to commerce.
As regards, second, the rise of representative ‘democracy, we should go back to the last quarter of the 18th century when the ‘Founding Fathers’ of the US constitution, literally invented representative ‘democracy’, an idea without any historical precedent in the ancient world. Up until that time, democracy had the classical Athenian meaning of the sovereignty of demos, in the sense of the direct exercise of power by all citizens ―although, of course, the Athenian democracy was partial, given the limitations it imposed on the right to citizenship which excluded the majority of residents (women, slaves, foreigners). The Founding Fathers considered as completely unacceptable this direct exercise of power, ostensibly, because it was supposed to institutionalise the power of the ‘mob’ and the tyranny of the majority. In fact, however, their real aim was the dilution of popular power, so that the claims of representative ‘democracy’ about equal distribution of political power could be made compatible with the dynamic of the market economy that was already leading to a concentration of economic power in the hands of an economic elite[8]. This was of course a constant demand of liberal philosophers since the time of Adam Smith, who took pains to stress that the main task of government was the defence of the rich against the poor —a task that, as John Dunn points out, is “necessarily less dependably performed where it is the poor who choose who is to govern, let alone where the poor themselves, as in Athens, in large measure simply are the government”[9]. This way, democracy ceased to be the exercise of political power and was identified instead with the resignation from it and the associated transfer of this power, through the elections, to a political elite.
The more or less simultaneous institutionalisation of the system of the market economy and representative ‘democracy’, during the Industrial Revolution in the West, introduced the fundamental element of modernity : the formal separation of society from the economy and the state which has been ever since the basis of modernity. Not only direct producers were not able anymore to control the product of their work but, also, citizens were offered a new form of political organisation called ‘democracy’, in which the direct exercise of political power —the characteristic of classical democracy— was impossible. In other words, the market economy and representative democracy had in fact institutionalised the unequal distribution of political and economic power among citizens. Furthermore, it could be shown that the gradual extension of the right to citizeship to the vast majority of the population ―a process that was completed only in the tewntieth century— did not offset the effective loss of the meaning of citizenship, in terms of the exercise of power. Thus, the type of citizenship introduced by representative democracy was a passive citizenship which had nothing to do with the active citizenship of classical democracy. It was therefore not surprising that the extension of civil rights did not have any marked effect in reducing the concentration of political and economic power which has always characterised modern society, apart from a temporary effect on economic inequality during the statist phase of modernity, as we shall see below.
In this problematique, therefore, it was the institutionalisation of the market economy and its political complement in the form of representative ‘democracy’ which were the ultimate causes for the characteristics usually assigned to modern society, such as the replacement of the group or the community (as the traditional basic unit of society) by the individual; the assignment of specific, specialised tasks to modern institutions within a highly developed division of labour in contrast to the traditional social or political institutions (family, community, king etc); the government of the institutions of modern society by ‘rules’ rather than, as in traditional society, by custom and tradition, and so on.
Liberal modernityThe marketisation process that was initiated by the emergence of the market economy made apparent the contradiction between the requirements of the market economy and those of society. This contradiction was due to the fact that, in a market economy, labour and land had to be treated as genuine commodities, with their free and fully developed markets, whereas in fact they were only fictitious commodities. It was the same contradiction that led to a long social struggle, which raged for over a hundred and fifty years, from the Industrial Revolution up to the last quarter of the twentieth century, between those controlling the market economy, (i.e. the capitalist elite controlling production and distribution) and the rest of society. Those controlling the market economy (with the support of other social groups which were benefiting by the institutional framework) aimed at marketising labour and land as much as possible, that is, at minimising all social controls aiming at protecting labour and land, so that their free flow, at a minimum cost, could be secured. On the other hand, those at the other end, and particularly the working class that was growing all this time, aimed at maximising social controls on labour (not so much on land before the emergence of the Green movement), that is, at maximising society's self-protection against the perils of the market economy, especially unemployment and poverty. The outcome of this social struggle led first to the liberal form of modernity which, after a transitional period of protectionism and a relatively brief intermission in the form of statist modernity, was succeeded by today’s neoliberal form of it.
At the theoretical and political level, this conflict was expressed by the struggle between economic liberalism and socialism, which constituted the central element of Western history, from the Industrial Revolution up to the mid 1970s. Economic liberalism was the ideology which had as its main aim the justification of the project for a self-regulating market, as effected by laissez-faire policies, free trade and regulatory controls[10]. Socialism, on the other hand, was the ideology which had as its main aim the justification of the project for social control over economic resources in order to cover the needs of all humans (rather than simply the needs of those who can survive competition, as in economic liberalism) and to conserve productive organisation and labour.
During the liberal phase[11] of marketisation in the 19th century, which barely lasted half a century between the 1830s and the 1880s, the first attempt was made to establish a purely liberal internationalised market economy in the sense of free trade, a ‘flexible’ labour market and a fixed exchange rates system (Gold Standard). However, this attempt failed and liberal modernity collapsed as it did not meet the necessary condition for a self-regulating market economy, namely open and flexible markets for commodities and capital, which were not feasible in a period in which big colonial powers like England and France were still exercising almost monopolistic control over significant parts of the globe at the expense of rising non-colonial powers (like the USA) or smaller colonial powers (like Germany)[12]. So, after a transitional period of protectionism, the liberal form of modernity was succeeded in the 20th century, with the decisive help of the socialist movement, by a new form of modernity: statism.
The statist form of modernityStatist modernity took different forms in the West and the East (namely the regimes of Eastern Europe, China and so on). Thus, in the West[13], statism took a social-democratic form and was backed by Keynesian policies which involved active state control of the economy and extensive interference with the self-regulating mechanism of the market to secure full employment, a better distribution of income and economic growth. A precursor of this form of statism emerged in the inter-war period but it reached its peak in the period following the second world war, when Keynesian policies were adopted by governing parties of all persuasions in the West during the era of the socialdemocratic consensus, up to the mid 1970s. On the other hand in the East[14], for the first time in modern times, a ‘systemic’ attempt was made to reverse the marketisation process and create a completely different form of modernity than the liberal or the socialdemocratic one (which, in a sense, was a version of liberal modernity). This form of statism, backed by Marxist ideology, attempted to minimise the role of the market mechanism in the allocation of resources and replace it with a central planning mechanism.
However, statist modernity, in both its socialdemocratic and Soviet versions, shared the fundamental element of liberal modernity, namely, the formal separation of society from the economy and the state. In other words, the basic difference between the liberal and statist forms of modernity concerned the means through which this separation was achieved: in liberal modernity, through representative ‘democracy’ and the market mechanism, whereas in statist modernity through representative ‘democracy’ and a modified version of the market mechanism (social democracy), or, alternatively, through soviet ‘democracy’ and central planning (Soviet statism). Furthermore, both the liberal and the statist forms of modernity shared a common growth ideology[15] based on the Enlightenment idea of progress, which has led to the creation of the two types of ‘growth economy’[16]: the ‘capitalist’ and the ‘socialist’ growth economy.
