Perspectives on the Crisis of Political Thought: Labor and Society

Abstract

The essays in this issue are a response to an apparent contradiction. How can we explain the disjunction between rapid, spectacular technological and economic change, and the continued reception of ideological patterns derived from nineteenthcentury originals? Has theory been unable to reform itself, let alone to encapsulate and direct the processes of social transformation? Indeed, the repetitive and imitative character of much of contemporary political theory seems to herald an end but not an actualization of philosophy. But its very stagnancy may hold the key to its relation to concrete social life. Behind the dazzling dance of phenomenal forms, fundamental historical structures of social relationships and social activity persist. It is here that the deep experiential basis for ideological currents of distant origin reproduces itself. The central issue is the tenacity of capitalism, whose apologists and critics in many respects occupy essentially the same terrain as they did at the height of the Industrial Revolution. For all the newness of the present moment, for all its unprecedented dangers and opportunities, for all its frenetic technical development, the persistence of capitalist relations of production is the ground from which liberal and Marxist reflections continue to spring. The current world market invites comparison with Plato's analogy of the cave, where a surface flurry of activity conceals an underlying fixity of structures. In the cave of advanced capitalism this stagnation is not a permanent and unchangeable structure of being, but a historical and social product. It ensues from the blockage of real transformative dynamics in society whose causes require the most urgent and probing investigation. In itself, political theory is powerless to shake the foundation of such a world. But if capitalism persists, it persists in a crisis-ridden form which constantly reproduces its basic contradictions in new and unstable configurations. These, in turn, open a limited range of new perspectives for social thought. The structural dislocations entailed in the globalization of production, the specific traits assumed by cyclical fluctuations, and shifts in models of accumulation do not directly signify the emergence of qualitatively new forms of social life, but evince the contradictory logic of advanced capitalism. In these conditions of persistence and change, however, new forms of struggle and new social movements arise along the basic line of cleavage between labor and capital. They project possibilities of transformation beyond the