Late Capitalist Culture and Cultural Critique

Contemporary post-marxist critiques of marxism (such as those of Laclau and Mouffe, Aronowitz, Giroux, etc.) invariably replace the category of “socialism” with that of “radical democracy.” The effect of this shift is to articulate a social telos which involves not a radical break between one mode of economic and cultural organization and another, but rather an extension of those “democratic” elements which already exist in suppressed form in capitalist society. So, for example, Henry Giroux has often written of the importance of educating students for “citizenship” in “a democratic society,” and this kind of education is one that involves preparation of “critical political subjects” who are able to precisely locate themselves and their practices within history as a means towards intervention in history so as to “radically” change it. This assumes a romantic-utopian, highly abstract and ultimately very classically idealist, kind of “radical pedagogy,” as if the production of genuinely “democratic citizens” was even on the immediate agenda of radical praxis in contemporary late capitalism — i.e. as if it were possible to produce genuinely “democratic citizens” regardless of the essentially undemocratic character of the social environment. Giroux’s “radical pedagogy” is typical in its assumption that the classroom — or the course — can function as a fairly unproblematic pedagogical space, free from social contradictions and antagonisms, where teachers and students can simply “collaborate” in producing “good,” democratic subjects. Presumably, the democratization of society as a whole, as is seemingly the case for Laclau and Mouffe as well, would entail merely the cumulative growth and cultivation (“nurturing”) of steadily more and more such democratic spaces and subjects, until they all “add up” to a democratic society.

In such conceptions of “radical democracy,” there is a strong, even decisive, liberal component which has not been subjected to critique. Liberalism assumes a homogeneous connection between an abstract(ed) subject and an abstract(ed) object — abstracted, that is, from their historical conditions of possibility. This enables the assumption of a direct relation between private and public, and of the immediate realization of private interests through their public representation. This, of course, obscures the fact that the public space is itself constructed out of the interrelations between antagonistic and highly unequal private interests — the appearance of equality and homogeneity is a result of the representation of the most dominant private interests as general social ones. From the (neo)liberal perspective, the failure of the vast majority of private interests to be registered in the public space appears to be simply the effect of “distortions” and “perversions” of an otherwise sound system.

The left liberalism of “radical democracy,” insofar as it does not address the problem of collective control over the means of production and all social institutions, likewise assumes the possibility of remaking the public sphere from within — for example, by activating previously silenced interests, or articulating those interests in a new way. However, these understandings neglect the fact that “empowerment,” in a collectively and centrally organized society, cannot be produced from the “inside” out, but must involve the production of a new system of power and authority.

What this means is that the combination of the predominantly public and collective character of late capitalist cultural institutions undermines the grounds for traditional liberal understandings of democracy. More precisely, no longer can the mere redistribution of power to new and dispersed sites (even if conceived communally rather than individually) be considered a significant democratic advance. This project, again, assumes the possibility that subjects could control the means and capacities required for production and reproduction within a circumscribed local space. By contrast, the possibility of democracy at this historical moment requires the centralized organization of the fundamental social question — the distribution of resources and capacities of the various institutions and communities.

This requires some explanation. Liberalism depends upon the dispersal of production and consumption sites which, it claims, prevents the emergence of authoritarian modes of social power; in fact, though, this allows the process of social production, and especially those who benefit from it most, to escape from public accountability. For this reason, in a social and cultural system which is already organized globally and collectively, and therefore necessarily subjected to centralization and planning, the only adequate political response is not a “decentralized” proliferation of “new” and “different” sites of power, but the subjection of centralization to democratic control.

This political project involves the production and support of “counter-public” oppositional spaces, which combine organization within, outside of, and across all capitalist institutions. Counter-public spaces depend upon the struggle against local and especially outmoded kinds of authority and hierarchy integrated into such institutions: more precisely, they emerge in particular out of the struggles against modes of domination which combine “pre-capitalist” (e.g., slavery and patriarchy) with advanced capitalist forms. To use terms introduced earlier, they involve the struggle against the “independent” (class based, authoritarian) aspects and for the “universal” aspects of institutions; or, to put it another way, this means struggling to realize the deepening of our social interdependencies as a basis for freedom, rather than as obstacles to freedom. For example, effective feminist practice requires independent organization so as to contest both local and global modes of patriarchal sexist control, and works by means of a political praxis which must extend cross-institutionally at the same time as it is simultaneously compelled to develop strategies designed so as to work “immanently” within specific, existing institutions. Only such counter-public spaces, in conjunction with working class and community based struggles, can propose alternative modes of organizing the distribution of the cultural capacities required to meet social, collective needs.

Counter-public spaces can serve this purpose, furthermore, not by abstracting the needs of particular groups from the collective organization of late capitalism, but instead — only — by generalizing those needs through critiques of the existing mode of organization. This means the following: the democratization of global processes of allocation along with local processes of control and use requires the constant elevation of all individuals into “representatives” of specific collective practices. That is, individuals must become the organizers of these processes as delegates of the collective in global determinations of allocation. Existing property relations, and their representatives, resist this possibility by evoking the criteria of profitability, technical efficiency, and natural inequality. The cultural forms defended by these criteria must be critiqued and contested, not by dismissing questions of waste and irrational management of resources, but rather in the interest of enhancing rational management by tying production to the needs of all people. An indispensable prerequisite of this is precisely the transformation in types of authority we have just proposed. This transformation of types of authority, finally, requires an extensive critical-pedagogical effort in order to overcome “unnatural,” that is socially produced, inequalities in capacity — the kinds of inequalities upon which authoritarian types of control depend.

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