Still, for reasons that I could not expand on here, both forms of statist modernity collapsed. The Western form of statist modernity collapsed in the 1970s because of the fundamental incompatibility that was created by the growing expansion of the state role in the economy and the parallel increasing internationalisation of the market economy —as a result mainly of the activity of the emerging TNCs and their requirements in terms of openness of the commodity and capital markets[17]. On the other hand, the Eastern form of statist modernity collapsed a decade or so later because of the growing incompatibility between the requirements of an ‘efficient’ growth economy and the institutional arrangements (particularly centralised planning and party democracy) which had been introduced in accordance with Marxist-Leninist ideology[18]. The collapse of statist modernity in both its forms was one more indication that the fundamental institutions on which modernity was based, contrary to postmodern arguments, were the market economy and its political complement in the form of representative ‘democracy’ and that any effective interference with the market mechanism was doomed to failure
The emergence of neoliberal globalisationThe change in the ‘objective’ conditions I mentioned in the last section and in particular the growing openness of the commodity and capital markets which led to the present internationalisation of the market economy (incorrectly called ‘globalisation’[19] ―as the inevitable result of the dynamic of the market economy[20]―was not the only cause of the collapse of the statist form of modernity in the West. The economic crisis which erupted in the 1970s, as a result of the incompatibility between statism and internationalisation (and, not as it is usually stated, because of the oil crisis, which was simply the immediate cause that precipitated the crisis), led also to the rise of the neoliberal movement. The emergence of this movement was not simply expressing the Right’s inevitable backlash, as Left analysts often argue, in the aftermath of the collapse of the New Left following the aborted uprising of May 1968. The rise of the neoliberal movement expressed the need of the economic and political elites to fight statism, in view of the economic problems (inflation and then stagflation) that had been created by the incompatibility between statism and internationalisation and in view also of the change in the balance of power against them that growing statism implied.
Thus, the political program of the neoliberal movement, which rose first in the academia (Chicago school, resurrection of Hayek and so on) and then among the Anglo-American political elites, mainly expressed the new requirements of the economic elites, in view of the aforementioned changes in the objective conditions. In contrast to the Liberal Old Right that was founded on tradition, hierarchy and political philosophy, the neoliberal New Right’s credo was based on the belief of economic ‘democracy’ through the market and individualism[21], in the sense of the citizen's liberation from `dependence' on the welfare state. Ironically, the main demand of the New Left for self-determination and autonomy was embraced by the neoliberals and was reformulated by them in a distorted form as a demand for self-determination through the market! In this sense, the neoliberal agenda has a striking similarity with the analysis of the neoliberal trend within the postmodern movement, what we may call ‘neoliberal postmodernism’ (see below).
The neoliberal movement, when it came to power, first in Britain and the USA and later on (in the form mainly of the present ‘social-liberal’ governments) all over the advanced market economies and beyond, introduced a series of structural changes, which characterise the present neoliberal[22] form of modernity. Such changes were the liberalisation of markets and particularly of the labour market --with the aim to make it ‘flexible’ through the abolition of the full employment commitment, the encouragement of part time and occasional work and so on; the liberalisation of commodity markets through GATT and the World Trade Organisation; the liberalisation of capital markets through the lifting of exchange and other controls; the privatisation of state enterprises --which enhanced the ‘individualistic‘ character of this form of modernity compared with the mildly ‘collectivist’ character of statist modernity; the drastic shrinking of the welfare state and its replacement by a safety net and the parallel privatisation of social services (health, education, social security); and, finally, the redistribution of taxes in favour of high income groups which further enhanced the concentration of income and wealth .
As a result of these changes, by the early 1990s, an almost fully liberal order has been created across the OECD region, giving market actors a degree of freedom that they had not held since the 1920s[23]. At the same time, the internationalisation of the neoliberal market economy coincided with significant technological changes (information revolution) which marked the shift of the market economy into a post-industrial phase that resulted in a drastic change in the employment (and consequently the class) structure of advanced market economies with significant political and social implications[24]. As a result of these technological changes, the nature of the production process has changed and is characterised today by ‘de-massification’ and diversification, in place of the mass production that was particularly dominant in the era of statist modernity. However, neither “de-massification”, nor the growing diversification of production has affected the degree of concentration of economic power at the company level[25], which has continued growing over the entire period since the emergence of neoliberal modernity. Furthermore, the combined effect of the ‘objective‘ and ‘subjective’ factors I mentioned was that the internationalisation of the market economy has accelerated sharply since the 1970s[26].
Neoliberal globalisation therefore meets all four conditions which, according to Polanyi, have to be met for a successful self-regulating market economy. Thus, first, the universalisation of the flexible markets for commodities, labour and capital is more advanced than ever before in History; second, the liberal state, in the form of representative ‘democracy’, has today been universalised after its virtual demise in many parts of the world during the statist form of modernity; third, the balance-of-power system, after the collapse of Soviet statism which was undermining the institutions of modernity, has been re-established; and finally, the international monetary system is moving again, after the successful launching of the Euro, towards the establishment of some kind of fixed parities between the three major international currencies (Euro, US dollar and yen) in the first instance, and, at the end, into some sort of an international version of the Gold Standard system--in other words, into a global monetary system (and possibly a single currency) in a new interlinked economic space which would unify the richest parts of the world.However, the present neoliberal form of modernity should not simply be seen as completing the cycle that started with the emergence of liberal modernity. In fact, it represents a new synthesis, which avoids the extremes of pure liberalism, by combining the essentially self-regulating markets of liberal modernity with various elements of a ‘mild’ statism: safety nets and various controls in place of the welfare state, “new protectionist” non-tariff barriers (NTBs), such as export restraints and orderly marketing arrangements, direct or indirect subsidies to export industries, and so on.
Has there been a break in the political/economic sphere?A comparison of traditional political/economic structures with modern ones, on the one hand, and of modern with ‘postmodern’ ones, on the other, shows that whereas a clear rupture could be established in the former case this is impossible in the latter.
In premodern societies, there was no division between economy and society and even the division between polity and society was not always evident (the 200 hundred history of Athenian democracy is an obvious example) let alone the division between society and other spheres (cultural etc). In fact, as the political/military element was the dominant one in traditional society, forms of political structure ranged from (partial) democracy in classical Athens to various forms of oligarchic regimes in ancient Rome and the Middle Ages.
