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It's Not Too Late to Ask
Thirty-five years ago many people in the United States and Europe were willing to give Marxism a hearing* Just a decade later nearly everyone agreed it had been discredited* Why this sudden change? Had some new discovery disproved Marxist theory? Were people no longer interested in the problems Marxism addressed? Or had the problems themselves disappeared?
Something had indeed happened in the period in question. From the mid-1970s onwards, the Western system underwent some vital changes. There was a shift from traditional industrial manufacture to a "postindustrial" culture of consumerism, communications, information technology, and the service industry. Small-scale, decentralized, versatile, nonhierarchical enterprises were the order of the day. Markets were deregulated, and the working-class movement was subjected to savage legal and political assault. Traditional class allegiances were weakened, while local, gender, and ethnic identities grew more insistent.
The new information technologies played a key role in the increasing globalization of the system, as a handful of transnational corporations distributed production and investment across the planet in pursuit of the readiest profits. A good deal of manufacturing was outsourced to cheap-wage locations in the "underdeveloped" world, leading some parochially minded Westerners to conclude that heavy industry had disappeared from the planet altogether. Massive international migrations of labor followed in the wake of this global mobility, and with them a resurgence of racism and fascism as impoverished immigrants poured into the more advanced economies. While "peripheral" countries were subject to sweated labor, privatized facilities, slashed welfare, and surreally inequitable terms of trade, the bestubbled executives of the metropolitan nations tore off their ties, threw open their shirt necks, and fretted about their employees' spiritual well-being.
None of this happened because the capitalist system was in a blithe, buoyant mood. On the contrary, its newly pugnacious posture, like most forms of aggression, sprang from deep anxiety. If the system became manic, it was because it was latently depressed. What drove this reorganization above all was the sudden fade-out of the postwar boom. Intensified international competition was forcing down rates of profits, drying up sources of investment, and slowing the rate of growth. Even social democracy was now too radical and expensive a political option. The stage was thus set for Ronald...