Late Capitalism and Culture Critique

Many on the revolutionary left have theorized the development of an economic crisis — and as a result of this economic crisis, a tendency towards the development of political and ideological crisis — in late capitalism as it has evolved from the late 1960s to the present. Such analyses, focused on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, are absolutely essential. Still, they do not usually directly address the specifically cultural aspects of the contemporary crisis of late capitalism: the crisis as it takes shape within and is fought out within late capitalist institutions such as the university. The terms for such an analysis of cultural crisis have generally not been available — have not yet been discovered and invented — and this is a crucial lack since, as Gramsci, for example, argues, the struggle for (political and ideological) hegemony takes place throughout civil society, i.e. within and across all of the institutions and discourses of (late) capitalist society, and not just within the economic processes of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption and not just within political society in and through the state.

A crisis, as Gramsci also suggested, consists of the fact that the old is dying while the new cannot be born. To put it another way, in a situation of crisis, social contradictions have advanced to the stage where “normal” social reproduction is impossible (or increasingly problematic and costly), and yet no alternative mode of organization of social relations has yet emerged in a substantially developed form to be effectively opposed to the existing system.

We propose that cultural intervention can play a crucial role in pushing crisis through towards progressive resolution, because cultural intervention can contribute to the formulation of the necessary alternative to the existing system. The most significant aspects of culture are the modes of cooperation, the kinds of divisions of labor, and the forms of social organization into which individuals and social groups arrange themselves in meeting their needs, as well as the mechanisms established for facilitating these cooperative relations. Intervention directed towards disrupting and subverting the stability and legitimacy of “old” modes of cooperation, kinds of divisions of labor, and forms of social organization while pushing forward the elements within the old which anticipate “new,” more radically progressive modes of cooperation, kinds of divisions of labor, and forms of social organization can make a crucial difference in determining the direction of social crisis.

The type of social organization most essential to late capitalist structures is the collective type. By “collective,” we mean, first of all, any practice in which all the subjects whose activities are combined by the practice tend to be transformed into interchangeable elements of that same practice. Capitalism, as Marx already noted, is characterized by the systematic organization of subjects as collectives in the production process. Late capitalism is characterized by the collective organization of all aspects of culture, including those institutions (such as educational institutions) which were marginal in earlier periods of capitalist development. The central cultural problem in late capitalism, then, is the production and reproduction of institutions which can frame and coordinate the collective practices required by late capitalism.

This process of collectivization, which proceeds irregardless of anyone’s will, comes into contradiction with the maintenance of private property in the means of production. Here, we will point to just one significant aspect of this contradiction. Systematic collective organization requires the production of what Marx called “universal” or “social” individuals: subjects, that is, who are capable of moving from one practice or institution to another, and of developing skills and capacities which are abstracted from any single local space. This, furthermore, requires the establishment of institutions capable of producing such subjects: for example, a mass education system, including the higher education system, which involves universal standardization, the subordination of technique to science, etc. However, the production of such a mode of subjectivity comes into direct contradiction with the requirement of the ruling class for a working population with no pretensions of actually taking control of the institutions which produce them — and with effectively limited capacity to do so.

This kind of analysis, focused upon the development of this fundamental contradiction of capitalism in the context of the crisis of contemporary late capitalism, could provide an extremely useful way of theorizing the social struggles of the 1960s. The main tendencies of struggles such as those of feminism and gay liberation, and the struggles of African-americans for democracy and equality, could be understood as (partial and contradictory) attempts to realize consciously the tendencies for collectivization in late capitalism. By “realize consciously” we mean the subordination of the objective processes of collectivization to the determination of and by the collective subjects themselves. In order to advance this kind of end, it becomes necessary to intervene in institutions so as to question, challenge, contest, critique, and transform modes of cooperation, kinds of division of labor, and forms of organization of social relations within and across institutions in all areas of culture. That such struggles have often taken the limited form of struggles against “bureaucratization” or “power” as such (often coded as “mastery,” “homogeneity,” “logocentrism,” etc.) does not change the fact that the abolition of racism, sexism, and heterosexism requires a completely different mode of organizing culture which involves specifically collective control over cultural institutions (for example, collective control over child rearing institutions). Nor does it change the fact that it was precisely the entrance of women, gays, and Blacks into positions from which they can exercise at least some, limited and partial power against men, straights, and Whites within the objectively — and yet still, by and large, authoritarianly and despotically — collectivized institutions of late capitalist society which has made existing modes of authority increasingly untenable and which has provided the conditions of possibility for the eventual genuine realization of these liberation struggles.

In this context, the capitalist response to the current crisis (Reaganism, Thatcherism, etc.) can be understood as a form of reaction to an unsolvable contradiction. The project of “re-privatization” undertaken by the capitalist class — understood as an overall cultural and not only economic strategy — can be seen as an attempt to resecure the conditions of capitalist rule by destroying the elements of “public individuality” implicit in the social struggles forged in the 1960s. (By “public individuality,” we mean the kind of individuality which takes a conscious organization of one’s relation to collectives as constitutive of subjectivity). However, this strategy is highly problematic from the standpoint of capital itself (hence the crisis). This is because, as we have already suggested, such a strategy undermines the conditions of possibility for producing the kinds of individuals required by contemporary capitalism. This is evidenced, for example, in the U.S. “education crisis”: the evacuation of public accountability for educational institutions serves precisely the purpose we outlined before — that is, it diverts the investment of resources from those institutions delegated the authority to produce “cultured” subjects. However, the social and economic effects of this “evacuation” are devastating; again, even for the ruling class. Since the overall tendency of capitalist development is irreversible, there are obviously limits to the “re- privatization” strategy.

We could, then, call this strategy a “post-collectivist” “re-privatization”: that is, a mode of re-privatization which suppresses, but does not destroy the elements of collectivization, including those associated with oppositional practices. Furthermore, whenever possible, this strategy of “post-collectivist re-privatization” appropriates and employs the elements of these oppositional practices in the service of reaction. Take, for example, the practices of the anti-abortion movement: the “participatory” strategies of “civil disobedience,” references to the “abortion industry” and “abortion bureaucracy,” among other things, would be unthinkable without the “lessons” of the 1960s. In fact, a great deal of the “anti- bureaucratic” “revolt” of the right involves such an appropriation from the left.

While we do not have the space to explore the question here, it could also be argued that the discourses of postmodernism — anti-totalizing, anti-universalizing, yet within a less naive, “post- liberal” problematic — are also conservative responses to these contradictions insofar as they work to promote a “radical” indeterminacy and undecidability, ostensibly against the threat of “totalitarianism” arising from determinate forms of knowledge and decisive programs for action, which insofar as it renders existing social reality largely unknowable also renders it largely unchangeable — at the least the systematic totality of existing social reality cannot be changed if it can not be grasped precisely and confronted with a conscious, deliberate, and planned alternative.

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