Summary of 2-3 Central Themes of Harvey\'s the Condition of Postmodernity

Postmodernism

Capitalism entered a new 'postmodern' phase in the 1970s and 1980s in which small-scale and entrepreneurial enterprises revived, and became the most dynamic sector of the economy in the West. This revival coincided with the reemergence of free market conservatism under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at the same time, along with a culture that became more aggressively competitive, egotistic and individualistic. During the same period, economists and sociologists rediscovered "sweatshops and…informal activities of all kinds" as the older Fordist mass production industries declined and shifted labor to low-wage regions in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Labor, production and capital markets all become more "flexible" and mobile (Harvey, 10990, p. 190). All of these trends had already existed for decades, to be sure, but the new computer and communications technologies accelerated them greatly. Postmodern political-economy is "a fantastic world of booming paper wealth and assets," prone to severe crashes and cycles of boom and bust like the 1930s and late-19th Century (Harvey, p. 357). Such crashes occurred in 1987 on Wall Street, in the Asian Meltdown of 1997-98, that spread to other emerging markets very quickly, in the collapse of the high tech bubble in 2000-01, and most spectacularly in the great recession of 2008-09. Harvey and other theorists predicted that these crashes would continue and intensify long before they actually occurred.

Harvey characterized modernism as it existed from the 19th Century to the 1960s as based on Fordist mass production and consumption (at least in the Western world and Japan), bureaucracy, collectivism, labor unions and the welfare state. Its culture was materialistic, authoritarian; paranoid and alienated, symbolized by the anonymity of the big city and the large organization. Postmodernism is more laissez faire and free market, individualistic, entrepreneurial and decentralized, based finances, services and virtual money rather than production. Its workforce was more white-collar than blue-collar, and its culture was schizophrenic, chaotic, pluralist and eclectic. Politically, postmodernism favored celebrities and charismatic, transformational leaders rather than faceless managers and bureaucrats (Harvey, p. 340). Some philosophers who were hailed as postmodernists like Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man were better characterized as anti-modernists with fascist sympathies, but postmodern culture and political-economy should not be dismissed as synonymous with fascism. Indeed, it is more neoliberal, chaotic and disorganized than totalitarian, and seems to have no center. Its ideologies are more ephemeral than concrete or totalizing. Unlike classical Marxism, postmodernist politics emphasizes culture, gender, race and religion -- identity politics -- rather than unified metanarratives and ideologies centered on social class. Postmodern technology has caused a sense of shrinking, compressed time and space in which a constant stream of disconnected and incoherent images seem more real (or hyper-real) than concrete reality itself. New Left politics of the 1960s and 1970s were harbingers of postmodernity, although their emphasis on gender, race, sexuality and the counterculture "connected better with anarchism and libertarianism than with traditional Marxism, and set the New Left against traditional working-class attitudes and institutions" (Harvey, p. 357). One of the great ironies of the postern era is how the politics of the New Left and New Right interested in this peculiar way that undermined organized labor and the welfare state, and unleashed a revival of free market capitalism. Although the New Left radicals and hippies of the 1960s could hardly have intended this, in the end the fact that their movements coexisted in the same time and space as the New Right or Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan turned out to be anything but coincidental.