In modern societies, whose typical form of economic structure is the market economy, the economic element is the dominant one in society. Representative (liberal) ‘democracy’ is the typical form of political structure, as the more consistent with the market economy (theoretically as well as historically) form of political structure. Still, there are significant variations between the various forms of political structures in the era of modernity. Thus, the representative ‘democracy’ of liberal modernity evolved into a political system of a much higher degree of concentration of political power in the hands of the executive during the statist era, both in the West and, even more so, in the East. This system is presently being replaced by new internationalised political structures to fit the already internationalised economic structures. Thus, in neoliberal modernity, the old Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states is being replaced by a multi-level system of political-economic entities: ‘micro-regions, traditional states and macro-regions with institutions of greater or lesser functional scope and formal authority’[27].
In fact, the trend toward the accelerating internationalisation of the market economy and therefore the universalisation of the system of market economy has already led to a debate about the future of politics and democracy, ‘as we know them’ in modern society[28]. However, although the internationalisation of the market economy does challenge the nation-state that developed in modernity, there is no reason to assume that it also challenges the fundamental political institution of modernity: representative ‘democracy’. Far from it, this institution has now expanded to the Third World and even to the old Second World, following the collapse of Soviet statism. So, as the traditional differences between liberals and socialists over the role of the state in today’s’ neoliberal form of modernity are phased out, the consequence is the demeaning of even this distorted form of ‘democracy’, with electoral contests becoming expensive beauty contests between the leaders of bureaucratic parties, characterised by minimal programmatic differences and a common objective: state-craft, that is, the management of power.
However, it is interesting to note that it is not the Left anymore which attempts to degrade representative ‘democracy’. The postmodern Left —from Bobbio, who characterised liberal democracy as the ‘only possible form of an effective democracy’[29] to Habermas and from mainstream Greens to postmodernists— has wholeheartedly nowadays embraced liberal ‘democracy’. Thus, as Perry Anderson, the New Left Review editor, with reference to the adoption of representative ‘democracy’ and the market economy by prominent Left figures like Lyotard, Habermas, Hassan and Jencs:[30]
common to all was subscription to the principles of what Lyotard —once the most radical— called liberal democracy, as the unsurpassable horizon of the time. There could be nothing but capitalism. The postmodern was a sentence on alternative illusions.
Today, it is the turn of the economic elites which control the market economy to downgrade representative democracy in favour of the markets and the ‘new social movements --presumably as less threatening to their power than even representative ‘democracy’ is-- using in the process of doing so the postmodern discourse.
Thus, as Thomas Frank argues in a recent book on what he calls ‘market populism’[31], the new ideology promoted by the economic elites is that markets is a far more democratic institution than representative ‘democracy’ because, in addition to mediums of exchange, they are mediums of consent, a powerful tool of economic democracy! Furthermore, management theory of the 1990s, using language reminiscent of postmodern theory, defines the problems of the corporation as those arising because of the fact that the individual worker is voiceless, oppressed by bureaucratic unions— the real problems of today being on how to ‘empower the individual’ and to fight against ‘certainty’ and elitism. Not surprisingly, Demos[32] writer Charles Leadbeater, also embracing the market economy, uses postmodern theory to celebrate the intrinsic link between the dawning ‘knowledge economy’ (which thrives on a culture of dissent, dispute, disrespect for authority, diversity and experimentation’) and ‘democracy’, and concludes that to fully swallow the ways of ‘the New Economy’ (i.e. the neoliberal form of modernity) we would have to adopt a new narrative, ‘an engaging and compelling account of the future that captures the popular imagination , and which people can buy into, endorsing and enacting in their own lives’[33].
Finally, Newsweek, celebrating the end of the twentieth century, did not hesitate to call it ‘the people’s century’, on account of the fact that, as its columnist Kenneth Auchincloss put it, for once in human history ‘ordinary folks changed history’. Of course, these ‘ordinary folks’ were not the Russian workers who took part in the 1917 uprising, nor the Spanish anarchists and other radicals who fought in the civil war, not even the students and workers who took part in the May 1968 uprising but, instead, the feminists, the anti-war and civil rights movements and…entrepreneurs like Bill Gates!
It is not, of course, surprising that the ‘new social movements’ do not seem threatening to the ruling elites. The neoliberal form of modernity is associated with the fear of unemployment and uncertainty concerning the ability to adequately cover basic needs (health, education, housing). This uncertainty, in turn, has contributed significantly to the retreat of radical currents within the feminist movement, the withdrawal of students from public life, the withering away of labour militancy and so on. At the same time, the hope invested in the Green movement has already faded, since the dominant trends within it do not challenge the fundamental institutions of the market economy but, instead, either adopt the social-democratic ideology of enhancing the civil society and resort to environmentalism (Europe) or, alternatively, turn to irrationalism and mysticism (USA). The active role that the disgraceful European Green parties played in NATO’s crime against the people of Yugoslavia[34], which, as it is now revealed, implicitly agreed even to the use of a form of nuclear weapon (depleted uranium) in NATO’s bombardments (whereas they still protest against nuclear energy!) has effectively extinguished any hopes that the Green movement could play a liberatory role in today’s society.
A neoliberal form of modernityHowever, if there is no rupture with modernity how one might describe the present significant changes, particularly at the economic level, given that, as I attempted to show above, the neoliberal liberalisation of the market economy and the associated internationalisation of it do not simply represent a change of policy brought about by some cultural decadence but that in fact express a significant structural change? This question becomes crucial if one takes into account that the basic elements of neoliberalism have already been incorporated into the strategies of the international institutions which control the world economy (IMF, World Bank), as well as in the treaties that have recently reformed the EU (Single Market Act, Maastricht Treaty, Amsterdam Treaty), NAFTA etc —something that forces political parties of all persuasions, conservative or ‘socialist’, to follow the same policies in order to protect the competitive position of the economic elites, on which further growth (and their own political survival) depends.
It is clear that the present situation, although not a break with modernity, it does differ significantly not only from the statist form of modernity, as I attempted to show above, but also from its liberal form. To mention some significant differences between the liberal and the neoliberal forms of modernity, it is noteworthy that today’s emerging ‘postmodern’ paradigm, unlike that of the liberal (and the statist) form of modernity, is not based on some sort of ‘scientific’ truth. Also, economic growth, unlike in the liberal form of modernity (and even more so in statist modernity), is not identified anymore with progress in the sense of further development of productive forces. The idea of progress is not fashionable anymore after the attacks it received recently from all sources: from ecologists, up to the new irrationalists and Third Wordists. Instead, growth per se, growth for the improvement in material welfare and open consumerism, has become the prevailing ideology today.
So, given that Marxists of almost all persuasions, postmodernists, as well as supporters of the inclusive democracy paradigm, all agree that the 1970s did mark the beginning of a new period, the issue is whether the structural changes marking the new period mentioned above express a break with modernity, i.e. a postmodern era, or whether instead they simply represent a continuation of modernity, what we called a new neoliberal form of it.
