on the meaning of “late” in “late capitalism”
From Benjamin Kunkel’s review of Fredric Jameson in the LRB:
Jameson’s description of the mood and texture of postmodern life had, in its almost tactile authority, few rivals outside the work of DeLillo, Pynchon and (more to his own taste) William Gibson. And, as in their novels, local observation in Jameson was complemented by an implacable awareness of what he called the ‘unrepresentable exterior’ enclosing all the slick and streaming phenomena in view. In the novelists, however, allusion to the great ensphering system often took the form of paranoia. As a Marxist, Jameson was calmer and more forthright: he simply called the system late capitalism, after the book by Ernest Mandel, the Belgian Trotskyist, which provided the base, as it were, to his own cultural superstructure. Mandel’s Late Capitalism (1972) had offered a magnificently confident and pugnacious argument about the nature of postwar capitalism, but he regretted ‘not being able to propose a better term for this historical era than “late capitalism”’. In Mandel’s usage, ‘late’ simply meant ‘recent’, but the term naturally also suggests obsolescence. This implication of an utterly misplaced Marxist triumphalism probably had consequences for the reception of Jameson’s theory (and Mandel’s). Who could believe in 1991, when Jameson publishedPostmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, that capitalism was on its last legs?
In fact, Jameson didn’t think it was either. His actual claim was more like the opposite: with the postwar elimination of pre-capitalist agriculture in the Third World and the last residue of feudal social relations in Europe, with the full commodification of culture (no more Rilke and Yeats and their noble patrons) and the infiltration of the old family-haunted unconscious by mass-disseminated images, humankind had only now embarked, for the first time, on a universally capitalist history. Late capitalism was the dawn, not the dusk, of a thoroughgoing capitalism. It constituted a ‘process in which the last surviving internal and external zones of precapitalism … are now ultimately penetrated and colonised in their turn’. This thesis can only have been reinforced by the advent of China as the workshop of the world and the channelling of so much of intimate life by the internet. My shoes are sewn under the supervision of the CCP, and Gmail fills the margins of my private correspondence with ads.
“Who could believe in 1991, when Jameson published Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, that capitalism was on its last legs?”
This question is, however, a bit of a dodge. Postmodernism was identified not just with “late capitalism” but with a U.S.-centered globalized regime of finance capital, and a few commentators were fairly clear (and prescient) regarding the oncoming obsolescence of that late capitalism: Fernand Braudel and then in more detail Giovanni Arrighi, e.g., in an analysis toward which Jameson gestures (albeit with a productive misreading) in said essay.
>In fact, Jameson didn’t think it was either. His actual claim was more like the opposite: with the postwar elimination of pre-capitalist agriculture in the Third World and the last residue of feudal social relations in Europe…<
It’s a secondary point, I guess, but there’s been lots of work, beginning really with Marx, but rigorously analyzed by “Dependency Theory” economists beginning in the 1960s, showing that the notion of a dominant “pre-capitalist” mode in the “Third World,” one separate from European mercantile capitalism, is basically a myth. The satellite colonial zones were thoroughly integrated into and structured for posterity by their relation to the metropolis, far back as the 16th century. In Latin America, for example, pre-capitalist *relations* of production certainly existed in agriculture and extractive industries, but these were subsumed within the larger, controlling *mode* of early international capital. They are what guaranteed the maximum return to the center and early take-off. Mandel, who was a leader of the Fourth International, himself argues the point in Late Capital. In fact, Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution is based on the presence of such “uneven and combined development” at capitalism’s heart.
(Still, after almost thirty years, only six credits away from my Masters in Latin American Studies…)
I take both of these points. It depends on what one means, not just by “late” but by “capitalism.”
I do wonder about criteria of obsolescence (and about the eagerness to make claims about obsolescence that fuels many an appropriation of FJ). How do we determine if something like a U.S.-centered globalized regime of financial capital is obsolescent? When it no longer works? (And how do we judge this, exactly — in relation to efficiency? Power?) Or when such a regime no longer exists?
Jane’s comment kind of proves Kunkel’s point, no? I think BK’s got Jameson right and Jameson’s got the situation right: “Late capitalism was the dawn, not the dusk, of a thoroughgoing capitalism.” For a lot of people, though, the “late” in “late capitalism” did and does encode an expectation of/belief in/hope for dusk, a dream of capitalism’s obsolescence. But JA’s questions about that obsolescence are right on.
