March 17, 2006: Social Movements #5: Secular Trends
My previous blogs on social movements focused more on their episodic aspects. There is also the question of the long-range or secular tendencies of social struggle. In particular one could question whether there has been a secular decline in the capacities of the working class (or subordinate social groups in general) to engage in struggles against the power of capital and the state. The postmodernist trend in left social theory claims to have identified a major shift in the evolution of capitalist society that has weakened these capacities. This epochal shift--from modernity to postmodernity--is supposedly based upon a social "break" that occurred sometime in the early 1970s. Postmodernist writers, in characterizing this break, have emphasized both cultural and economic changes involving the rise of consumerism, information technology, flexible accumulation, increased cultural diversity, and social fragmentation.
However, I tend to agree with Ellen Meiksins Wood that, "If we've been seeing something new since the 1970s, it's not a major discontinuity in capitalism but, on the contrary, capitalism itself reaching maturity. It may be that we're seeing the first real effects of capitalism as a comprehensive system." (Monthly Review, July-August 1996) In other words, we're now seeing the completion of the process of real subsumption of society into capitalism, a concept that Marx developed in his critique of political economy, nearly 150 years ago.
In the following several blogs, I want to look more closely at the concept of real subsumption and and try to see what consequences the real subsumption of society under capitalism has for activists and for social movements.
