The New Fetishism:
Citizenship and
Finance Capital
COLIN MOOERS
ntroduction In recent years, there has been renewed
interest in theoretical issues relating to citizenship and
democracy. As one recent commentator put it, "a global
theory of citizenship remains one of the leading desiderata of
contemporary social theory.! Commentators have cited a
number of events which have altered traditional views on
citizenship: the collapse of communism and resurgence of
nationalism; globalization and migration; erosion of the welfare state in the industrialized world; new rights claims by
women, gays, and other minorities.? This catalogue of changes
has prompted some theorists to claim that older liberal and
republican models of citizenship are in the process of dissolution.' Postmodern theorists have gone further to suggest that
the entire modernist lexicon of universal rights, freedom and
equality should be junked in favour of a democratic politics
rooted in notions of identity and difference.'
Whatever one thinks of such claims, it is clear that
citizenship in the advanced capitalist countries is undergoing
significant change and that attempting to make sense of
these changes, for both empirical and political reasons, is
vitally important. Equally important, however, is to recognize that the many of these changes are being driven by
transformations in global capitalist accumulation, exchange
and commodification. Too often, this basic point has been
forgotten in work on what Frederic Jameson has called "the
current four c's of the ideological re-equipment of late
capitalism-contracts,
constitutions, citizenship and civil
society... well-worn vagrants newly bathed, shaven, and
dressed up in respectable new clothes ..."5 The most important "c"-capitalism-simply
disappears from view in many
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Studies in Political Economy 66, Autumn 2001
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such accounts. Nevertheless, the capitalist circulation process still constitutes the "master narrative"6 within which the
consolidation and contestation of social identities unfolds,
despite their apparent remoteness and autonomy from such
influences. As I will argue below, the social metabolism of
capitalist circulation constitutes a vital starting point for
understanding both current practices and future prospects
for citizenship in the era of global capitalism.
This article analyses the complex interaction between
class, citizenship and the new forms of finance capital which
have been unleashed by the globalization of capitalism. Its
main focus will be to examine how the "practical ideology" of
citizenship in the industrialized liberal democracies has been
transformed through the dematerialization of money and the
growth of an international speculative financial system
founded on "fictitious capital." This speculative system has
generated new forms of reification and fetishism which have
profoundly affected class consciousness, the formation of
social identities, political institutions, and culture. It has also
destabilized the spatial and temporal coordinates of traditional forms of liberal-democratic citizenship. While new
social spaces have been opened up for the expression of
novel forms of identity and as sites of resistance, others have
been subjected to the "creative destruction" of neoliberal
engineering and market colonization. Despite these changes,
it will be argued, the creative tension between citizenship
claims and class demands will remain central to future struggles against global capitalism.
Citizenship and Money Under capitalism, Marx famously
remarks in the Grundrisse, the "individual carries his social
power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket."? Marx
was referring here to the fact that whatever other uses money
had, it was the preeminent expression of social power and
wealth. The circulation of money in its different modalities
conditions virtually every aspect of life from the money we
receive in the form of wages, to that spent on food, shelter,
education, entertainment, old age, births and deaths.s How,
and under what circumstances we do these things, largely
depends on our social relationship to money. This is not
meant to imply that money is a thing external to the social
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relations that constitute it. Indeed, it was the burden of
Marx's analysis to demonstrate that money embodies both
the freedom afforded by monetary wealth and the unfreedom
entailed by the earning of it.
As a means of exchange, money makes possible the circulation of value across space and through time. As a measure
of value, money becomes the universal equivalent whereby
the value of different concrete labours that go into the production of commodities can be expressed as abstract social
labour. Money as social power, therefore, presupposes that
those who command money as an expression of general
social wealth are able to employ the labour of others to create more value on an expanding scale; that is, it presupposes
that labour circulates as a commodity on the market and that
society is divided into a class of capitalists and of labourers.?
In reality, however, money is particularly effective at
masking the social relations of power and class domination
which it abstractly embodies. Money is the ultimate fetish
because it ascribes to money the ability to order social relationships between people as if this was one of its natural
attributes, rather than the other way around: that money
takes the form it does as a measure of abstract social labour
because social production is organized along capitalist lines.
As Bertell OIlman observes:
Money is understood as the power without which nothing is possible, so that greed for money becomes perfectly rational; being
allowed to do anything for money when you need some and buy
whatever you want to when you have some serves as the
paradigm for freedom (the market mystifies freedom making one
believe that one can do what one can't, and, when one does what
one can, it makes one believe that one has done what one hasn't);
equality is when others can do the same ..)O
As a means of exchange, money further masks these social
relationships by making it appear that the exchange which
takes place between the capitalist and the worker is one
between equals. What remains hidden is the fact that the capitalist receives more from the use of the worker's labour than
was paid for it. But the illusion of equality was so powerful,
Marx believed, that it appears "as a very Eden of the innate
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rights of man."ll Indeed, Marx went on to suggest that all
notions of liberty and equality in capitalist societies stemmed
from the illusion of equality found in this monetary exchange
between the capitalist and the worker:
All the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist, all the mystificationsof the capitalist mode of production,
all capitalism's illusions about freedom, all the apologetic tricks
of vulgar economics, have as their basis the form of appearance...which makes the actual relation the invisible opposite of
that relation.I?