Well, Jonathan Richman sez, take a risk today for me. I think there’s little intellectual honor in producing some semi-official metric for the ends of epochs and not making any claims until it had been rigorously satisfied. That, to be sure, is to be a slave of the past. And ends, moreover, are not punctual but tendential; even now it is a matter of (often interesting) debate when exactly the British Empire ceded the top dog title to the US. But it did, somewhere in there. And some other manner of transfer will happen again, indeed seems already be in progress. It’s unclear whether denying this is a kind of realism, or the opposite.
SWhile it is true that claims about the obsolescence of US capitalism as the hegemonic economic order of the world are at this point predictive, they are considerably less premature than they might have 10 years ago — given that things have played out very much as foreseen by the Braudel-Arrighi claims about the autumnal sign of finance capital, and Robert Brenner’s account of the crisis character of the distance between the financial and industrial sectors. One doesn’t need the last two minutes of Alice in Wonderland, or the ocean of journalistic ink being spilt over China, to know that there is real anxiety, based on real data and circumstance, about the ceding of the leading role in the world economy (and perhaps in real changes in the basic nature of capitalism, given a global decrease in profitability.
Indeed, we have seen something like the completion of capital’s expansion to the global horizon. But as anyone able to hold a dialectical thought is aware, this doesn’t lead to the end of history and a pleasing victory dance; it presents qualitative problems for capital and its need for ceaseless expansion. So I myself will continue to be leery of claims that in general the great thinkers have accepted things will basically remain as they are; it ain’t really so, and for good reason.
Oh jeez Jane, no one’s plumping for the end of history here.
As I see it–leaving Jameson out of it–there are two ways to look at claims to capitalism’s imminent obsolescence: analytical (are they right?) and ethical (what do they mean for what we do?).
On the analytical front, I’m very skeptical that capitalism is on its way out the door but I don’t think it’s impossible. We could argue particulars—isn’t an oscillating gap between the financial and industrial sectors a regular feature of capitalism? would a shift in power to China really cause a change in the very DNA of capitalism? won’t the exhaustion of natural resources lead capitalists to find new ways to create monetizable demand? (hello, Farmville!)—but my basic protest is an old one: the system is too complex and the historical inputs too many to allow for a trustworthy predictive model. As the history of predictive models of capitalism’s demise tends to suggest, we just don’t know.
Ethically, I’d claim all the risk for my side. If the present economic system is going to topple of its own weight or succumb to its internal contradictions or get pummeled by historical momentum, then all one has to do is sit back and cheer it on. (Or, when things don’t work out, go back and write a new introduction to explain why conditions weren’t quite right this time around.)
But if we take the prospect of a durable capitalism seriously, not because we like but because we think it’s proven itself remarkably good at surviving attempts to get rid of it, then the question gets more difficult but also more engaging: how do we find and exploit the weaknesses in the system, and, when that’s not possible, how to we set up some kind of resistance to its ill effects? Short of revolution (I know) it’s about the furthest thing possible from a victory dance or accepting that things “will basically remain as they are.”
“One doesn’t need the last two minutes of Alice in Wonderland, or the ocean of journalistic ink being spilt over China, to know that there is real anxiety, based on real data and circumstance, about the ceding of the leading role in the world economy (and perhaps in real changes in the basic nature of capitalism, given a global decrease in profitability.”
The really interesting and potentially problematic point is buried in that “perhaps.” Are we starting to lose the game, or is the game itself changing in a fundamental way? I take Jane to be saying we’re definitely starting to lose this particular game, and that the game is probably changing fundamentally, too. We’ll be able to confirm this retrospectively (or, if you like, historically), but, for now, we can make some pretty good educated guesses (i.e. predictions). But of course this raises another question — what does it mean for the game to change fundamentally! The ghost of Hegel hovers over us here.
Bobby,
huh? One, my own previous comments (regarding both my own analysis and those of Braudel, Arrighi, Jameson, Brenner) concerned not “the end of capitalism” but the end of this current US-led cycle of it. So all your remarks about capitalism tout court are a conversation with yourself.
