History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism

Abstract

As is well known, the period since the early 1970s has been one of massive historical structural transformations of the global order, frequently referred to as the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism (or, better, from Fordism to post-Fordism to neoliberal global capitalism). This transformation of social, economic, and cultural life, which has entailed the undermining of the state-centric order of the mid – twentieth century, has been as fundamental as the earlier transition from nineteenth-century liberal capitalism to the stateinterventionist, bureaucratic forms of the twentieth century. These processes have entailed far-reaching changes in not only Western capitalist countries but communist countries as well, and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and European communism in addition to fundamental transformations in China. Consequently, they have been interpreted as marking the end of Marxism and of the theoretical relevance of Marx’s critical theory. And yet these processes of historical transformation have also reasserted the central importance of historical dynamics and large-scale structural changes. This problematic, which is at the heart of Marx’s critical theory, is precisely that which eludes the grasp of the major theories of the immediate post-Fordist era — those of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jurgen Habermas. Recent transformations have revealed those theories to have been retrospective, focused critically on the Fordist era, but no longer adequate to the contemporary post-Fordist world. Emphasizing the problematic of historical dynamics and transformations