http://www.solidarity-us.org/current/node/2036
Is Anti-Capitalism Enough? The New Crisis & the Left
— Howard Brick
The New Spirit of Capitalism
by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello
translated by Gregory Elliott
Verso Books 2006, paperback edition 2007, 656 pages, $39.95.
WHETHER OR NOT the current economic crisis and a historic
presidential election open up hidden potentials for renewed
popular protest and collective action, it is obvious that the
radical Left has lost a great deal of its size, visibility, élan
and influence since the 1970s.
When French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello commenced
their work together in the mid-1990s, resulting in this monumental
and inventive book, they saw not only that the Right had surged
and the Left declined since heady days of revolt in the late 1960s.
They also believed that “social critique has not seemed so
helpless for a century.” That is, the practical and theoretical
opposition to the status quo was weaker than at any time since the
beginnings of the modern mass labor and socialist movement.(1)
Why was the opposition so deep in the hole? After all, the signs
of growing inequality were evident, and activism persisted through
the 1980s and ’90s in addressing acute problems and grievances,
concerning AIDS, homelessness, the plight of the undocumented, or
the lack of modern medical care in the poor world at large. But
almost no one talked much any longer of the systemic framework —
of capitalism — that demanded a correspondingly systemic
challenge, thought Boltanski and Chiapello (hereafter B&C).
In this respect, things may have been different in the United
States than in France. Here, plenty of people were talking about
capitalism — in an overwhelming din of celebration.
While the remarkable energy signaled by the burst of the
“anti-globalization,” or global justice movement, promised to
“revive critique,” as B&C put it, those campaigns suffered a sharp
setback in the wake of a renewed Right turn following 9-11. Even
the momentous antiwar protests of 2003 lost energy steadily as the
Iraq war continued.
Now, nearly ten years after B&C first ventured their judgment that
“capitalism has benefited from the enfeeblement of critique,” it
remains unclear if much is different.(2) Capitalism has suddenly
revealed its fragility for all to see, but it is quite another
matter whether the Left now has the standing or the poise to offer
the radical, democratic and transitional demands that would, one
would think, have a growing audience amidst the present crisis and
current calls for “change.”
It is the great ambition of The New Spirit of Capitalism to
diagnose the peculiar shape that capitalism has assumed since the
1970s, to explain how and why its new forms have eluded a
forceful, concentrated challenge, and to venture proposals for
reinvigorating, indeed reinventing an effective anticapitalist
critique.
It’s not as if everything is new: Capitalism, in B&C’s eyes,
remains a system for pursuing profits and limitless accumulation,
amidst the generalization of wage-labor; and anticapitalism —
critiques of the domination, alienation, inequality, and
antisocial egoism spawned by the system—has kept it company since
its very beginning. Yet there has been plenty of room for
shape-shifting along the way.
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