Capitalism after Globalization

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Rarely do historical events cooperate with the work of cultural studies as readily as they appear to have done with Paul Smith’s Millennial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North. Several months after his book first appeared in stores, a worldwide stock market crisis seemed to provide corroborating evidence for Smith’s most audacious claim, that globalization’s promise of a stateless, borderless world is little more than an elaborate cover story told by capitalism’s apologists in a variety of fields. Smith identifies a tendency in cultural studies in particular to treat globalization as a revolutionary change in the way the world does business. In truth, he argues, it is nothing of the sort. Far from introducing a radically new mode of production, “the budding global economy simply nurtures the social relations of colonial business as usual” (10). The methodological upshot of this argument should be clear. High-profile theorists such as Stuart Hall and Saskia Sassen make a fatal error, Smith contends, if they assume that globalization has so changed capitalism that the old-fashioned tools of Marxist analysis no longer apply. Echoing ongoing debates over post-Fordism and postmodernity, Smith sets out to prove that “the fundamentally different descriptions of the world that Marxism can offer are still crucial” (3). Though certain aspects of Smith’s defense of Marxism are open to question, his assessment of late modern capitalism appears to be borne out by the historical narratives he reconsiders in Millennial Dreams. The market collapse of 27 October 1997, an event that happened well after his book went to press, lends further credence to his claims. Sparked in the markets of Asia, the crisis at first seemed to testify to a genuine shift in global economic power. Within a matter of days, however, the old imperial calculus of Northern management of Southern economies returned to the fore.