Modernity or Postmodernity

Many historians, social scientists and other cultural commentators have stated that we are now living in an age of ‘postmodernity’, and that this has implications on our capacity for cultural construction, economic activity and the political process. Before we look at some of the empirical examples that support this notion we need to get some idea of what is meant by the term ‘postmodernity’. In popular parlance the state of postmodernity is defined as a society built on ‘sex and shopping’, or, in more sociological terms, people in ‘modern’ societies are defined by class derived from their role in production, whereas in a postmodern society people are defined by their consumption, or their lifestyle. This is very general indeed. Dictionary definitions tend to take us no further than tautological definitions of postmodernity as “the state or condition of being postmodern”. So, in true postmodern style, we need to deconstruct the notion of postmodernity and reconstruct it to give it some kind of generalised, overall meaning. French critical thinkers, notably Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard (and to a lesser extent Michel Foucault), from the 1960s onwards began to refer to postmodernity as a state or condition of society that could be said to exist after modernity, and / or a historical condition that marks the reasons for the end of modernity. The concept of postmodernity is entirely dependent upon an understanding of the notion of ‘modernity’, an historical epoch that coincides (more or less) with the Enlightenment or the Industrial Age. Philosophers, historians and cultural commentators, with varying emphases, generally concur that modernity is characterised by the ever increasing incorporation of rationality and hierarchy into public and artistic life, and some have gone further to say that modernity is a cultural condition characterised by constant change in the pursuit of progress. In this way modernity can be seen as contiguous with the development of capitalism (itself characterised by constant change and innovation) with its associated socio-political and scientific metanarratives of positivism, structuralism, liberalism and Marxism. Critical thinkers such as Lyotard argue that postmodernity represents the culmination of this process where constant change has become the status quo and the concept of progress has dissolved into obsolescence.

Others such as Fredric Jameson and David Harvey go further and identify postmodernity almost entirely with ‘late capitalism’, a stage of capitalism following finance capitalism, and characterised by highly mobile labour and capital and the weakening of geo-political boundaries and regulations to the movement of capital. Harvey specifically identifies late capitalism with the breakdown of the economic order following World War II (the Bretton Woods agreement).

Although there is some agreement in the description of postmodernity, there is no such agreement as to the benefits or drawbacks of postmodernity. There are many historians and philosophers who view the culmination of rationality and progress within modernity as inherently inhumane and flawed, leading to the long 20th Century of warfare, the holocaust and ever repeated explosions of ‘ethnic cleansing’ throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries. For these thinkers, the end of modernity has come none too soon. Equally there are those, particularly from the ‘critical theory’ tradition, such as Jurgen Habermas, that view modernity an unfinished historical epoch of the Enlightenment and view postmodernity and postmodern ideas with suspicion, as a resurgence of counter-enlightenment ideas, a return to a darker, less rational age.

Jameson views a number of phenomena as distinguishing postmodernity from modernity. Firstly, he speaks of "a new kind of superficiality" or "depthlessness" in which models that once explained people and things in terms of an "inside" and an "outside" (such as hermeneutics, the dialectic, Freudian repression, the existentialist distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity and the semiotic distinction of signifier and signified) have been rejected. Secondly he points to a rejection of the modernist "Utopian gesture" and the reductionism in art from the transformative to the decorative. The third feature of the postmodern age that Jameson identifies is the "waning of affect" He notes that "pastiche eclipses parody" as "the increasing unavailability of the personal style" leads to pastiche becoming a universal practice.

Jameson argues that distance has been abolished in postmodernity. The postmodern era has seen a change in the social function of culture. He identifies culture in the modern age as having had a property of "semi-autonomy", with an "existence… above the practical world of the existent" but, in the postmodern age, culture has been deprived of this autonomy, the cultural has expanded to consume the entire social realm so that all becomes "cultural". "Critical distance", the assumption that culture can be positioned outside "the massive Being of capital" upon which left-wing theories of cultural politics are dependent, has become outmoded.