And two, capitalism is a social relation, not a movie; I’m pretty confident that you neither believe, nor think anyone else believes, that “If the present economic system is going to topple of its own weight or succumb to its internal contradictions or get pummeled by historical momentum, then all one has to do is sit back and cheer it on.” That’s a kind of determinism that no intelligent person I know has ever made claim to. We are its internal contradiction, dude. Feudalism was going to end too, and did. But it means nothing to say it ended under its own weight, except in that its own weight was in part the experiences of those who lived, and what they did.
Again, I’ll make the perfectly obvious and perfectly salient remark that, just as feudalism ended, other historical eras have ended and will end. One can certainly choose to be circumspect about predictions; the exact how and why are indeed something one would have to predict based on complicated, incomplete and contingent information, rather than somehow just <i?knowing. That’s all I mean about risk.
And yet there are parameters of likelihood. They are quite informative.In the modern era (post 1300, say) no dominant regime has lasted more than about 120 years, and each has ended with a detachment between finance and productive earnings. We are probably in about year 90 of the US-led era (maybe closer to 100; I think the argument for the establishment of the Fed in 1913 is a reasonable one) and seeing a familiar divergence of profitability between financial and productive sectors. So: one can offer any number of cries that capitalism is so complicated and how could we ever predict anything and etc? But based on every bit if historical precedent that we have, the US-led era is in the period of its steep decline. You’re right that the question of what part we play is a significant one. But inventing an impenetrably durable entity is quite the opposite of the reasonable stance you offer. It’s counter-histoical.
On the last paragraph above, Joshua, not sure I grasp what’s being argued:
Insofar as “Late Capitalism” is concerned, why would the displacement of U.S. economic power (after its dominance for “90 years”) necessarily have anything to do with the system’s continued global survival or demise? What’s the central import of national “regimes” in context of the survival of a global mode (with all the great modifications, granted, that hegemonic modes historically undergo)?
Spain begins to get displaced by the Dutch and the English in the 17th century, France takes over in the 18th, but mercantile capitalism keeps going just fine for a long time (its “regime,” one could say, lasts for far more than “120″ years, and even in lesser role Spain continues to do OK for nearly 100 years in the 18th). Who’s to say U.S. capital won’t be to China, India, and Brazil for, say, possibly the next 400 years, what Spain (in its long denouement within a very profitable and hegemonic global system) sort of became to the Dutch, English, and French?
Just trying to better understand exactly what’s being argued here and what the stakes are. What do we mean by “Late Capitalism”? What do we mean by “regime,” etc.?
I doubt you’re any more interested than I am in dragging this on, but you accuse, I defend, so here we go.
1/ In the question you protested—“Who could believe in 1991, when Jameson published Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, that capitalism was on its last legs?”—the uncapitalized “capitalism” is capitalism tout court. The question Kunkel raises is whether the capitalized “Capitalism” in Jameson’s title is also capitalism tout court. He decides, as I have, as you apparently have, that it is not, that it’s better to think of “late capitalism” as a set phrase referring to a specific period of history than as a presumptive claim to the imminent demise of capitalism tout court. If you want to talk about the end of late capitalism—late late capitalism—that’s fine, but in that case you’re arguing with exactly no one, Kunkel included.
2/ The only thing I’ll say here is that durable ≄ impenetrable, as the last question in my previous comment makes clear.
Robert, two things. One, while you may not find my point interesting, it was always explicit — so I hope it’s fair to say I wish you would have read what I wrote before disputing it.
Two, at the risk/apparent necessity of repeating myself, I think the point is quite relevant re Kunkel’s claim (I should say that in general I like the Kunkel essay quite a bit). He elides the fact that the essay about which he is speaking (the Postmodernism essay) goes to great length to identify the “cultural logic” of postmodernism not with the history of capitalism tout court, but specifically and in lengthy detail with this phase in the epoch of US-led capitalism. To wit,”
“Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world…”
Thus, Kunkel’s adducing the phrase “late capitalism” from that essay to a set of thoughts on the long durée of capitalism tout court is “a bit of a dodge.” An elision, a slippage. I went on to note that, if we recalled what Jameson was actually speaking of, Kunkel’s claim that any sort of end was unforeseen was also mistaken. That point, the only one I elaborated, stands.