In other words, as the measure of abstract social labour,
money is specifically implicated in the legal constitution of
notions of abstract citizenship: "Money represents the standardization of individuals as abstract citizens ...Money is the
incarnation of liberty, of private property, It represents the
liberty of individualized property owners, their equality and
freedom. "13The money wage which the worker receives then
is fraught with social meaning. It invites the worker into the
"community of money" as an apparently equal participant in
the appropriation of the fruits of private property and freely
contracted relationships.i- Thus, a kind of juridic fetishism
compliments the economic fetishism of money. That is, ownership of private property, contractual relations, equality
before the law and the state appear to be the result of human
nature and reason rather than the product of a particular set
of social relations of production.i>
To suggest that money and citizenship are connected
forms of fetishism is not to imply that they are mere illusions
or the product of some "false consciousness." Indeed, Zizek
has suggested that the ideological force of money rests not in
its "falsity" but rather in our willingness to act as if the
money-illusion were true:
When individuals use money, they know very well that there is
nothing magicalabout it-that money,in its materiality,is simply
an expression of social relations. The everyday spontaneous ideology reduces money to a simple sign givingthe individual possessingit a right to a certain part of the social product. So, on an
everydaylevel, the individualsknow very well that there are rela62
MooersIFetishism
tions between people behind the relations between things. The
problem is that in their social activity itself, in what they are
doing, they are acting as if money, in its material reality, is the
embodiment of wealth as such.They are fetishistsin practice, not
in theory.If
Thus, the twin fetishisms of money and citizenship are not
forms of false consciousness so much as spontaneous, often
contradictory, forms of consciousness which arise out of a
contradictory social reality which is itself based on an "objectified illusion:"17
Ideology is not some dreamlike illusion that we build to support
an insupportable reality; in its basic dimensionit is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our "reality" itself: an
'illusion which structures our effective, real social relations and
thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel.i.Jf
The citizenship "illusion"-juridic
equality which masks
an underlying class inequality-is thus less in our heads than
it is a function of objective social relations. It is a practical
fetishism because, like Bourdieu's concept of habitus, it
inscribes in our consciousness a disposition to act in accordance with the objective limitations of the system.i? This
smooth synchronization of thought and action is, however,
never total. In liberal democratic societies, notions of liberty
and equality are always contested, not because they are
viewed as empty ideological illusions, but because some
groups see them as only partially adequate vehicles for the
realization of their democratic aspirations. To put it another
way, in capitalist democracies, different social classes will
attempt to pour different social contents into these concepts,
to invest them with different meanings. It is perhaps more
accurate to think of the ideological discourse of citizenship as
something like a "compromise formation," as in Freud's
account of neurotic behaviour. As Terry Eagleton has
suggested:
The "truth" of such ideology,as with the neurotic symptom, lies
neither in the revelation nor the concealment alone, but in the
contradictory unity they compose. It is not just a matter of strip-
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ping off some outer disguiseto expose the truth, any more than
an individual's self-deception is just a "guise" he assumes. It is
rather that what is revealed takes place in terms of what is concealed and vice versa.20
Why citizenship rights have the character of a "compromise formation" for the working class may have something to
do with the dual-sided nature of wage labour itself. In the
realm of production, workers are exploited by capital. But, as
owners of their own labour-power, they are also property
owners of a certain type. Capitalist notions of property rights
are bound to have some appeal since, in the limited sense that
they enjoy "property in their persons" as Locke liked to say,
they dispose of their labour-power as the apparent equal of
the capitalist who purchases it. In terms of political consciousness, the dual nature of wage labour means that workers are pushed to struggle against the limitations of capital as
well as being pulled by its apparent attractions. The role of
money expresses these contradictory impulses clearly as a
"tension between the individualism that attaches to the
spending of money and the class experience of earning that
splits the social and psychological foundations for political
action. "21 This means that the individualistic norms which
govern the world of monetary exchange tend to overshadow
class-based demands. Since human needs are mediated by the
market it is not surprising that the idioms of the market
should become the "common sense" to which most people
adhere most of the time. Money, within certain constraints,
really does afford a degree of individual autonomy and freedom. Like money, therefore, the circumscribed citizenship
rights of capitalism are a practical fetish: people are aware of
their limits, just as they know that such rights are often subverted by money and power. But, much of the time, they act
as if this was not the case.
Money and Finance Capital If money obscures its origins in
the productive sphere as a measure of human labour-time,
the credit system increases this opacity even more. As Marx
was to comment: "Interest-bearing capital is the consummate
automatic fetish ...money making money, and in this form it
no longer bears any trace of its origin. "22 The growth of
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finance capital in a myriad of forms in recent decades has
been truly astronomical. Indeed, the expansion of the credit
system has provided much of the grease on the wheels of economic globalization. As we shall see later, this expansion has
also fundamentally transformed the spatial and temporal
coordinates of citizenship as well.
Money, as an expression of generalized wealth or socially
necessary labour, generates finance capital and the credit
system out of its own operations. As the universal equivalent
and store of value, money also plays another crucial role as a
means of circulation. Money allows the separation of
purchase and sale and therefore helps to overcome the constraints of simple barter. But "the more money is used to
store value rather than circulate values, the greater the monetary costs of circulation become... The use of 'money of
account'(credit) comes to the rescue."23
The main purpose of the credit system is to increase the
velocity of the circulation process, shortening the "turnover
time" through which capitalist profits are recouped.
Decreasing the turnover time of the circulation process has
far-reaching implications. For what the extension of the credit system accomplishes is a "time-space compression."24 The
credit system allows for the more rapid replacement of fixed
capital which often needs to be replaced for competitive reasons long before it has actually worn out physically. Credit
also helps to overcome some of the constraints which distance
and space impose on profitability. Commodities are delivered
to market sooner and new geographical regions become more
accessible as spatial barriers are annihilated. In other words,
the credit system facilitates both the extensive reach of capitalism into new areas of the globe at the same time as it
enables the intensive commodification of new areas of social
life. Over time, this has meant that productive capital has
become increasingly dependent on the credit system to
finance its operations. This inter-penetration of finance and
productive capital has also meant that a crisis in the productive sphere immediately manifests itself, and indeed appears
to have its origins in the credit system.o
Credit is "the 'most adequate' and most effective image of
the rule of exchange value, capable of flexible transfigurations, more relentless and penetrating than money itself." Its
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expansion also marks "a fundamental line of social demarcation, one that definitively constitutes groups, territories,
and bodies as conductors and bearers of the movement of
value."26 But these social lines of demarcation are well
hidden by the spectral movements of finance capital.
Interest-bearing capital can take a multiplicity of forms.