Economic and technological conditions of our age have given rise to a decentralized, media-dominated society in which ideas are only simulacra, inter-referential representations and copies of each other with no real, original, stable or objective source of communication and meaning. Globalization, brought on by innovations in communication, manufacturing and transportation, is often cited as one force which has driven the decentralized modern life, creating a culturally pluralistic and interconnected global society lacking any single dominant centre of political power, communication or intellectual production. The postmodernist view is that inter-subjective, not objective, knowledge will be the dominant form of discourse under such conditions and that ubiquity of dissemination fundamentally alters the relationship between reader and that which is read, between observer and the observed, between those who consume and those who produce.

In terms of information dissemination and political action the basic premise of postmodernity is that the metanarratives of class, race, gender, and the consequent liberationist political movements are obsolete, and that the discourse of political change has become increasingly atomised and decentred.

At this point we need to take stock and determine whether or not we live in a state of (high or late) modernity or postmodernity.

The case for postmodernity would run roughly thus. The great socio-economic metanarratives of Marxism and liberalism with concerted political actions from a coherent philosophical perspective are dead. Communism has had its day, for example with the rapid capitalisation of China, the breakup of the Soviet Union and death of Yugoslavia. The iconic image to support this perspective is the fall of the Berlin Wall. Further, within the UK we have seen a slow but steady disengagement with political parties and the political process over the past twenty years and a consequent rise in single issue politics and personal political practices, such as, for example, 21st Century feminisms, that focus to a dominant extent on personal male behaviour and attitudes towards women, rather than meta-political processes of socio-political change to enhance the position of women power per se in our society. The past fifty years (in particular the past ten years) have seen widespread technological developments that have fundamentally shifted the ways in which we define ourselves and organise our lives. We are all on Facebook and are likely to live as much of our lives in cyber-space as in geographical space, we subscribe to specific single issue causes, and we define ourselves by our tastes and our consumption not by our occupation. In other words we are postmodern.

The case against postmodernity makes roughly the opposite claims. It states that we are living in a different age to that of our parents and grandparents, but we are still living in the modern age. It accepts that communism has failed in that the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are no more. It accepts that we are much more defined by a decentred consumerism than we used to be, and that national and even supra-national boundaries have less force in the regulation of capital than ever before. However, it would point to the persistence of the one major metanarrative, capitalism, and its capacity to change and reform itself to remain constantly historically contingent. It would also argue that total of the single issues that individual people become involved in tend to articulate to a coherent political position. In other words, from the individual perspective the labels of liberal, conservative, socialist etc, can and do still apply.

The arguments for some form of late modernity are more compelling than those for postmodernity. We do consume cultural artefacts (often ironically) in isolation from their context (think about exactly what is on your iPod); there is a ‘sex and shopping’ feel to our modern western societies, and we are more than inveterate consumers. We also engage more than ever in single issue politics, and are to some extent obsessed with lifestyle.  We also engage in the ultimate of postmodern experiences; using web technologies to interact globally from our own homes. However, we remain attached to our neighbourhoods; indeed our sense of place is as strong as ever, and socio-geographic mobility is no greater than in the 1950s. Class awareness OF itself is little changed in the past century and meta-concepts such as nation and ethnicity are still defining elements of our selves. There has been some decline in the meta-narrative of socialism over the past thirty years in that class awareness FOR itself has declined, but this is much more to do with the relatively recent success of neo-liberal hegemony that it is with a fundamental shift in the shape of our society. The majority of people still hold to the basic Enlightenment principles of rationality and progress, with a general support for science and other rational discourses.

Whether we are living in a state of modernity or postmodernity is important in terms of liberationaist actions, as it will determine the course of our political activity.

A Fairy Story

Hello children everywhere. Let me tell you a little bedtime story.

