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.

I sup­pose now that the second quar­ter has ended with Gold­man Sachs post­ing “the rich­est quar­terly profit in its 140-year history” (the Times, in an arti­cle headed “Stunning Profit at Gold­man Revives Gilded Pay Packages”) and JPMor­gan Chase send­ing the finan­cial pages scram­bling for tropes drawn from Greek mythol­ogy, not even the most Kool-Aid-eyed Obama lib­eral still believes in the second coming of Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt.

From Arthur Koestler’s Dark­ness at Noon:

[Paul] had learned to his regret that in the class strug­gle the double Nelson was not done.