Jane, easy, Bobby’s fine and I think you’re reading snark where none was intended. I do think the Arrighi thesis is interesting, and I’m as intrigued as anyone to see what kind of changes a shift to China as power center will entail for capitalism.
My only argument is that you’re dinging Kunkel for bringing up a claim (i.e. that FJ’s “late capitalism” is the autumnal phase of capitalism tout court) he’s arguing against. He’s simply saying that the facile (one is tempted to say undergraduate, though I’ve heard it from the mouths of grad students and faculty members who should know better) reading of Jameson’s title is incorrect. Originally I’d thought you were intervening on the side of that facile claim, hence my first comment, but once you made it clear you were not, it became evident that everyone–Jameson, Kunkel, you, and me—is in violent agreement.
Kent, while I don’t agree with all the specifics of that (France was never at the center of the world system economically, and Spain’s relation to the United Provinces was in may ways more collaborative than antagonistic), in general that is a very good question. Three brief thoughts:
One, Giovanni Arrighi’s book the Long Twentieth Century confronts these issues with implacable clarity, and I recommend it highly.
Two, you are indeed gesturing exactly at what Kunkel ignores: that “late capitalism” for Jameson (again following Mandel, Braudel, etc) isn’t identified only with a general world development in the history of capitalism. It is identified with the “late” phase found in each cycle of accumulation — that is, the financial phase (following the merchant and industrial phases). Again, Arrighi is the clearest (but far from the only) unfolding of this history. So Jameson’s propositions about postmodernism (and c’mon, we’ve all read the essay, he is totally explicit about this) are proper to the US mutation of the financialized mode of capital, not simply to a later or more complete capitalism.
Three, there may well be a next cycle of accumulation, and it may be centered in China or India or the Eurozone (though that’s not looking so good, huh?) — though it’s not clear that global capital has the juice to start a new cycle (see, for example, Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing, or Gopal Balakrishnan’s essay in the NLR, “Speculations on the Stationary State”). But if such an era, a renewed cycle capitalism, does arise — that will no longer be the era Jameson was talking about. It will have its own character. It won’t necessarily be characterized by financialization or etc. This again shows the error in Kunkel’s elision of the Jameson essay and the history of capitalism.
I hope this is useful. Joshua
Yes, that’s helpful, Joshua.
By the way, though, I can see why you took it as you did, but when I referred to France “taking over in 18th century” in sentence below, I was actually referring to Bourbon Spain in the 1700s, not to French economic power!
“Spain begins to get displaced by the Dutch and the English in the 17th century, France takes over in the 18th…”
It’s worth pointing out here that on the second to last page of the book that grew out of the essay FJ writes that “The postmodern may well … be little more than a transitional period between two stages of capitalism, in which the earlier forms of the economic are in the process of being restructured on a global scale.” That the transition might well entail the eclipse of US hegemony is implicit, although the point is made explicitly elsewhere in the book.
I guess, as much as I like Bobby’s Happy Ending (the name of my massage parlor, btw), that I would push a little bit on the idea that we are all in violent agreement. I took Kunkel to be enlisting Jameson into a seemingly common-sensical agreement that “late capitalism” didn’t mean that capitalism was at any risk of serious challenge, but simply indicated its latest stage of development, and tendential completion.
I don’t actually think that.
Now, to be real clear, I don’t think the opposite of that. I don’t think capitalism is necessarily or objectively almost done for. However, I do think some fairly simple things, rooted both historically and theoretically. To aggregate them: these “cycles of accumulation” (as in the current US-led cycle) are not independent of the larger historical development which includes feudalism, capitalism, state communism, and so on. They are part of it. They are not blindly repetitive, and they are at least somewhat volatile.
Which is to say that ends of cycles are moments of transition when capital is meaningfully weaker, as it hasn’t the capacity to expand, lacks surplus —and must risk its own volatility to reestablish a new profitability and new capacity for expansion (this is Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” of course, though we could also talk about Kondratieff waves or crisis theory in general or any number of other accounts of this tendency within the history of capitalism.
It’s interesting to note that many of the substantial revolutionary moments have come exactly at these moments of transition (most obviously the Soviet revolution at exactly the moment of transition from a British to a US-led world-system). I think there is real yield in thinking about the relation of these cycles of hegemony in relation to the larger arc of global capitalism — and that it’s probably not quite right to settle for a model wherein volatility within the cycle is logically divorced from the possibility of volatility in the larger secular development of capitalism.