What all of these forms share in common, however, is that
they are all forms of "fictitious capital:" whether in the form
of bank loans or stocks and other securities, credit is extended as a future claim on profit. The capital is "fictitious"
because it is merely a promise but not a guarantee of future
earnings. It mayor it may not produce the expected return
on investment. "Fictitious capital" as a claim on future profits stands outside production and begins to move to its own
laws. It creates "new instrumentalities and institutions, new
class fractions, configurations and alliances and new channels for the circulation of capital itself. All of this is part and
parcel of the necessary evolution of capitalism. "27 The
growth of "fictitious capital," like the meteoric rise and fall
of stock markets in recent times, appears to have taken flight
from any association with real values in the sphere of
production. "All connection with the actual expansion process of capital is thus completely lost, and the conception of
capital as something with automatic self-expansion properties is thereby strengthened." The credit system thus takes
on "all manner of insane forms" and is "transformed into a
mere phantom of the imagination."28
Since the 1970s, global financial capital has been spurred
to new heights and all manner of new "insane forms" have
arisen. By far the largest area of growth has been in the trade
of currencies and other financial instruments. Financial
speculation on foreign exchange markets now amounts to
$1.2 trillion daily.29Money itself has to a large extent become
de-materialized with the advent of computerized transfers of
wealth; paper money now accounts for only about ten
percent of the broadly defined money supply.w In appearance at least, "Capital has become free-floating."31
It is often forgotten that the resurgence of finance capital
was coincident with the slowing of economic growth and
return of crisis in the advanced capitalist world in the early
1970s. After the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary
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MooersIFetishism
arrangement and the recession of 1974-75,several key developments took place. The first and most obvious was the
deceleration of growth in the industrial sector. Falling profit
rates in industry meant that stock market and related forms
of investment became more attractive owing to their higher
rates of return. Currency trading also exploded during the
same period as speculators took advantage of the new floating exchange rates. In less than three years the turnover in
world money markets went from $25 billion in 1970 to over
$100 billion in 1973.32
Financial "reform" and technological change in the 1980s
and 90s have greatly accelerated the pace of change.
Information technology and computerization has reduced the
cost of financial transactions by an estimated 95 percent since
the mid-1960s.33This is in sharp contrast to the more modest
productivity benefits due to technological change in industry.
Meanwhile, financial liberalization and deregulation of capital flows has led to an explosion of new financial activity,
products, and institutions. These changes, in turn, have
unleashed a torrent of mergers and takeovers of banks and
other financial institutions throughout the capitalist world
which shows few signs of abating.P A massive oversupply of
liquidity in the world economy, combined with low or falling
rates of profit in industry, has meant that while foreign direct
investment and trade have certainly grown, they have been
far outstripped by the exponential flight of capital into financial investments.e>
Together, these changes have produced a growing
disparity between production, trade and finance, leading to
much greater independence for the latter: "liberalized and
international finance, in relative autonomy from industrial
accumulation, regularly creates bubbles of partly fictitious
prosperity. When these burst, the entire economy is thrown
into turmoil."36 Furthermore, this relative independence has
greatly helped to reconfigure the economic geography of the
global economy by opening up new centres of accumulation
in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere.s?
Despite these developments, it is important to emphasize
that the new autonomy of finance capital is relative and not
absolute.P While the mobility and scope of finance capital is
in one sense definitive of the current period of globalization,
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Studies in Political Economy
its origins are ultimately rooted in productive capital. That is
why when speculative fevers lead to a crash and a full-scale
crisis sets in, capital will tend to seek more secure forms of
money. That is, it will seek to reestablish its connection to the
world of socially necessary labour and the real values of the
productive sphere.w This points up a fundamental contradiction which lies at the heart of money, between money as
a store of value and money as a means of exchange and
circulation:
A tension exists ...between the need to sustain accumulation
through credit creation and the need to preserve the quality of
money. If the former is inhibited, we end up with an overaccumulation of commodities and specific devaluation. If the quality
of money is allowed to go to the dogs, we have generalized
devaluation through chronic inflation. Thus are the dilemmas of
modern times neatly presented.s?
Crises tear away the veil of the "metaphysical" abstractions of capitalist circulation to reveal the brute physicality of
living labour and exploitation. Such moments often portend
heightened levels of class conflict; the intense social and
political struggles unleashed by the Asian crisis of recent
years are a reminder of this fact. In the industrialized North,
the depth of economic downturns and the intensification of
class conflict, have been partially offset by exporting surplus
capital from metropolitan to less developed regions of the
world economy, thereby relieving downward pressure on the
rate of profit. This "spatial fix"41is designed to establish new
spaces for industrial production and to mobilize new sources
of labour, technology and credit. As financial capital followed
productive capital into the Asian and other newly industrializing economies in the early 1990s, however, it has just as
surely retreated to safer havens in the industrialized North
since the onset of the Asian crisis in the late 1990s.42
Citizenship in the Age of Finance Capital What the ascendancy of finance capital ultimately signals is a heightening of
processes of social abstraction rooted in the fetishistic forms
of money and credit. By masking underlying social processes,
as Raymond Williams insists, abstraction performs one of the
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MooersIFetishism
essential functions of ideology.O This becomes clear when we
examine how class identities as well as traditional forms of
citizenship have been reconfigured in the face of the changes
outlined above. In the advanced capitalist countries, new
forms of identity have been pushed to the forefront. They
have been registered in often contradictory ways. On the one
hand, the expansion of the credit system, and the intensification of commodification it has underwritten, has promoted
the growth of new social spaces-especially in large urban
centres-where
new forms of ethnic, gender and sexual
identity have flourished. Such communities of identity have
often displayed rich cultural and symbolic resources,
frequently deployed in opposition to various forms of oppression. On the other hand, these spaces have never been
immune to colonization by capital.f New economies of
desire linked to commodification have arisen hand in hand
with new and more flexible forms of identity. As Rosemary
Hennessy has observed, "In the media-images generated in
the overdeveloped capitalist centers especially, more permeable, fluid, ambiguously coded sexual identities are allowed,
even promoted. "45
Capital has penetrated virtually every sphere of social life;
the relentless logic of commodification has resulted in a "dedifferentiation"46 of the public, cultural and private spheres.