For many postmodern theorists the new period represents a rupture, which is as great as the rupture between modern and premodern soci-eties. Paradoxically, however, even founders of postmodernism are sometimes ambivalent about this crucial issue concerning the nature of today’s society. It is indicative for instance that Lyotard’s The Postmodern condition, which Perry Anderson[35] called ‘the first book to treat postmodernity as a general change of human circumstance’, classifies postmodernism as part of the modern, (which it considers as a constant state), a kind of internal renewal of it rather than a rupture with it. Thus, as Lyotard puts it: ‘what, then, is the postmodern? What place does it or does it not occupy in the vertiginous work of the questions hurled at the rules of age and narration? It is undoubtedly a part of the modern’[36]. On the other hand, for those of the liberal side of postmodernism, who usually identify modernity with industrialism, the end of statism and the emergence of post-industrial society are synonymous with the rise of a new era of postmodernity, if not with the end of History itself!
In the Marxist space we may distinguish the following trends. For Marxists like Harvey[37], the rise of postmodernity was marked by the restructuring of global capitalism and the emergence of a new regime of ‘flexible accumulation’ in which autonomous financial markets significantly limited the economic sovereignty of nation–states. For other Marxists like Callinicos[38], the features of flexible accumulation are not as important as to significantly reduce the state’s economic sovereignty, whereas postmodernism in the arts was a figment and what in fact happened was only a gradual degradation of modernism itself, as a result not of economic or cultural changes but mainly of political changes, i.e. the political defeat of the radical generation of the late sixties. Finally, for Marxists of the ex-New Left variety[39], postmodernism is a real phenomenon which emerged, also in the seventies, within the context of three new ‘historical coordinates’: first, the virtual extinction of the bourgeois class and its replacement by an ensemble of administrators and speculators of contemporary capital with ‘no stable identities’; second, the technological inventions that transformed again urban life, notably colour television; and, third, the political changes that followed the political ferment of the sixties and particularly the rise of the neoliberal Right in the USA and UK that led to the collapse of the regimes in Eastern Europe and the abandonment of the old social democratic goals.
It is therefore clear that the Left, and particularly the Marxist version of it, never grasped the significance of the rise of neoliberalism in the mid 1970s, which, to my mind, marked the start of a shift towards a new form of modernity and not just a change in policy, as Marxists of various persuasions maintain: from Alex Callinicos, the present theoretical guru of British Trotskyites, to Eric Hobsbawm, the doyen of Marxist historians, who, together with other equally perceptive former Marxism Today writers, as late as 1998, were still proclaiming the end of neo-liberalism’![40]. In fact, recent developments in the internationalised market economy fulfilled the prediction made in INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY that, in the competition between the Anglo-American model of capitalism and the European ‘social market’ model, the latter had no chance to survive because, as I put it at the time of writing (1995-1996), ‘it is not a model for future capitalism but a remnant of the statist phase of marketisation which obviously cannot survive the present internationalisation of the market economy’[41]. However, the Marxist Left still seems very surprised by the final predominance of the Anglo-American version of neoliberalism over the European ‘social democratic model’, and the fact that the latter not only did not attempt to undermine the former but also effectively has copied it, to the dismay of the ex ‘New Left’![42]. In fact, one may argue that it was this profound failure to grasp the fact that neoliberalism represents not just a policy change but a structural change marking the shift to a new form of modernity, and the parallel confusion of modernity with industrialism, that have led to the myth about a new era of postmodernity.
In my view, although the modernity instutions of the market economy and representative ‘democracy’ did represent a rupture with the traditional forms of political/economic structures, there is no corresponding rupture at all with these institutions at present. Instead, there is continuity and further expansion and development of modernity institutions in the so-called postmodern era, which should more accurately be described as the neoliberal form of modernity. In other words, the significant changes at the economic level I mentioned, as well as the changes at the political, the scientific, the theoretical and the cultural levels I am going to consider in the rest of the paper, in no way constitute a rupture with the past, similar to the rupture marking the move from the traditional to the modern society. Although the present changes do amount to significant structural changes, they are always changes within the existing structures rather than changes of the structures themselves. But, to talk about a rupture, or a transition towards a new structure, one would have to show convincing signs of new forms of economic and political organisation beyond the market economy and representative ‘democracy’, the two fundamental institutions characterising modern society, and such signs are simply non-existent. Far from it, these institutions are not only still surviving but, in fact, are being increasingly universalised and are spreading all over the world.Therefore, the hypothesis that advanced market economies have entered a postmodern era, or even a transitional period towards it, is, to my mind, invalid. In fact, the emergence of the internationalised ‘new economy’, as well as that of post-industrial society and the consequent rise of the ‘knowledge class’, can simply be seen as a stage in the development of the market economy and industrial society that emerged in the modern era, i.e. as the result of long-term trends implicit in the marketisation process and the science-based industrialization rather than as any break with it.
2. A paradigm shift in the scientific sphere?The strongest claims in favour of the view that advanced market economies have entered a postmodern era, or at least a postmodern turn, are made with respect to science, the arts, theory and culture generally. As Best and Kellner[43] point out in their excellent presentation of the case for a postmodern turn:
The scientific developments we just described have significant similarities to recent changes in the arts and social theory, leading us to believe there is a postmodern paradigm shift taking place in multiple fields of knowledge and the arts. It appears that the epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical assumptions about the nature of the world are rapidly changing in all fields, creating new configuration of thought, what Kuhn calls a “paradigm shift”… We have argued in the previous chapters that we are currently undergoing a major paradigm shift within the culture at large, parallel to the shift from premodern to modern societies and from medieval to modern theory.
So, let us compare again the modernity changes in the scientific sphere to those marking the present era.
The rise of modern scienceThere is no doubt that the move from premodern to modern society represented not just a radical change in society’s political and economic structure but also a similar break at the scientific, the theoretical, and the cultural levels. The work of Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes was not simply important per se, i.e. for their fundamental contributions to science, but because it established the authority and autonomy of reason, which dominated all philosophising and theorising of modern society since then. Reason, of course, was not discovered in the Enlightenment era. The philosophers of ancient Greece had first explored the powers and uses of reason that was the basis of both ancient Greek philosophy and democracy, which, not accidentally, flourished, together in classical Athens. However, apart from this relatively brief historical interval, the dominant social paradigm[44] of premodern society was not based on reason but on irrational beliefs of various kinds (religions, superstitions, animistic beliefs etc), whereas in the Middle Ages, religious irrationalism in the form of Christianity constituted the main element of the dominant social paradigm. In fact, it was in reaction to theological ‘explanations’ of the world that scientific explanations were developed in the Enlightenment, on the assumption that knowledge should be used not to serve God but, rather, to serve the needs of human beings.
The revival of reason was not simply initiated by the work of people like Descartes and Leibniz but was mainly based upon the conviction that for the intellectual conquest of the natural world reason had really worked. It was the enthusiasm born out of these scientific successes that gave rise to the second main element of the Enlightenment: the idea of progress.