Once upon a time there was a very naughty man called Mr Hitler. He put lots and lots of people into big prisons, killed lots of people because they were not like him and made a very big war. Lots of people from all over got very cross and fought Mr Hitler and his friends. Lots of these people died but eventually they beat Mr Hitler and told him and his friends to stop it and behave themselves. Most of then did behave themselves but some of them would not so the people had to kill them or put them in prison so everyone would be safe. The people then said this is a ‘New World Order’ and we must not let such naughty people do their wicked things anymore.

As part of this ‘New World Order’ the people in a country called Britain decided to make some new things that would be nice for all the people. This was very new, you see, because before they fought Mr Hitler most of the people in Britain had to live in dark and dingy places with smelly water and dirty clothes. Only a few people had nice things. Those lucky people had motor cars, sea cruises, very big houses and nice comfy beds. The ladies of the lucky people wore long dresses with sequins and the men wore top hats. They were called the plutocrats. Now children, Britain is the name of the country we live in, and yes this story is about us.

Now, you may be wondering exactly what the nice things were that we decided should be for everybody. Well, there were lots of things such as hospitals, schools and houses. There were also other things such as better wages and free medicine. We were very pleased with these things and some of us even called Britain the ‘New Jerusalem’. Now, it was quite difficult to make all these things and it cost lots of money, and the war with Mr Hitler had already cost a lot of money. So, to make all these lovely things we had to do something called ‘raising taxes’ which meant that everybody put a little bit of money in the pot to help pay for things. This still wasn’t enough money though so we had to borrow some money from our best friends in another country called America. To help us do all this we got a man called Mr Atlee to help us. This all went very well and everyone was very happy.

This lasted for many years; sometimes we didn’t want to pay quite so much tax so we had a few less things and at other times we wanted more nice things so we paid a bit more tax.

Then after many years, there came along a very clever lady by the name of Thatcher. She became very powerful and told us that she knew best what we would like and so we told her that she could decide what was best.  She did lots of things that we didn’t fully understand but because she was very clever we let her keep doing them as we knew that she knew best. She started to take away some of our nice things, and told us that we didn’t need to pay as much tax. She told us that we would like to keep our money because money is better than nice things, and we believed her. She even made some of the nice things private so we could buy them with our own money if we wanted to or just not bother if we didn’t. She said this was choice and we it would bring us joy. Then she tried to kill all our children and make quite a lot of us live in cardboard boxes. She told us that this was a good thing and that it would make our country great again. She also told us that we had been much happier when we were fighting Mr Hitler and to make us happy again she would make us another war. How we cheered as our soldiers and sailors went off to the other side of the world to fight a new set of naughty people who were called the ‘Argies’.

But as time went on we started to become unhappy and thought that we would like her to go away. She became very sad at this and let one of her friends, Mr Major, look after us and make our decisions. But Mr Major was not very clever and got cross with his friends. He even called them ’bastards’, which is a very rude word indeed. So we let another person look after us and he was called Mr Blair. He said that he thought we would like to have our nice things back but that we would still like to have all that lovely choice and not have to pay lots of tax. His friend Mr Brown helped him to make this happen in a very clever way. Mr Brown built us his very special thing called a deficit and for a while everything was lovely. To make us even happier Mr Blair made us some new wars along with our best friends, America. But we did not cheer and these wars made us unhappy so Mr Blair left and let Mr Brown look after us by himself. Mr Brown then made his other special thing with a complicated name. He called it ‘light touch regulation of the financial sector’ and it made us very happy and gave us lots of nice things.

But things went wrong. You see, Mr Brown’s new thing was so complicated it led to a very bad new thing called ‘toxic debt trading’ and this new bad thing made an even worse thing called ‘sovereign debt’.

Then Thatcher’s son came along and said he would help us along with his best friend, Nutcase Nick. He has told us that we have to get rid of all our nice things and pay more tax, and that doing this is a very good and noble thing that will make us happy because we will have so many nice things in the future and even more choice than ever before. Her son is called Cameron and he says that we are broken, and to mend us he is going to take all our food away and then we will be very happy, our country will be renamed Airstrip One, and we will return to the ‘Old World Order’.