The omnipresence of commodification has found expression
as an altered "structure of feeling" often associated with the
"sensibility of postmodernism."47 People experience both a
pervasive sense of anonymous forces beyond their control, as
well the giddiness that accompanies the vertiginous oscillations in "life styles" (the very term suggests infinite changeability) and consumption cycles. The spectral movements of
finance capital across global cyberspace, with its fetishistic
promise of wealth created literally out of thin air, has become
part of the collective Zeitgeist:
It was this restless, speculative system that was the existential
basis of the various forms of postmodern culture, whose reality
and novelty were not to be doubted-a sensibilitycloselyrelated
to the dematerialization of money, the ephemerality of fashion,
the glut of simulation in the new economies.48
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The twin poles of postmodem consciousness-implacable
determinism combined with sense of free-floating contingency-exemplifies the practical ideological expression of the
reified and fetishistic character of finance capital. The
fetishism of money has been given a new twist in the heightened abstractions of "fictitious capital:" the dematerialization
of money has amplified the sense of risk and contingency
throughout society. Where, after all, does wealth reside once
it has become "virtual" rather than "real?" Can any form of
wealth or income be really secure when fortunes :He won and
lost in cyberspace? All of this appears as an "tm.pattemed
naturalist 'chaos'."49 Like the tumult of natural disasters, the
"'solipsistic' speculative dance of Capital" is indifferent in its
effects; its violence is impersonal, "no longer attributable to
concrete individuals and their 'evil' intentions, but is purely
'objective, systemic, anonymous."'50
What is being suggested here is that with the ascendancy
of finance capital, the ideological verities of an older form of
capitalism have been scrambled and reconfigured. Notions
of human beings as "rational self-seekers" whose actions
result in broad social benefits have been overtaken by a
conception which views human actions as essentially unpattemed, chaotic, and unregulated. In this context, rational
forms of behaviour make less sense; risk-taking or "purposive-non-rational action" becomes more common.u Thus, the
"solipsism" of the financial speculator becomes the definition
of "normal" behaviour. Risk, chance, and the temptations of
the big "pay off"-inherent
aspects of the speculative
system-have become "the orienting image of social life itself,
the spectre of an elusive future circulating in the present,
forever dashing off toward the dusty horizon."52 Living with
risk and being at risk have become a way of life not just for
those who daily immerse themselves in the frenzied world of
financial speculation: "The willingness to risk ... is no longer
meant to be the province only of venture capitalists or
extraordinarily adventurous individuals. Risk is to become a
daily necessity shouldered by the masses. "53
It has been suggested that the ascendancy of "fictitious"
capital has engendered "a universal core of narcissistic experience ..." characterized by "(a) a cynical distancing from all
identification, but an acute awareness of lack of identity, and
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(b) consumptionist narcissistic dependency on the presentation of self via the commodity construction of identity. Highly
unstable, it can easily switch over to religious or ethnic
solutions."54 The "blase attitude" of Simmel's society of
money, has given way to the narcissistic cynicism of the financial gambler, unable to affirm any lasting values or goals
beyond the next trade.f Among some professional groups,
recognition, wealth and other markers of professional status
have superceded the older affinities of citizenship: "Hence,
the professions are more loyal to their professional occupation than to abstract notions of the state or public. They are
professional-citizens. "56
This kind of "libidinal investment in private life"57has
fuelled new forms of individualism which have been mirrored
and reinforced in other spheres of social life. In the productive sphere, the introduction of information technologies, the
"speed-up" of the labour process through the imposition of
lean production norms, and the increased use of contingent
labour have bred a heightened sense of insecurity as well as
undermining many of the traditional supports of class
solidarity and organization. 58 The loosened bonds of the
workplace have also loosened the bonds of community. If the
links between what people do to earn a living and where and
how they live have been eroding for many decades, the tum
to lean production has hastened this process. For many, the
contingent nature of work has meant that work is no longer a
source of pride and self-identity but a grim necessity; moving
from one or more jobs or places to another has sapped much
of the solidarity once typical of working class communities.
Becoming inured to feelings of fragmentation and disconnection are the all too common outcome of the brave new world
of the flexible workplace.c?
Meanwhile, neoliberal governments have employed the
powers of the state to foster a new civic culture more
conducive to the exigencies of the market. A new ideology
of "lean citizenship'w has evolved based around notions of
"self-reliance," "de-centralization," and "empowerment."
These have been married to the broader market values of
"entrepreneurship,"
"consumer choice," and the "risk
society. "61 All manner of state activities are being
re-engineered to conform to the narrow imperatives of the
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market and lean production.s' Older notions of social entitlement have been stripped down to those of consumer
choice; citizenship is now equated with the selective
demands of individual customers or clients.63 Under the
aegis of neoliberalism, the education system has been
charged with inculcating a new disciplinary regime based on
"new subjectivities more closely attuned to the requirements of the labour market."64 All of these changes are
meant to implicate citizens themselves in the erosion of the
social rights and civic culture associated with the Keynesian
welfare-state by fostering the illusion that a real devolution
of economic and social power is taking place. The intended
result is the "lean citizen:" one whose primary allegiance is
no longer to a broader ideal of social citizenship, but rather
to a diversity of communities of consumption and lifestyle,
or even narrower moral, ethnic or religious communities.
Against this backdrop it is perhaps not surprising that postmodernists have rejected the mundane legalisms of traditional
definitions of citizenship in favour of the loftier abstractions of
"hybridity," "fragmentation," and "difference," as their guiding principles.e What few have recognized, however, is that
the currency of these concepts may have something to do with
the alterations of global capitalism we have been describing.