However, the fact that progress was identified with economic growth had nothing to do with reason, or with science for that matter. Progress was identified with growth when the grow-or-die dynamic of the market economy, which was established during the Industrial Revolution and the scientific discoveries of the 18th century and their technological applications, gave rise to the growth ideology. So, as I attempted to show in TID[45], it is not the ‘growth ideology’, which is the exclusive or even the main cause of the emergence of the growth economy, as most Greens, ecofeminists and various irrationalists (New Agers and the likes) argue. The growth ideology has simply been used to justify ‘objectively’ the market economy and its dynamics — a dynamics that inevitably led to the capitalist growth economy. Still, the fact that the same idea of progress (as development of productive forces) has also been adopted by radical modernists like Marx and that the growth ideology became the ultimate ideological foundation for all forms of modernity, liberal or statist, had the result that the same ethic to dominate Nature, which led to today’s’ ecological crisis, became part of the dominant social paradigm’ in both the East and the West. This was a fact of tremendous importance given that, as Marxists of the Frankfurt School[46] and libertarians like Murray Bookchin[47] have shown, there is an intrinsic relationship between the domination of nature and the domination of human beings in a subject — object relationship in which men are the subjects, while nature, women, slaves are the objects of domination. So, the fact that the modern scientific paradigm was both anthropocentric and patriarchal, or generally based on the idea of domination, was not the cause of the dominating character of modernity, as Greens, feminists and others in the ‘new social movements’ naively (or often deliberately in order to avoid marginalisation by the establishment) assume.
Modern scientists simply adopted the ‘dominant social paradigm’, the main values of which were anthropocentric, patriarchal and were extolling progress in the form of growth. The very fact that the so-called ‘postmodern’ scientific paradigm is much more Nature-friendly and much less patriarchal than the modern one, although it is still based on the same principles of reason and growth, is a proof of this.
On the other hand, the fact that the scientific paradigm, on which the scientific successes of modernity were based, was a mechanistic one, based on certainty and objective truth, had very important implications. As it is well known, the major architects of the modern world-view (Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton) saw the cosmos as a vast machine governed by universal and invariable laws, which function in a stable and orderly way that can be comprehended and controlled by the rational mind. A side effect of the predominance of this mechanistic paradigm was that even the radical critiques of modernity, notably by Marx, were also based on the same mechanistic paradigm. This was inevitable in view of the fact that for many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers, the project of establishing a science of history and society presupposed the ability to formulate hypotheses and laws of an explanatory power analogous to that attained by theories in the physical sciences. In their effort to transcend religious and metaphysical conjectures concerning the destiny of human affairs, radical critics of modernity took it for granted that their task was one of constructing, upon the basis of hard observable facts, interpretations that would not only rescue the human studies from ignorance, uncertainty, and primitive superstition but also give them an instrument (complete with ‘its own ‘laws’) for predicting and controlling the future. Thus, the modern paradigm adopted by both supporters of liberal modernity and its critics was deterministic, ‘objectivistic’ and, mechanistic, in an explicit attempt to be taken as seriously as the scientific paradigm.
Is there a shift to a postmodern science?It was in reaction to the mechanistic and deterministic worldview of Newtonian Physics that a series of developments took place in the twentieth century which, for postmodernists, mark the emergence of a postmodern paradigm based on concepts such as entropy, evolution, organism, indeterminacy, probability, relativity, complementarily, chaos, complexity, and self-organization. Furthermore, as Best and Kellner point out, ‘in significant ways this new mode of thought is congruent with changes that have occurred in social theory, and it also overlaps with recent shifts in the arts, suggesting that the postmodern turn is not merely a sign game, struggle for cultural capital, or frivolous fad but, rather, concerns the construction of a new transdisciplinary paradigm[48]. These developments, according to the same authors, refer to at least five major areas, some of which emerged in the 19th century but most flourished in the 20th century: thermodynamics; evolutionary biology and ecology; quantum mechanics and relativity theory; cybernetics and information theory; and chaos and complexity theory. As a result of such changes, Best and Kellner argue, a transition has been effected ‘from mechanical dynamics to thermodynamics, from a static and deterministic view of life to a new theory of “dissipative structures” based on principles of complexity, self-organization, and order emerging from the “chaos’ of nonequilibrium conditions. Change and time introduce instability and disorder into the world, but these in turn create new and more complex forms of order’[49]. Also, postmodernists argue, it was as a result of such scientific developments as the development of the framework of entropy, that the idea of progress has been challenged in the present period—although one may argue here that the framework of entropy was developed much before the supposed beginning of the postmodern shift in the 1970s and that it was the massive realisation of the eco-catastrophic implications of growth in the period of neoliberal modernity that effectively challenged progress rather than any scientific developments.
However, despite the fact that, as a result of these developments, science today is much less mechanistic than it used to be, it would be wrong to conclude that today’s world is not organised anymore around science and quantitative reasoning, or even that it is showing tendencies to move away from science and quantitative reasoning, when in fact computer science, celebrated by postmodern writers as the science of the future, is very much based on them. Furthermore, ‘instrumental knowledge’, (i.e. knowledge for the sake of domination), is still the prevailing type of knowledge and is bound to be so in the future, as long as the economic and political institutions of modernity (market economy, representative ‘democracy’) prevail, irrespective of scientific or theoretical developments like the ones emphasised by postmodernists. Best and Kellner[50] themselves also notice the continuities between modern and ‘postmodern’ science, although, of course, they give much more emphasis to the significant shifts involved:
At a general level, there are some significant continuities between modern and postmodern science, but there are also fundamental shifts and reversals, involving tenets of modern science that postmodern science repudiates. Both modern and postmodern science utilize experimental and empirical methods of hypothesis, observation, experiment, and prediction; both are interested in detecting order, in control, and in discovering laws and regularities.
Furthermore, it should be noted that, not accidentally, some important tools of ‘postmodern’ science, like systems theory and complexity, have already been used widely to legitimise the neoliberal form of modernity[51], although, as I attempted to show elsewhere[52], one may raise serious reservations on whether such tools may offer useful insights in the interpretation of social reality (as opposed to that of natural reality) and whether they are compatible at all, both from the epistemological point of view and that of their content, with a radical analysis aiming to systemic change towards an inclusive democracy.
Similarly, the fact that, according for instance to Bohr’s theory of complementarity, reality is irreducibly plural and complex and no single theoretical description can exhaust it —a fact, which implies that various languages and perspectives are needed in the analysis of reality— could not be used to justify the postmodern view that social reality as well cannot be explained in terms of a single tradition (the Lyotardian idea that the world is fragmented into a plurality of discourses each local and autonomous). Such a view could easily end up with the sort of conformism characterising most postmodern theorists. Clearly, even if the theory of complementarily is a useful tool in the analysis of natural reality, the same cannot be held with respect to the analysis of social reality, unless we assign to this view of social reality a status of ‘objectivity’, so much despised by postmodernists. But, if we reject this status and we have to deliberately select the criteria we use to interpret social reality, in full knowledge that our criterion of choice is axiomatic and that our conclusions do not claim any ‘objective’ validity[53], then, obviously, we cannot rely on a multi-perspective interpretation of social reality (can we use, for instance, both the autonomy and the heteronomy tradition, or both the socialist and the fascist ideology to interpret social reality?)
