The End of History and the Last Man

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

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The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class

The third way: the renewal of social democracy

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia.

It is ‘the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena’ that Augé attempts to describe. So far, so good, but this is only from Non-places’ back-cover blurb. In fact the book is very disappointing: the author offers a bland narrative of the experience of modern life, for example, on the supermarket: ‘The customer wanders round in silence, reads labels, weighs fruit and vegetables on a machine that gives the price along with the weight, then hands his credit card to a young woman as silent as himself—anyway, not very chatty—who runs each article past the sensor of a decoding machine before checking the validity of the customer’s credit card’ (pp.99–100). He nostalgically contrasts this to some romantic idealization of the (French) past, and mixes it up with what can only be described as pretentious waffle. To be fair, some of the concepts introduced are interesting. Anthropological places are contrasted to spaces; places in turn are contrasted to nonplaces: ‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a nonplace’ (pp.77-78). Modernity is contrasted to supermodernity: it is supermodernity which creates non-places, ‘spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places...’ (p.78). For example, ‘in the modernity of the Baudelairean landscape ... everything is combined’, the old and new are interwoven; on the other hand, supermodernity ‘makes the old (history) into a specific spectacle, as it does with all exoticism and all local particularity ... in the non-places of supermodernity, there is always a specific position ... for “curiosities” presented as such’ (p.110). It’s true that airports, supermarkets, new housing estates, suburbs and so on are alienating (non-)places—just listen to Strummer’s lyrics to ‘Lost in the Supermarket’ (The Clash, London Calling, 1979); it is also true that we are forced to spend more and more of our lives in such (non-)places. This is why this little book appeared promising. But the concepts Augé employs are hopelessly inadequate to explain the proliferation and character of these ‘late capitalist phenomena’. The definition, cited above, of place vis-à-vis non-place begs the questions: relational to whom?, concerned with whose history?; whose identity? Augé’s point is, of course, that everywhere 144 Capital & Class #60

Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

The article analyses the UK government’s plans to create a social investment market. The Big Society as political economy is understood as a response to three aspects of a multi-faceted, global crisis: a crisis of capital accumulation; a crisis of social reproduction; and, a fiscal crisis of the state. While the neoliberal state is retreating from the sphere of social reproduction, further off-loading the costs of social reproduction onto the unwaged realms of the home and the community, it is simultaneously engaging in efforts to enable this terrain of social reproduction to be harnessed for profit. Key to this process are specific government policies, the creation of new financial institutions and instruments and the introduction of the metric of ‘social value’. Policies ostensibly aimed at resolving the crisis in ways that empower local communities actually foster further financialisation and a deepening of capitalist disciplinary logics into the social fabric.

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Harnessing the Social: State, Crisis and (Big) Society

One hundred years ago, Frederick Taylor and the pioneers of scientific management went into battle on US factory-floors. Armed with stopwatches and clipboards, they were fighting a war over measure. A century on and capitalist production has spread far beyond the factory walls and the confines of 'national economies'. Although capitalism increasingly seems to rely on 'cognitive' and 'immaterial' forms of labour and social cooperation, the war over measure continues. Armies of economists, statisticians, management-scientists, information-specialists, accountants and others are engaged in a struggle to connect heterogeneous concrete human activities on the basis of equal quantities of human labour in the abstract – that is, to link work and capitalist value. In this paper, we discuss contemporary capital's attempt to (re)impose the 'law of value' through its measuring of immaterial labour. Using the example of higher education in the UK – a 'frontline' of capitalist development – as our case-study, we explain how measuring takes places on various 'self-similar' levels of social organisation. We suggest that such processes are both diachronic and synchronic: socially-necessary labour-times of 'immaterial doings' are emerging and being driven down at the same time as heterogeneous concrete activities are being made commensurable. Alongside more overt attacks on academic freedom, it is in this way that neoliberalism appears on campus.

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'Cognitive Capitalism' and the Rat-Race: How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities

Following Desai (1984), Goodwin's simple "predator-prey" growth cycle model of the economy (1967) is tested, using post-war data for ten OECD countries--Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway, the UK and the US. At a quantitative level, Goodwin's model is found not to be adequate: (i) estimated parameter values poorly predict the cycles' centres; and (ii) Goodwin's restrictive assumptions are not justified. However, at a qualitative level, the evidence presented here for the existence of Goodwin-type cycles is extremely encouraging, justifying both existing theoretical extensions of Goodwin's model and further empirical work in this area. Copyright 2000 by Oxford University Press.

Testing Goodwin: growth cycles in ten OECD countries

The paper analyses the UK government’s plans to create a social investment market. The Big Society as political economy is understood as a response to three aspects of a multi-faceted, global crisis: a crisis of capital accumulation; a crisis of social reproduction; and, a fiscal crisis of the state. While the neoliberal state is retreating from the sphere of social reproduction, further off-loading the costs of social reproduction onto the unwaged realms of the home and the community, it is simultaneously engaging in efforts to enable this terrain of social reproduction to be harnessed for profit. Key to this process are specific government policies, the creation of new financial institutions and instruments and the introduction of the metric of ‘social value’. Policies ostensibly aimed at resolving the crisis in ways that empower local communities, actually foster further financialisation and a deepening of capitalist disciplinary logics into the social fabric.

David Harvie

Papers

Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

Harnessing the Social: State, Crisis and (Big) Society

'Cognitive Capitalism' and the Rat-Race: How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities

Testing Goodwin: growth cycles in ten OECD countries

Harnessing the Social: State, Crisis and (Big) Society 1