As one commentator has aptly observed, "postmodern" conceptions of citizenship:
May be the result of our having immersed ourselves in the world
of persons and things, when the production of things has become
exponential and uncontrollable and is constantly redefining the
actions and the persons using them. And if the things being produced are in fact not material objects but fictions and images, we
have entered that post-modern and post-structuralist world in
which the languages, constantly reproducing themselves, are
more important than the persons speaking them."66
Universal norms and rights are rejected by postmodern
theorists in favour of a "politics of difference" which brings
formerly marginalized groups to the centre of its political concerns. These groups, it is argued, cannot be accommodated by
the "universalist" orientation of enlightenment conceptions of
citizenship since these were tailored to the needs and interests
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of largely white, European males.e? On this view, the movement of formerly excluded voices from the margins to the
centre of society, such as those of women, ethnic and sexual
minorities, has produced a multiplication of identities and
"postitionalities," which effectively disable attempts to specify a general or common interest. Commenting approvingly on
this orientation, two recent commentators claim that:
By exploring concepts such as conflict, struggle and agony and
arguing that they do not need to be inconsistent with democracy and citizenship, by abandoning the unitary concept of
individual and self, by abandoning the possibility of stable
cultural identities, by refusing an ethic of ultimate ends, and by
avoiding grand narratives and universal assumptions, teleological and evolutionist schemes, these studies begin to form an
alternative to liberal democratic, socialist and communitarian
conceptions of citizenship, democracy and politics.s''
This perspective explicitly endorses some of the more
dubious epistemological claims of postmodem thought in
which universal truth claims of any sort have become suspect:
All criteria for distinguishingbetween truth and falsehood, for
evaluating theory,require that one choose between categories, or
they expect one to establish a hierarchy of values that designates
some as good and others as bad. Post-modernists reject such
distinctions and rather emphasize multiple realities and the view
that no single interpretation of any phenomenon can be claimed
superior to any other.e?
The reason that we cannot really know or say much that is
meaningful about the world stems from the fact that the very
idea of a knowing subject has become suspect. Subjectivities,
like the ephemeral and image-soaked world we inhabit, are
themselves product of multiple and incommensurate "discourses." Thus, in the postmodem scheme of things, we seem
to be caught in an infinite regress of possible subject positions
without any firm basis for distinguishing one from another.
This "solipsism of discourse"7o prevents us from even formulating common rules of evidence and argument, let alone
attempting to agree on common social and political goals.
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Postmodernism has not entirely abandoned the subject,
however, though it has greatly constricted its area of
operations. Individuals may be divided, fragmented and
unstable but they are still considered the only basis upon
which knowledge is possible.t! In an odd reverse-Cartesian
twist, this has led some to see the body as the only reliable
basis of knowledge and as the cite from which to rethink the
social and political. "Objectivity," Donna Haraway claims,
"turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment
and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility."72
Whatever the merits of this approach,73 it is possible to
view the general orientation of the "new somatics"74 as a
response to the precariousness and insecurity which governs
the lives of many: an epistemological retreat into the intimacies of the body as a last redoubt of certainty against
ephemera of daily life. The problem with this view is that it is
difficult to imagine any body which has not already been
stamped by social processes; there simply is no such thing as
a neutral, pristine, body. This is especially true of labouring
bodies, a topic for which postmodernists have little time.t>
The body has indeed become a battleground, but for some
fairly old-fashioned reasons. The tum to lean production has
meant that not only has labour become more stressful, for
many, it has also become less transparent. While the use of
information technology in production often requires greater
technical skill, it also throws up an opaque wall between the
worker and the object being produced: "One's work is so
clear yet so obscure. Flexibility creates distinctions between
surface and depth; those who are flexibility's less powerful
subjects are forced to remain on the surface."76 It has been
suggested that we are now witnessing "a dramatic transition
of body percept and practice, from bodies suited for and
conceived in the terms of the era of Fordist mass production
to bodies suited for and conceived in the terms of the era of
flexible accumulation."77 This transition has had implications
for both the gendered nature of work as well for current cultural obsessions with "lean bodies:" "the fit body is a central
feature in contemporary understandings of sexuality and
desire. The lean ethos is ultimately about making bodies that
are hot, healthy and flexible, hard bodies for hard times. "78
74
MooersIFetisbism
The new fetishism of finance capital, therefore, has also
spawned a new and more all-embracing alienation of labour.
When Marx wrote that the modem worker "only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself,"79
he was referring to those areas of life where it was still possible for the worker to evade the embrace of capital.
Contemporary capitalism has closed that circle to such a
degree that it is now a rare private moment which has not
been touched by the logic of commodification and money.
The contemporary alienation of labour now encompasses the
entire spectrum of experience inside and outside the workplace: "The reorganization of labour... affects the way in
which people understand and conduct not just their work
lives, but their everyday business and leisure."8o The new
"culture-ideology of consumerism"81 is deeply imbricated
with the new global productive system, neatly sanitized so as
not to offend consumer appetites:
In selling culture, capital has extended its homogenizing imperatives to the very base of our subjectivities ...If the world is a
mall, at least from the perspective of the comfortable classes,
then this mall should be seen not as a cathedral but as a factory,
where the round of consumption and production grinds on, not
to the sound of machinery but to muzak and the smell of
cappuccino. In the mall which is the wider world, the same cycle
also runs, and outside the direct environment of the affluent, it
is fuelled by hard labour and little reward, and maintained by
repression and constant bloodletting. 82
Conclusion These facts are a salutary reminder that, however
much our subjectivities may have been swept up in the rarefied
atmosphere of finance capital, it is highly doubtful that
capitalism is about to dispense with the legally-defined subject
positions which underpin the social relationship between
capital and labour. Nor is it likely to accede to the infinite
regress of subject identities lauded by postmodem theorists.
Fragmented and multiple identities are fine so long as they
remain congruent with capitalist social-property relations and
commodity consumption: "If the system has need of the
autonomous subject in the law court or polling booth, it has
little enough use for it in the media or shopping mall."83
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Studies in Political Economy
This suggests too that law and the state are unlikely to
wither away any time soon, as some proponents of globalization have suggested. Law continues to be essential to the
forms of legal subjectivity which lie at the heart of abstract
citizenship in capitalist societies-as a measure of right, as a
normative standard, and as a means of social regulation.e' As
much as neoliberals decry state intervention when it comes to
the making of profits, they are happy to deploy state coercive
powers in the service of the civic and social order they desire.
If lean citizenship is the desired goal, the lean but strong state
has been its active champion.