It is perhaps in only one sense that ‘postmodern’ science does break from modern science. This is the sense defined by Griffin[54], according to whom, ‘postmodern science seeks to loosen the boundary between scientific and “non-scientific knowledge” in order to incorporate other realms of knowledge and value in the sciences, involving “a new unity of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religions intuitions” and a “creative synthesis” of premodern, modern, and postmodern ideas.’ But, if this is the only sense in which so called postmodern science really breaks from modern science, then, those in the Marxist[55] or anarchist[56] side who criticise postmodernism as a form of irrationalism are right. Similarly, one may argue that if all postmodernist critique amounts to is basically a denunciation of progress, ‘objectivity’ and’ certainty’, this is no reason either to go back to irrationalism. Without retreating to primitive ways of thinking we can still achieve the same result by resorting to an analysis based on reason[57] rather than one based on the insights of Taoism or Zen! As Guy Debord[58], the founder of situationism, aptly put it referring to the crisis of (but also the need for) science, ‘when official science has come to such a pass, like all the rest of the social spectacle…It is not surprising to see a similar and widespread revival of the authority of seers and sects, of vacuum packed Zen or Mormon theology’.
In fact, the irrational element, despite the efforts of rationalist postmodernists (usually of the post-Marxist variety) to downgrade it, exercised a decisive influence in the postmodern paradigm. Jeremy Rifkin’s New Age ecometaphysics and mystical tendencies that ‘wax poetically about love, the “timeless” realm of the spirit, and the ‘natural goodness of the cosmic process’[59] are well known. Furthermore, it is not accidental that postmodern science has been linked with ecology mainly through deep ecology, which is considered a form of postmodern ecology, but which at the same time, as Best and Kellner admit, is ‘typically mystical, and its deification of nature usually leads to neglect of the socio-economic forces that are destroying nature’[60].It is obvious that the irrational trends in ecology and postmodernism in general have their origin in the collapse of the myth of progress. However, the collapse of this myth does not mean that we have to go back to forms of irrationalism in order to criticise the modern techno-science, or that, alternatively, we have to fall into the trap of positivism. The alternative to objective rationalism, ‘certainty’, and’ objectivity’, as well as to irrationalism is not, as I attempted to show in TID[61], a ‘postmodern’ relativism which equates all traditions, either they are based on philosophy, (which to be true to itself has to be based not on ‘given’ truths but on constant questioning), or to some form of closed system.
The real alternative to positivism and irrationalism is the development of a democratic rationalism[62] that transcends both, namely, a rationalism founded on democracy as a structure and a process of social self-institution, which implies the democratic adoption of those traditions and body of knowledge which have their sources on (and are processed by) reason, rather than on religious or other intuitions. This means that the only admissible ‘truths’, including values and ethical codes conditioning individual behaviour, are those rationally derived (i.e. through reason and open discussion rather than through Revelation, intuition, myth, or a closed system of ideas or ‘scientific’ truths) and democratically decided on. In fact, if there was any progress in the last quarter of the century this was could perhaps be attributed to the fact that it is now widely recognised that the content of progress itself can only be determined through a conscious choice between various traditions. To my mind, the only tradition which could determine the content of progress in a way that is compatible with freedom itself is none other than the democratic tradition, which is based on individual and social autonomy. Finally, democratic rationalism also differs radically from postmodernism with respect to the issue of how ideology can be fought today. It is of course true that (positivist) ideology today, in the way it has moved from the pages of books proper and expanded into everyday culture (through television, newspapers, magazines, school and college textbooks, even academic social science), has become domination. It is also true that, as I argued above, ideology cannot be challenged by an appeal to ‘objective’ rationalism and ‘science’ since, as regards social reality in particular, there can never be any ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ way to ‘represent’ it. However this does not mean, as postmodernists suggest, that ideology can only be challenged by alternative ‘rhetorical versions that acknowledge their grounding in non-logocentric language,’[63] on the assumption that method and science do not play a much different role today than ideology and mythology-- or even advertising. Although it is true that positive science does play this role in the so-called social ‘sciences’, it would be a sweeping generalisation to extend this characterisation to all kinds of kinds of science, if not to reason itself, as most postmodernists do. This could easily lead us again —particularly today!― to the paths of irrationalism (religious or otherwise) from which some parts of Humanity emerged just a couple of hundreds of years ago.So, the only rational way to fight ideology is through the use of alternative versions of reality, which, though not founded on any ‘objective’ science or analysis, still, are not just based on a ‘non-logocentric language’ but on an alternative view of social reality, which we grasp through a ‘subjectively’ rational analysis of it. ‘Subjectively’, because we use a particular criterion we have selected in advance to do it. ‘Rational’ because our analysis uses only reason in the processing of data and the assessment of alternative descriptions of reality rather than intuitions or other irrational ways of thinking.
In conclusion, although there have been significant recent developments in the scientific, theoretical and cultural fields, it is clear that the overall picture is one of continuity rather than of a break. Furthermore, one should not forget that even if these developments amounted to a paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense, namely, in the sense of a break, or rupture with the previous paradigm, a paradigm shift, by itself, does not indicate a move to a new era. This is particularly so if the present paradigm shift does not bear any comparison with the major break that characterised the move from premodern to modern society, which I discussed above. The obvious conclusion is that the recent scientific developments could well justify a move to a new form of modernity rather than a shift to a postmodernity. Particularly so, if the assumption of the paradigm shift itself has become part, as I am hoing to show below, of the dominant social paradigm in this new form of modernity.
3. A break with modern art and culture?There is little doubt that modern art did represent a huge break with traditional art. The freedom that modern artists acquired from a stupefying tradition that, for hundreds of years, had their imagination ‘corseted’ by silly religious themes —miracles, saints and the like― led to radical innovations, in content and in form, during the era of modernity. Furthermore, History has repeatedly shown that significant artistic development has invariably been related to ruptures at the broader social level: from the artistic achievements of classical Athens up to the flourishing of the arts in every revolutionary period since then. It should also be noted that the break of modern art with tradition extended much beyond the themes and form of traditional art. Artists in the modern era, as every other modernity producer, had, for the first time in History, to create for an anonymous self-regulating market, whose rules had to obey ― a fact which often put obstacles to originality and the free expression of thought.