In short, capitalism is gonna end some day (given the historical familiarity of such periods ending, I honestly can’t see how thinking of capitalism as endless is anything but obeisance). And it seems from here more likely that it will end during a period of systemic volatility. So without insisting that this moment is nigh, we can still see the relevance of being interested in the “late” cycle for a given regime as something significant for thinking the end of capitalism as such.
Jane, I’m doing my best, but I’ve read your last four paragraphs three times now and I can’t find anything to disagree with. The question we’ve been wrassling over isn’t what you think about the relationship of cyclical and secular trends in capitalism, it’s whether Kunkel got the description of “late capitalism” in Jameson right. (Basic question being, is “late capitalism” in FJ best understood as a late or terminal phase of capitalism tout court?) I think he did (answer: no), and I think the quotes that you and MR adduce above are good as any to show why.
For a while I thought you agreed, but while your later paragraphs above are unobjectionable on their own, the only point they have in the present argument seems to be to smuggle back in some sense that, wait!, maybe “late capitalism” really is the end of capitalism tout court. Which I think is both objectively wrong and also a thought that’s completely worth thinking through. But if you want to convince me that it’s a thought that should control our understanding of Jameson’s “late capitalism,” if it’s a thought that you think makes Kunkel’s description “a bit of a dodge,” you’ll have to show me where FJ makes the case that “late capitalism” is the autumn of capitalism’s long year. Maybe it’s there–I admit it’s been a couple of years since I last read PCLLC–but I don’t remember him pressing that argument.
On related note to this Late Capitalism stuff, here’s an example of what some young poets, artists, and musicians from Chicago, almost all of them hardscrabble proletarian/lumpen-bohemian (I mean that
–it’s a big and vibrant collective based out of the Mid-Coast Free School in the Ukranian Village, and I don’t think a single one of them is in an MFA program, though not that there is anything bad with being in one) are doing to puzzle it all. It’s a big side-project of the school, a kind of follow-up to the public actions they organized a couple years ago to commemorate Chicago ‘68. My son’s right in the organizing middle of it, and OK, so I’m a proud pop: http://versionfest.org/V10/
Kent
Sorry, I got carried away and confused in my enthusiasms after finding the link this AM and my comment might be misleading. Versionfest is not *initiated* by the folks of the Mid-Coast school! It’s a bigger thing, and the MCFS folks are actively *involved* with it in various ways and participating with a big installation and “soap-box” debate performances around issues related to culture and the economy.
Just to clarify that. Check out the link.
Late decaying overripe corrupt haywire capitalism…. O the hour inexorably draws near, when this evil system will be replaced by…. free enterprise. Based on a more equitable distribution of inputs (education, access to investment resources, business skills & capital) and outputs (dividends, private property). Be careful what you drool for. Hyah come de judge.
Bobby, you are entirely correct that I was no longer limning Jameson’s position (another debate, a finer parsing, we’ll need drinks) but rather taking the opportunity to offer what I think is a more nuanced case about the situation of global-historical capital than Kunkel offers, on his own and Jameson’s behalf. Again, I’m not saying that “late capitalism” really is the end of capitalism tout court.” I’m saying that
a) capitalism tout court is going to end someday
b) it’ll probably end in some part because of what people do in a moment of global capital’s vulnerability
c) that vulnerability arises in the “late” phase of cycles of accumulation within global capitalism, such as we are in now, so
d) we want to be attentive to “late” phases including this one, because they have a real material relationship to capitalism as a whole.
I offer this as a useful way to think about the history of capitalism which is elided by Kunkel’s framing — not as a ventriloquism for Fred.
Got it, Jane. First round’s on me.
In preparation for our drinking date:
“If we wouldn’t be in this crisis, East Asia might continue to increase in power as it is doing right now to form within about seventy-five years the new hegemonic power, succeeding to the United States. But the capitalist world-system is not going to last another seventy-five years.” I. Wallerstein.
I swear I was not researching for the comment boxes! — but for a talk I’m giving next week.
http://www.theory-talks.org/2008/08/theory-talk-13.html