At the same time, this regime has been flexible enough to
accommodate some significant equity demands. Part of the
reason for this is that the social and political costs of instituting
programs such as employment equity, while not negligible, are
still relatively slight. Such measures have the added benefit
of providing neoliberal governments with a patina of social
progressiveness without compromising their overall commitment to downsizing the state.85 Moreover, whatever their
intrinsic merits, such programs are perfectly compatible with
"corporate multiculturalism"86 in which "diversity" is
employed as part of a larger global marketing strategy. Indeed,
a compelling argument has been made that "the ideal form of
ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism."87 In
Canada certainly, the official version of "multiculturalism from
above" has functioned to mask and contain class conflict as
well as struggles around issues of race and ethnicity not recognized by the state.88 Citizenship rights, therefore, can be
extended to marginalized groups, as they were to the working
class in the nineteenth century, without in any way threatening
the private powers of capitalists. Civic equality and class
inequality can continue to exist side by side.89Therefore, while
it is true that the distinctions between the political, the economic, and the cultural spheres have become increasingly
blurred-largely to the benefit of private interests-the basic
separation between economics and politics remains as firmly
entrenched as ever. The private powers of appropriation
enjoyed by capitalists in the economic sphere are still fundamentally immune to public interference. Indeed, the last two
decades have been all about making private interests even
more impervious to public intervention. The extension of
76
MooersIFetisbism
citizenship rights, therefore, has definite limits when it comes
to challenging the private powers of capital. That is why
citizenship in the advanced capitalist countries of North will
continue to be the "broad church" it has always been, accommodating the high-flying dot-com millionaire and the destitute
single mother alike. And that, ironically, may be its greatest
limitation of all.
This leaves us with a final conundrum. If the practical
ideology of contemporary citizenship is as we have described
it-that is, people are aware of its limits yet continue to act as
if this were not the case-from whence can we expect systemic
change to arise? Has the "culture of distraction"90 generated
by global finance capital so effaced the connection between
production and consumption that all hope of resistance is
futile? Is the triumph of reification throughout society so
complete that we don't even notice it anymore?
As ubiquitous as the new forms of reification and fetishism
have become, they are still subject to contestation and disruption. The importance of viewing citizenship in liberal-capitalist
societies as a "compromise formation" as discussed earlier, is
that it opens up a gap between people's understanding and
how they act day to day. What this gap signals is a lack of deep
attachment to prevailing neoliberal values. And, where such a
gap exists-even if for a time it is filled by fatalism or cynicism-the potential for resistance remains open.s' If we ask
after the material sources of this tension, our earlier discussion
of the contradictory impulses engendered by the dual-sided
nature of wage-labour represents an essential starting point.
For it remains that the experience of the majority in capitalist
societies encompasses both the apparent freedom and equality they enjoy as sellers of their labour-power in the sphere of
circulation as well as the alienation and exploitation they
endure in the sphere of production.
This combination suggests two very different bases from
which rights claims might arise. While capitalism can accommodate claims for greater formal equality in the political
sphere, it has great difficulty with demands for more substantive forms of equality in the productive sphere. Thus, the
"compromise formation" between people's political awareness
and how they act as citizens is traceable to the contradictory
nature of working class experience. Not only do different
77
Studies in Political Economy
understandings of citizenship rights exist between different
social classes, competing conceptions are also present within
the minds of individuals and between different racial, ethic and
sexual minorities within the working class. Class identity, in
short, has always existed in reciprocal and dynamic tension
with other forms of identity.92
This has consequences for the way in which class and other
demands intersect with struggles over citizenship rights in the
political sphere. Rather than there being a single political
or public sphere there are in fact multiple public spheres or
"subaltern counterpublics ... where members of subordinated
social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to
formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities,
interests, and needs"93 Such discourses are what animate
political and social action. Political mobilizations certainly
include, but are by no means limited to demands for the
recognition of "difference." The lives of political and social
movements, like those of individuals, are never quite so neat.
Rather, class and identity-based demands tend to overlap one
another because they both express in different ways something about the multi-dimensional nature of human needs.
Such needs find expression in battles against exploitation in
the workplace; over issues of identity in the family; and over
issues of race or ethnicity in the community. The important
point is that, wherever people are situated (and they tend to
be in all of these situations simultaneously), some individuals
and groups will feel inspired to resist. Needs such as those for
community, security, freedom from oppression, dignity, and
the desire for self-determination and recognition, all implicate
notions of humanity and are, therefore, arguably universal
and attempts to thwart them usually result in political
resistance.s- Struggles against oppression and exploitation,
therefore, should not be seen as inhabiting separate domains
of experience. Even though the lines connecting them are not
always neatly traceable in reality, they are both rooted in
needs, desires, and aspirations which define what it means to
be human.s' In the end, we are left with "the concept of the
human being ... which contains within it the human being as
wage-labourer and the human being as non-wage-Iabourer,
both the inhuman existence as well as the ought that goes
beyond."96
78
MooersIFetishism
If resistance, as Walter Benjamin suggested, must begin
from an act of remembrance then we are already half way
there. The fact that we know but do not act (or act like we do
not know) means that the fetishistic distractions wrought by
global finance capital have not succeeded in seducing the
majority into an act of mass forgetting. And where memory
resides, so also do the seeds of resistance.
Notes
1. Ronald Beiner, What's The Matter With Liberalism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), p. 115.
2. See, J.M. Barbalet, Citizenship: Rights, Struggle, and Class Inequality
(Milton Keynes: Open University 1988). John Keane, Civil Society and
the State ( London: Verso, 1988); Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions
(Stanford:
Stanford
University
Press, 1998); Brian Turner,
"Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Citizenship," Brian Turner,
(ed.), Citizenship and Social Theory (London: Gage Publications:
1993). Thomas Janoski, Citizenship and Civil Society (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
3. Jean L. Cohen, "Changing Paradigms of Citizenship and the
Exclusiveness of the Demos," International Sociology 14/3 (September
1999).
4. For a good summary of postmodern politics, see Steven Best and
Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn (New York: The Guilford
Press, 1997), pp. 270-81.
5 Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (London: Verso, 1998), p. 96.
6. David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 286.
7. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, (Harrmondsworth, England: Penguin Books,
1973), p. 157.
8. V. Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money, (New York: Basic Books,
1994), p. 202.
9. Harvey, Justice, pp. 234-38.
10. Bertell Oilman, "Market Mystification in Capitalist and Market
Socialist Societies," in Bertell Oilman, (ed.), Market Socialism: The
Debate Among Socialists (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 84-85.