So, has there been a corresponding break today? The fact that the label ‘postmodernism’ has been given to certain currents in architecture and that some artists prefer to call themselves postmodernists does not of course, by itself, establish a postmodern trend in the arts, if by this we mean a new form of art which breaks with the past, in this case with modern art. At most, such events may simply indicate the development of just one more art ‘school’, to be added to the pleiad of schools which proliferated throughout the modern era and which did not have the luck to discover the term ‘postmodern’.
Also, the fact that some recent currents in various arts express different themes than, say, the themes of liberal or statist modernity, and/or use new styles does not justify the title of ‘postmodern’ --unless it can be shown that such currents really represent a rupture, in a similar way that modern art could be shown that it broke with tradition both in content and in form. No one doubts, of course, that ‘postmodern’ arts do reflect the prevailing themes of today (anti-narrative, individualism, privacy etc) and that sometimes use different styles from those of the modern arts. But, again, this event, by itself, does not legitimise the use of the term ‘postmodern’. In fact, supporters of the hypothesis of a postmodern turn also admit this when they state that ‘although advocates of the postmodern like to champion it as a break from the modern, there are very few “postmodern” elements that are completely new or innovative’[64].
Furtrhermore, today, not only the market constraints on artists that were introduced in the modern era are still with them, but they are also reinforced to an unprecedented degree. Art, in all its forms, has today been more commercialised than ever before, as a result of the fact that social (usually state) subsidies have been drastically reduced, in the context of the neoliberal form of economic organisation —a development which often forces artists to self-censor themselves in their struggle to get support from the economic elites. As a consequence, art has become even more profit-oriented than in the previous forms of modernity. The inevitable outcome of this development was that the arts have now been deluged by the trivial, which attracts ‘customers’ more easily than the avant-garde. Therefore, what postmodernists celebrate as today’s’ ‘popular’ character of art, the ‘sharp break from bourgeois elitism and avant-garde art’, or the ‘aesthetic pluralism and populism’ is usually nothing more than an expression of the anguish of today’s artists in their struggle to survive by attempting to attract customers, from every source possible.
Likewise, the internationalisation of the market economy in neoliberal modernity made culture even more commercialised and, at the same time, homogenised, adding further constraints to the artist’s creativity. The internationalisation of culture is particularly obvious in consumer and computer culture (with the internet playing a crucial role in instantaneously conveying global culture), pop music, film and video, but also in areas like architecture[65]. In fact, the institutional changes effected by neoliberalism play a crucial role in the marketisation of culture, since the recent liberalisation and de-regulation of markets has contributed significantly to the present cultural homogenisation, with traditional communities and their cultures disappearing all over the world and people being converted to consumers of a mass culture produced in the advanced capitalist countries and particularly the USA.
The film industry as a case studyIn the film industry, even European countries with a strong cultural background and developed economies face today a drastic shrinking of their own film industry, unable to compete with the much more competitive US film industry[66]. In fact, the recent emergence of a sort of “cultural” nationalism in many parts of the world expresses a desperate attempt to keep a national cultural identity in the face of the cultural homogenisation imposed by neoliberal modernity — a vain attempt, within the existing institutional framework in which over 75 percent of the international communications flow is controlled by a small number of multinationals[67]. The degradation of the film industry, which is now effectively monopolised by the US film industry through its huge control of distribution networks, the similar degradation of the pop music industry (no wonder old pop music hits are back in fashion — a sure sign of stagnation), the lack of any artistic achievements similar in importance to the earlier forms of modernity, are all sure signs of the general retreat in the arts that one observes in what is called ‘postmodern art’[68], or what I would call ‘art in the neoliberal era of modernity’.
The film industry can also be used as a useful example to discuss the issue whether today’s trends in the arts represent a break with the past, or just an evolution of modern trends. Boggs & Pollard[69], in their excellent analysis of today’s’ Hollywood, put forward the case that a ‘new’ postmodern cinema has been created in the last quarter of a century or so, which reflects the main elements of today’s reality: i.e. the deepening of the multidimensional crisis, particularly of the social crisis (films on crime and drugs), the political crisis (films on the cynical manipulation of the electorate by the political elites and the mass depoliticization), the ecological crisis (films on ecological themes) and, finally, the cultural crisis —although in the latter case the crisis is (unintentionally) reflected by the films themselves rather than by their themes, and the emphasis they give on technique over content. However, although I would agree with the authors’ conclusion that the ‘new’Hollywood cinema does express, deliberately or not, the main elements of today’s multidimensional crisis which concern film goers (so that the potential profits could be materialised), I would disagree with the characterisation of this cinema as a kind of ‘new’ cinema representing some sort of break with the past.
I would argue instead that the main trends of modern Hollywood cinema are reproduced today, so that the characteristics the authors assign to this ‘new’ cinema fit much better to a neoliberal cinema reflecting the present form of modernity rather than to a postmodern cinema representing a supposed break with modern cinema. The familiar apolitical culture of Hollywood (mainly due to the direct control that the economic elites have always exercised over its financing) is surely reproduced in this ‘new’ cinema, even though sometimes it gives the impression that it deals seriously with social and political issues. A closer examination however reveals the superficial way in which such issues are treated by Hollywood, which trivialises them and invariably emphasises the role of the individual as against collective political action[70]. A comparison with the way in which some European directors (some of them still financed by state-controlled institutions) deal with the same problems of neoliberal modernity (fear of unemployment, homelessness, lack of safe jobs leading to ‘unsocial’ behaviour — the Belgian film Rosetta being a beautiful example), is revealing. It is indicative that even when the economic, or political, or media elites are featured in Hollywood films usually it is the ‘bad guys’ within the elites who are blamed for the abuse of their power and not the system itself (which concentrated the various forms of power at their hands in the first instance and conditioned them to behave the way they do). It is then left to the ‘good guys’ to fight them, so that any malfunctioning of the system can be eliminated. The ‘heroes’ who dominated modern Hollywood still exist in ‘postmodern’ Hollywood -- only this time they are not gangsters or cowboys anymore but policemen, congressmen, even Presidents (Independence Day, Air Force One)!
In fact, the distinction drawn by postmodernists between a ‘ludic postmodernism’ and a ”postmodernism of resistance”, or oppositional postmodernisrn[71] does accurately reflect the deeply conservative nature of today’s Hollywood cinema. Hollywood productions nowadays reflect both these two trends, namely that of ludic postmodernism, which seeks just pleasure, and that of ‘postmodernism of resistance’, which is ‘modestly’ oppositional, demanding some social changes but not a change in the social system itself[72].
To my mind, the neoliberal form of modernity today has created both the objective and the subjective conditions for the deeply conservative nature of today’s Hollywood cinema, which, to a significant extent, is also reflected in other forms of art as well, despite appearances to the contrary. The objective conditions refer to the globalisation of this industry, the need to attract customers with as many different tastes as possible and the parallel almost complete ‘marketisation’ of it (lack of any social controls even to restrict the brutal violence for its own sake that is portrayed in most Hollywood films, despite its obvious social effects). On the other hand, the subjective conditions refer to the postmodern ideology which we shall consider in the next section.