Now, children, I cannot tell you anymore as the story has not ended, and for all we know may never have an end.

Why Labour must move to the Left

The recent general election in the UK can be viewed as a repudiation of ‘New Labour’ after thirteen years at the helm. What it also showed was no significant surge in support for any viable alternatives. The Liberal Democrat share of the vote nationally increased marginally whilst their number of seats in Parliament fell slightly. Support for David Cameron’s ‘modernised’ Conservatives did not materialise in any real way; their increased number of seats in large part being due to Labour’s loss of support rather than any noticeable Tory surge; and this with a friendly media and after a great deal of Lord Ashcroft’s money was thrown at the campaign. The resulting Conservative – Liberal Democrat coalition is the result of an indeterminate election result.

At this point we need to examine two distinct factors; why did Labour’s vote fall to the point that it lost the election, and, why was there no strong enthusiasm for any alternative. In many ways these two factors coalesce over an apparent much talked about loss of confidence in the political process and the so-called political class, due in the main, although not entirely, to the expenses crisis that saw a number of MPs across the House of Commons being implicated in some form of swindling of the public purse. A great deal of the discussion of the expenses crisis generated much more heat than light. In the final analysis a small but significant number of MPs were shown to be in breach of the expenses rules, an even smaller number to be involved in genuine fraud. Associated with this in the public mind were video images of senior MPs involving themselves in a ‘cash for questions’ scandal. What was not publicised to any great extent was the probity and honesty of the majority of MPs. The issue of MPs expenses is a serious one and the rules have since been simplified, although it is far from clear if the new process is actually fair. We need to see exactly how things work out. What cannot be denied, however, is that confidence in Parliamentarians was severely dented, with Labour suffering a little more than the other parties simply because it happened on their watch.

The second issue to affect Labour and to a lesser extent the Conservative Party was the Iraq war. Although this is not the first election since the Iraq war, it was within the last Parliament that the details of the ‘dossier’ and the reasons for going to war have come into the public domain, leaving a public perception of Tony Blair as lying to Parliament and being supported in this lie by other senior members of the Government. Whether Blair lied or not is immaterial; it is the perception of lying that is enough. Why I say the Conservatives were also harmed by the Iraq war is that they were relatively enthusiastic supporters of it from the outset. Even without the infamous dossier and the issue of did Tony Blair lie or not, it is clear that there was a huge fracture between the political will to war and public opinion. Iraq was not and never could have been a ‘popular’ war. These two issues I feel explain much of why support for Labour dwindled and support for the Conservatives failed to increase. It may also go some way towards explaining the slight increase in overall support for the Liberal Democrats, who were not implicated in the expenses issue (at least until after the election) and who, for the most part, consistently opposed the Iraq war. The failure to turn this slight increase in support into seats owed as much to a very poor election campaign by the Liberal Democrats, who were never certain where or who to target, than it did to the much criticised electoral system.

To look at issues specific to the Labour defeat we need look no further than the global financial crisis. The crisis was not of Labour’s making, at least not entirely. This is not the time to examine the minutiae of the financial crises but to summarise it as a crises of deregulation. It began with a crisis in credit emanating from the unregulated and often disguised trading in toxic loans derived from the unethical sales of sub-prime mortgages in the USA, and it culminated in the near meltdown of worldwide banking and financial systems, with almost all the economies of the liberal democracies going into recession. The actions of Gordon Brown in the early phases of the crisis were rightly praised internationally and shoring up the banks and other corporate financial institutions was the only ‘sticking plaster’ in the first aid box. Without it things would have been much, much worse. However, both as Chancellor of the Exchequer and as Prime Minister, Gordon Brown had championed ‘light touch’ regulation in part to prioritise the City of London as a world financial centre, and develop a ‘business friendly’ economic environment. What is slightly unfair is that this approach was enthusiastically supported by all parties.