11. Karl Marx, Capital Volume One. Ben Fowkes, (trans), (New York:
Vintage, 1977), p. 280.
12. Ibid, p. 680.
13. Werner Bonefeld, "Money, Equality and Exploitation: Interpretation
of Marx's Treatment of Money," in Global Capital, Nation State and the
Politics of Money. Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway, (eds.),
(London: St. Martin's Press, 1995), pp. 187-88.
14. David Harvey, "Money, Time, Space and the City," in Consciousness
and the Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1985), p. 4. The "community of money" affects the form of citizenship
in other ways. It was Simmel, following Marx, who recognized that a
money economy establishes a relationship of abstract indifference
between citizens which closely parallels the abstract character of
money: " ... the inhabitants of a modem metropolis are independent in
79
Studies in Political Economy
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
80
the positive sense of the word, and, even though they require innumerable suppliers, workers and cooperators ... their relationship to them is
completely objective and is only embodied in money." Georg Simmel,
The Philosophy of Money, Torn Bottomore and David Frisby, (trans.),
(London: Routledge, 1990), p. 300. It was this social distancing effect of
money relations which Simmel saw as the source the blase attitude and
cynicism of modern life, (p. 255). The most prolific "nurseries of cynicism" were in his view "stock exchange dealings where money is available in huge quantities and changes owners easily." (p. 256)
Bob Fine, Democracy and the Rule of Law, (London: Pluto Press,
1986), pp. 97-98.
SlavojZizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London: Verso, 1989),p. 31.
David Hawkes, Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 177.
Zizek, Sublime Object, p. 45.
Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 1998), p. 8.
Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London: Verso, 1991), p. 134.
Harvey, "Money, Time, Space," p. 33.
Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part III, (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1975), p. 455.
David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, Second Edition, (London: Verso,
1999), p. 245.
Harvey, Justice, p. 243.
David McNally, "Turbulence in the World Economy," Monthly Review
51/2 (June 1999), p. 41.
Richard Dienst, "The Futures Market: Global Economics and Cultural
Studies," in Henry Schwartz and Richard Dienst, (eds.), Reading the
Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies (Boulder
Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), p. 83.
Harvey, Limits, p. 327.
Marx quoted in Ibid, p. 269.
Doug Henwood, Wall Street (London: Verso, 1998), p. 45
Ibid, p. 228.
Jameson, Cultural Turn, p. 142. This is not to suggest, as Baudrilliard
and others have implied, that capital has begun to "function independently of its own former aims...without reference to any aims whatsoever...the only genuine artificial satellite ...the oribit in which it rises and
sets like some artificial sun" Jean Baudrillard, quoted in Henwood,
Wall Street, p. 2. This sort of "vulgar postmodernism"(p. 2) simply
repeats and amplifies the fetishisms that Marx's analysis of the credit
system was designed to dispel. It seeks to deny that despite its stratospheric movements, all of the wealth circulated through the credit system is traceable to human labour (McNally, Turbulence, p. 102).
Michael J. Webber, and David L Rigby, The Golden Age Illusion:
Rethinking Postwar Capitalism (New York: Guilford Press, 1996),p. 29.
Ibid, p. 30.
Ben Fine, Costas Lapavitsas, and Dimitris Milonakis, "Addressing the
World Economy: Two Steps Back." Capital and Class 67 (Spring 1999),
pp.70-71.
Webber and Rigby, Golden Age, p. 29.
Fine, Lapavitsas, and Milonakis, "World Economy," pp. 72-73.
Webber and Rigby, Golden Age, p. 30; David Harvey, The Condition
of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1989), pp. 160-170;
Harvey,Justice, pp. 234-38.
MooersIFetishism
.r:
38. Paul Smith, Millennial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in
the North, (London: Verso, 1997), p. 35.
39. McNally, "Turbulence," pp. 41-42.
40. Harvey, Limits, p. 280.
41. Ibid, p. 435.
42. McNally, "Turbulence," pp. 47-51.
43. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, (Oxford University Press,
1978) p. 61.
44. Harvey, Justice, pp. 210-49.
45. Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late
Capitalism, (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 107. Two recent authors
have noted the extent to which identity politics has subsumed social
class. Wendy Brown claims the "identity politics is partly dependent
upon the demise of a critique of capitalism and bourgeois cultural and
economic values...(and remains) tethered to a formulation of justice
that reinscribes a bourgeois (masculinist) ideal as its measure." States of
Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995), p. 59. Lauren Berlant makes a similar point
arguing that the politics of intimacy and personal life have become so
pervasive that "a concern with the outrages of American class relations
has been made to seem trite and unsexy." The Queen of American Goes
to Washington, (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 8.
46. Jameson, Cultural Turn, p. 73.
47. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1996), p. viii.
48. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso 1998),
p.79.
49. Koula Mellos, "Reification and Speculation," Studies in Political
Economy 58 (Spring 1999), p. 122.
50. Slavoj Zizek, "The Spectre is Still Roaming Around." in An introduction to the 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto (Excerpts: 1,
4,10, Chapter 1): [http://www.arkzin.com/munist/zizle.htm]1998. p. 2.
51. Mellos, "Reification,' p. 130. Of course, financial firms and large institutional investors continue to think of themselves as rationally calculating risk on the basis of sophisticated mathematical models. However,
all such models are poor predictors of economic crisis since they merely project into the future what has taken place on the basis of past
trends.
52. Dienst, "Futures Market," p. 78.
53. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal
Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, (New York: W. W.
Norton and Company, 1998), p. 80. The concept of risk has become one
of the guiding principles of several contemporary versions of "third
way" social democracy. However, in the hands of such theorists as Beck
and Giddens, risk tends to be reified as an inevitable feature of "globalization." Ulrik Beck, Risk Society: Towards a new Modernity, Mark
Ritter, (trans.), (London: Sage, 1992); Giddens, Left and Right; Third
Way. For an extended critique of 'third way' theories see, Colin
Mooers, "Beyond Left and Right?: The Self-Limiting Politics of the
'Third Way'," in Mike Burke, Colin Mooers and John Shields, (eds.),
Restructuring and Resistance: Canadian Public Policy in an Age of
Global Capitalism (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2000).