ConclusionIt is again therefore doubtful, to say the least, that the emphasis given by ‘postmodernism’ on cultural politics and the thematization of culture as a crucial terrain of power and struggle does indeed represent a break with modernity rather than a further development of the modern trends, which were set in motion by the surrealists in the interwar period and the Situationists in the after war period.
However, whereas Situationists, for instance, were clearly aware of the fact that a cultural revolution, which is a necessary element of a systemic change, attains its real significance only within the context of an anti-systemic struggle, i.e. the struggle for a general social revolution that would overthrow the society of the spectacle, postmodern cultural and identity politics is ‘localised’ and fragmented. Furthermore, whereas Situationists like Debord lamented the postmodernist ‘end of History’, postmodernists like Baudrillard celebrated it. Thus, as Debord put it: ‘spectacular domination’s first priority was to eradicate historical knowledge in general[73]...’in Greece history and democracy entered the world at the same time. We can prove that their disappearances have also been simultaneous[74]. One may therefore assume that perhaps, the main common concern of Situationists and postmodernists was their concern about the ‘mediated’ society and the passive spectator, as against the active subject/citizen. Still, one may point out here that the passive spectator, as well as the society of the spectacle itself, is nothing more but the inevitable outcome of the disappearance of the active citizen. In other words, one might assume that the passive citizen that representative (i.e. mediated) ‘democracy’ had created was bound (once technology allowed it) to lead to the passive spectator of today.
II. Assessment of the postmodern paradigmModernity paradigm and subparadigms
In traditional societies, the ‘dominant social paradigms’ were characterised by mainly religious ideas and corresponding values about hierarchies, although of course there were exceptions like the Athenian democracy. At the same time, both in traditional and modern societies alternative paradigms had emerged which however never, or very briefly, became dominant. The various forms of modernity have created their own dominant paradigms which in effect constitute sub-paradigms of the main paradigm, as they all share a fundamental characteristic: the idea of the separation of society from the economy and polity, as expressed by the market economy and representative ‘democracy’ ―with the exception of Soviet statism in which this separation is effected through central planning and Soviet ‘democracy’. On top of this main characteristic, all forms of modernity share, with some variations, the themes of reason, critical thought and economic growth.
Thus, the dominant (sub)paradigm in liberal modernity features, also, the belief in a mechanistic model of science, objective truth, as well as some themes from economic liberalism such as laissez faire and minimisation of social controls over markets for the protection of labour. Similarly, the dominant (sub)paradigm in the statist period still features the same characteristics involving a belief in objective truth and (a less mechanistic) science, but also certain elements of the socialist paradigm and particularly statism, in the form of a socialdemocratic statism based on Keynesianism in the West, or Soviet statism based on Marxism-Leninism in the East. Finally, the present form of modernity is characterised by the emergence of a new social (sub)paradigm which tends to become dominant, the so-called ‘postmodern’ paradigm, whose main elements are a critique of progress (but not of growth itself), of mechanistic and deterministic science (but not of science itself), of objective truth, as well as some themes from neoliberalism such as the minimisation of social controls over markets, the replacement of the welfare state by safety nets and the maximisation of the role of the private sector in the economy.
Still, the fact that there are certain common elements which characterise those subparadigms does not mean they are monolithic. No wonder there is a diversity of postmod-em theories, in exactly the same way as there was, for instance, a diversity of statist theories (e.g. Keynesian and Marxist ones).
The emergence of the postmodern movementTo assess the significance of postmodernism it would be useful to examine first the conditions within which this new movement emerged. To my mind, two crucial events led to the emergence of the postmodernist movement, which however was a separate development from the parallel rise of the neoliberal form of modernity that we considered above.
First, the collapse of the May 1968 uprising in France, in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Socialisme ou Barbarie (SoB) group, the ideas of which played a significant role in this uprising, in contrast to postmodernism which, as Bookchin[75] points out, had nothing to do intellectually with it. It is noteworthy that activists sympathetic to this group like Daniel Cohn-Bendit (the ex-revolutionary and currently a middle-of-the-road professional politician who played a leading role in the promotion of the criminal NATO bombardment of the Yugoslavian people), as well as writers like Jean Francois Lyotard ( a member of the group), or Jean Beaudrillard (associated with the group), played a significant role in the events of May 1968 and the theoretical development of postmodernism respectively. A common characteristic in the views of these postmodernists associated with the SoB group is that they retained from its ideology only the attack against Soviet statism, while they quickly became adapted to the market economy and representative ‘democracy’. Although this attitude (shared by most postmodernists) was motivated by the French Communist party’s stand during the uprising, their fury against Marxism and Soviet statism — in the mid of the Cold War--obviously helped significantly the promotion of their views by the establishment media, as well as of their careers in politics or in academia[76].
Second, the collapse of Marxism in the 1970s, particularly in its dogmatic form of Marxist structuralism, as developed by Louis Althusser[77] and his disciples like Nikos Poulantzas. This development gave rise to another version of postmodernism, in the form of post-structuralism, developed by the likes of M. Foucault and J. Derrida, who, drawing on the irrational elements of the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger respectively, attacked not just objective rationalism, on which the Marxist ‘grand narrative’ —their favourite target— was based, but rationalism itself, as well as the modern visions of revolution and emancipation, turning instead to individualist programs of liberated sub-jectivity.
It is also important to note that, even after the collapse of actually existing socialism, following the decline of Marxism as an ideology, the focus of the postmodernists’ attack against ‘grand narratives’ remained unchanged, despite the fact that one of them had emerged victorious out of the Cold War, i.e. the one adopting the view of ‘a single, universal story of liberty and prosperity, the global victory of the market’[78]. This historic event not only did not deter postmodernists like Lyotard from continuing talking about the end of grand narratives but induced him instead to characterise the victory of the market economy as the outcome of a process of natural selection that pre-dated human life itself! Even entropy was invoked by Lyotard, in his opportunistic about turn from a thinker fighting for true socialism and autonomy, as a member of the SoB group, to an apologist of the market economy and representative ‘democracy’. According to the ‘reborn’ Lyotard, in a cosmos where all bodies were subject to entropy and external energy was limited, living systems had to compete with each other, in a perpetually fortuitous path of evolution. In this context, ‘various improbable forms of human aggregation arose, and they were selected according to their ability to discover, capture and save sources of energy’, and after some millennia punctuated by the Neolithic and industrial revolutions, ‘systems called liberal democracies’ proved them-selves best at this task, trouncing communist or islamist compet-itors, and moderating ecological dangers![79]. This is why, for Lyotard, the ultimate motor of capitalism is not thirst for profit but rather development as neguentropy. In the process, he manages to turn History upside down by arguing that it is not the system of the market economy whose dynamic has led to the present eco-catastrophic growth economy. Inst