As the crisis deepened issues of public deficit (the gap between receipts and expenditure for any one year) and of sovereign debt (the money borrowed by governments from banks, pension fund portfolios and other institutions) became the critical issue, with a number of EU countries having their creditworthiness downgraded. Both government deficit and government or sovereign debt are expressed as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as this best expresses the capacity of a country to budget and service its financial obligations.

The figures for 2009, the last full year for which there are figures shows the UK with a budget deficit of 11.4% GDP (£159.2billion) and a debt of 68.1% GDP (£950.4 billion). To put it into perspective, this compares favourably with Greece, for example, which had a budget deficit of 12.5% GDP and a debt of 113% GDP. Further, the UK debt, despite a rise in 2008 and 2009 is still much lower than it was in the 1950s and 1960s, when it averaged around 100% GDP.

However, the world in 2010 is very different to that in 1955; new geo-political entities have come into being and there have been periodic crises in both financial and economic systems since that time.

Two key issues were overlooked then and remain overlooked now, and much is revealed in the language of crisis. According to received economic wisdom recession is dirty word, and a healthy economy will be achieving (or seeking to achieve) an annual growth rate of 3%. This was all pretty hunky dory way back in say, 1750, when the individual capitalist took one days profit and then invested them in production for the next day. This is all well and good as long as there is somewhere for the profits to flow. When European countries became fully capitalist and the process of capital-labour we now understand had fully come into being, they began to look for other places to invest, and other ways to bring down costs; the result was colonisation in its various forms, opening up new markets for goods and sourcing cheaper labour for production. This has continued in various forms to this day, to the point that worldwide markets are more or less saturated and there is little left in terms of a reserve pool of labour.

As capitalism developed especially in terms of technological change, it become apparent that the educational levels of the labour force needed to be enhanced, leading to the educational reforms across the developed world that form our modern educational systems. An unintended consequence of education, however, is the development of the power to critique and question. Thus a number of labour rights and elements of welfare-statism developed independently in various countries.

This creates a serious problem for capital. If markets are already saturated where does capital go if it cannot go back into production? In recent years two things have happened. Surplus profits have not been reinvested in production but in gambling schemes such as derivatives and in property (sub-prime mortgages) and serious problems have ensued.

The other, more long-lasting solution has been privatisation of existing publically funded entities. This forms the core of the neo-liberal solution. For capital to have somewhere to go it has to go into new areas such as health and education. Hence in the UK we have had a variety private finance initiatives, ranging from the privatisation of the public utilities in the 1980s right through to proposals to partially privatise schools from the current government. However, such solutions can at best only be temporary; where does capital go when all publically funded entities have been privatised and there are no more markets left to penetrate? The answer is catastrophe!

We are at a very serious juncture in world history. It will solve little to simply blame the banks and seek tighter national and international regulation. Little will be achieved by a new ‘Bretton Woods’ agreement on financial systems and processes. All these things can ever do is buy a little time before almighty meltdown. The entire process needs to be overhauled and economic processes rescued from the fetishism of finances. The Labour Party can play a significant part in this process

Firstly, the Labour Party needs to develop a systematic economic policy that looks at a serious permanent reduction in the level of private financial activity, and a wholesale growth of the public sector. This needs to also inform foreign policy that will work towards enhancing the worldwide development of public financial structures as opposed to private ones. Secondly, the concept of growth as an absolute necessity needs to be dropped. It is not growth that is required but stability. A fruitful by-product of an enhanced public sector would be greater democratic control of the economy through the ballot box rather then via the corporate financial institutions, and the level of governmental control would enhance all governments’ capacities to deal more effectively with climate change.

Much of what is required will not be achieved quickly, but, in the first instance it is absolutely crucial that a British government takes complete control of those elements of the banking and financial services sector that are located in the UK. If that means banks and others upping and jumping ship so be it; other countries will follow the example and then they will have nowhere to go. In the 1970s we used to idealistically talk about nationalising the ‘commanding heights of the economy’. Then it was a preference; now it is a necessity. If the Labour Party has any meaning at all, it is to fulfil its historic destiny. Now is the time, for all our sakes.