54. Jonathan Friedman, "Narcissism, Roots and Postmodernity: The
Constitution of Selfhood in the Global Crisis," in Scott Lash and
81
Studies in Political Economy
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
82
Jonathan Friedman (eds.) Modernity and Identity, (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1993), pp. 358-61.
Henwood, Wall Street, p. 228.
Engin F. Isin, "Citizenship, Class and the Global City," Citizenship
Studies 3/2 (1999), p. 279.
Anderson, Origins, p. 57.
Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International
Economy (London: Verso, 1997).
Sennett, Corrosion, pp. 62-63.
Colin Mooers, "Can We Still Resist?: Globalization, Citizenship Rights
and Class Formation," in Citizens or Consumers?: Social Policy in a
Market Society (Halifax: Fernwood Publishers, 1999), pp. 291-95.
Nicholas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self
(London: Routledge, 1990).
Alan Sears, "The 'Lean' State and Capitalist Restructuring: Towards a
Theoretical Account," Studies in Political Economy 59 (Summer 1999).
John Shields and B. Mitchell Evans, Shrinking The State: Globalization
and Public Administration "Reform" (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing,
1998), pp. 78-82.
Alan Sears, "Education for a Lean World," in Mike Burke, Colin
Mooers and John Shields, (eds.), Restructuring and Resistance... 2nd
citiation: see fn. 53, p. 153.
James Good and Irving Velody, "Postmodernity and the Political," in
James Good and Irving Velody, (eds.) The Politics of Postmodernity
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 7-10;
William E. Connelly, Political Theory and Modernity, (Oxford:
Butterworth, 1988); Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of
Political Paradox, (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1991);
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge,
1993); Chantal Mouffe, Dimensions of Radical Democracy, (London:
Verso, 1992).
J. G. A. Pockock, "The Ideal of Citizenship Since Classical Times," in
Ronald Beiner, (ed.), Theorizing Citizenship. (Albany, New York:
SUNY, 1995). Arif Dirlik argues that Bhabha's concept of "hybridity"
with its emphasis on the fragmentation of postcolonial cultural experience simply mirrors in a one-sided fashion processes of fragmentation
and homogenization at work in contemporary global capitalism. "The
Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global
Capitalism," Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994), p. 349. Similar critiques
can be found in Aijaz Ahmed, "The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,"
Race and Class 36/3 (1995); E. San Juan, Beyond Postcolonial Theory,
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998); Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and
Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World, (Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 1999). For a discussion of how the concept
of "difference" has subsumed class in recent political theorizing on the
left, see Anne Philips, "From Equality to Difference: A Severe Case of
Displacement?," New Left Review 224 (1997).
Andrew Ross, (ed.), UniversalAbandon? The Politicsof Postmodernism,
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. xvi.
Engin F. Isin and Patricia K. Wood, Citizenship and Identity (London:
Sage, 1999), p. 21.
Pauline Marie Rosenau, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 80.
Dorothy E. Smith, Writing the Social: Critique, Theory and
Investigations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 109.
MooersIFetishism
71. Ibid, p. 107.
72. Donna Haraway cited in Harvey, Justice, p. 277.
73. Dorothy Smith makes a compelling case for the necessity of "situated
knowledge" whilst avoiding the relativism of much postmodern
thought, Writing the Social: Critique, Theory and Investigations
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 96-130.
74. Eagleton, Illusions, p. 70.
75. For a brilliant dissection of postmodern body politics see, David
McNally, Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor, and
Liberation, (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000).
76. Sennet, Corrosion, p. 75.
77. Emily Martin, cited in Harvey, Justice, p. 281.
78. Sears, '''Lean' State," p. 107.
79. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Dirk J.
Struik, (ed.), (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 110.
80. Paul Smith, Millennial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in
the North, (London: Verso, 1997), p. 32.
81. Leslie Sklair, "Social Movements and Global Capitalism," in Fredric
Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, (eds.), The Cultures of Globalization
(Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 297.
82. Julian Stallabrass, Gargantua: Manufacturing Mass Culture (London:
Verso, 1996), p. 167.
83. Eagleton, Illusions, p. 133.
84. Fine, Democracy, pp. 139-43. The state and law, in other words, are not
passive reflections of social relations in civil society, but rather are
directly constitutive of those relations as well as the ongoing "political
administration" of class conflict. See, Mark Neocleous, Administering
Civil Society: Towards a Theory of State Power, (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1996), pp. 46-55.
85. See, Janet Lum and A. Paul Williams, "Out of Sync with a 'Shrinking
State'?" and Anver Saloojee, "Containing Resistance: The Neoliberal
Boundaries of Employment Equity," in Burke, Mooers, and Shields,
(eds.), Restructuring and Resistance.
86. George Yudice, "Cultural Studies and Civil Society," in Henry
Schwartz and Richard Dienst, (eds.). Reading the Shape of the World:
Toward an International Cultural Studies, (Boulder Colorado: Westview
Press, 1996), p. 59.
87. Slavoj Zizek, "Multiculturalism,
Or, the Cultural Logic of
Multinational Capitalism," New Left Review 223 (1997), p. 44.
88. Himani Bannerji, "The Paradox of Diversity," in The Dark Side of the
Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender, (London:
Routledge, 2000).
89. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism, (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 201.
90. Stallabrass, Gargantua, p. 221.
91. This may be nowhere more evident than in the swiftness with which the
current global anti-capitalist movement has arisen.
92. Joanna Brenner, "On Gender and Class in U.S. Labor History,"
Monthly Review 50/6 (November 1998), p. 15.
93. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the
Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Craig Calhoun, (ed.),
Habermas and the Public Sphere, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996),
p.123.
83
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Studies in Political Economy
94. Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
2000), p. 100.
95. Whatever else they may disagree on, Marxists and liberal-democrats
are both still sufficiently rooted in the Enlightenment to agree that
some notion of universality is crucial to any meaningful definition of
citizenship.
96. Michael A. Lebowitz, Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the
Working Class (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992),p. 154.
84