Israel attacks aid ships

Yesterday Israel attacked a small flotilla of six ships carrying food, medicine and other aid to Gaza; the ships had on board six hundred humanitarian activists from many nations and sailed from Turkey. Amongst the humanitarian activists on board the ships were Northern Ireland’s Maraid Corrigan, the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Hedy Epstein, holocaust survivor and peace activist, and a number of European legislators.

At the time of the attack the ships were in international waters. As a result of the attack at least ten people were killed and thirty injured; some reports give the figures as high as nineteen dead and sixty injured. No Israeli soldiers were killed; two suffered injury.

The Israeli Defense Force and latterly spokesmen for the Israeli Government, including Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Alyon, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have variously claimed that the Israeli soldiers fought only defend themselves after being attacked on board the ships, and that the convoy itself was a provocation to Israel, and that it may have been carrying arms for the Palestinians. On the first point, counter claims have been made from individuals on board the ships that the Israeli soldiers landed on the ships already firing their weapons, whilst one also needs to note that the boarding of those ships in international waters was illegal and can be construed at best as piracy; at worst as an act of aggression against Turkey. On the second point the convoy was carrying a fully manifested cargo of 10,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid. This comprised primarily food, medicines, cement, other building materials, and water purifiers, materials which Israel has consistently refused to let through to Gaza as part of the ongoing blockade (since 2007).

That blockade has had a severe impact on the lives of the people of Gaza. There are continual breakdowns of the electricity system and sanitation system in Gaza through a lack of spare parts needed for ongoing maintenance and repair; there is a lack of food and medicine, to the point that the infrastructure of Gaza and the health of the inhabitants of Gaza have significantly deteriorated over the past two years. Indeed, the blockade has ensured that the collateral damage instituted by Israel in 2008 in its twenty-two day attack on Gaza has never been made good.

Some figures from the United Nations and the Aid agencies make clear the dire situation for Gazans.

• since the intensification of the siege in June 2007, “the formal economy in Gaza has collapsed”
• ”61% of people in the Gaza Strip are …food insecure,” of which “65% are children under 18 years”
• since June 2007, “the number of Palestine refugees unable to access food and lacking the means to purchase even the most basic items, such as soap, school stationery and safe drinking water, has tripled”
• ”in February 2009, the level of anaemia in babies (9-12 months) was as high as 65.5%”

Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Ehud Olmert, the then Israeli Prime Minister, said when the blockade was first imposed: "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger"; a comment that is as racist, heartless and cruel as it is crass.

The attack in 2008, precipitated by Hamas rocket attacks of northern Israel, provides another example of Israeli aggression. The Hamas rocket attacks killed thirteen Israelis; the Israeli response led to the deaths of 1,400 Palestinians, trapped in the homes and neighbourhoods and then brutally bombarded.

The 2008 attack, the blockade / siege, and now the illegal assault on foreign ships are but the latest events in a long line of Israeli atrocities and international crimes against humanity. Other examples are:

• The Sabra and Shatilla massacres in 1982: They took place in the refugee camps in Lebanon.
• The crushing of the 1987 Palestinian intifada resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children, with many more injured or maimed for life.

There are in reality hundreds of examples of Israeli atrocities meted out to Palestinians; Amnesty International published a full condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank as long ago as 2004. At some point the world needs to take action. The community of nations must take the strongest possible action against Israel. A UN resolution is being put forward by Turkey; the acid test is if this will be supported by the USA. If it is not, then everything that Barak Obama promised to be is a lie, a simulacrum. American Zionism can no longer legitimately prop up the rogue nation of Israel. Until the Israel question is resolved there will be no peace or stability in the middle-east. How many more Palestinians have to die?