late capitalism essay

We live in a time of ‘late capitalism’. But what does that mean? And what’s so late about it?

PhD candidate in Political Economy, University of Sydney

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David Elias Aviles Espinoza received funding for his PhD research from the Chilean Agency for Research and Development (ANID)

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The term “late capitalism” seems to be everywhere as a trending meme – often used as a kind of shorthand to illustrate the absurdities of certain free market economies.

On Twitter, you will find the hashtags #latecapitalism (English), #tardocapitalismo (Italian), #capitalismotardio (Spanish), and #spätkapitalismus (German), among others. Typically, they satirise notions such as the idea of endless growth.

The term also pops up in a wide range of academic articles and books. There are, for instance, discussions around the populist rise in late capitalism, the increase in financial-related investments in late capitalism, migration conditions in late capitalism, and so on.

But what are the origins of this term? And what, exactly, does it mean?

The origins

Karl Marx first analysed the last stage of capitalism in his three-volume magnum opus Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (published in 1867, 1885, and 1894), particularly in Volume 3.

For Marx, an acceleration in the turnover of capital, concentrating wealth in the hands of the few, would result in a continuous tendency to crises. This, he believed, would ultimately make the system collapse.

Read more: Karl Marx: his philosophy explained

However, Marx did not use the term “late capitalism”. It was coined by Werner Sombart, a controversial German historical economist, almost a century ago in his three-volume magnum opus Der Moderne Kapitalismus (published from 1902 through 1927).

Sombart’s main contribution was to define three periods of the capitalist economic system: early or proto capitalism, advanced capitalism and late capitalism. In Sombart’s analysis, late capitalism referred specifically to economic, political and social deprivations associated with the aftermath of the first world war.

A new epoch

The term wasn’t taken up widely until Belgian Marxist economist Ernest Mandel’s treatise Late Capitalism was published in English in 1975.

Mandel used the idea to describe the economic expansion after the second world war. This was a time characterised by the emergence of multinational companies, a growth in the global circulation of capital and an increase in corporate profits and the wealth of certain individuals, chiefly in the West.

As Mandel described it, the period of late capitalism did not represent a change in the essence of capitalism, only a new epoch marked by expansion and acceleration in production and exchange. Thus one of the main features of late capitalism is the increasing amounts of capital investments into non-traditional productive areas, such as the expansion of credit.

This period of exceptional economic growth, argued Mandel, would reach its limit by the mid 1970s. At this time, the world economy was experiencing an oil crisis ( in 1973, and a second wave in 1979 ). Britain was also experiencing a banking crisis derived from a fall in property prices and an increase in interest rates.

However, since the time of Mandel’s writing such crises have become recurrent.

For instance, the 1980s were known for the different regional financial crises, such as in Latin America, the US and Japan. In 1997, we saw the Asian financial crisis . The 2008 US subprime crisis became the Great Recession .

The cultural component

The term “late capitalism” regained relevance in 1991 when Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson published Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism .

Drawing on Mandel’s idea that capitalism has sped up and gone global, Jameson expanded his analysis to the cultural realm. His argument was that late capitalist societies have lost their connection with history and are defined by a fascination with the present.

In Jameson’s account, late capitalism is characterised by a globalised, post-industrial economy, where everything – not just material resources and products but also immaterial dimensions, such as the arts and lifestyle activities – becomes commodified and consumable.

In this capitalist stage, we see innovation for the sake of innovation, a superficial projected image of self via celebrities or “influencers” channelled through social media, and so on.

In this time, whatever societal changes that emerge are quickly transformed into products for exchange. Unlike those who celebrate postmodernism as replete with irony and transgression, Jameson considers it to be a non-threatening feature of the capitalist system in contemporary societies.

More recently, Jonathan Crary, in his book Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep , argues our current version of 24/7 capitalism, enabled by intrusive technologies and social media, is eroding basic human needs such as sufficient sleep. It is also eliminating “the useless time of reflection and contemplation”.

And then what?

Since its conception, the idea of late capitalism has chiefly referred to the latest stage of capitalist development. This “last stage” condition has been bestowed on almost every period following a moment of economic crisis.

Global economic upheavals such as the 2008 subprime crisis and the financial upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a simultaneous expansion and concentration of wealth.

In other words, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, such is the ever-turning gyre of capitalism. Indeed, contemporary economists, such as Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz suggest increasing inequality could endanger our future.

What will come after late capitalism? In the face of the climate crisis, some are imagining everyday lives no longer guided by overconsumption and environmental degradation: a post-capitalist society. In the meantime, the hashtags continue.

• Thomas Piketty
• Late capitalism

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Why the Phrase 'Late Capitalism' Is Suddenly Everywhere

An investigation into a term that seems to perfectly capture the indignities and absurdities of the modern economy

A job advertisement celebrating sleep deprivation? That’s late capitalism. Free-wheeling Coachella outfits that somehow all look the same and cost thousands of dollars ? Also late capitalism. Same goes for this wifi-connected $400 juicer that does no better than human hands , Pepsi’s advertisement featuring Kendall Jenner , United Airlines’ forcible removal of a seated passenger who just wanted to go home, and the glorious debacle that was the Fyre Festival. The phrase—ominous, academic, despairing, sarcastic—has suddenly started showing up everywhere.

This publication has used “late capitalism” roughly two dozen times in recent years, describing everything from freakishly oversized turkeys to double-decker armrests for steerage-class plane seats . The New Yorker is likewise enamored of it, invoking it in discussions of Bernie Sanders and fancy lettuces , among other things. There is a wildly popular, year-old Reddit community devoted to it, as well as a Facebook page , a Tumblr , and a lively Twitter hashtag . Google search interest in its has more than doubled in the past year.

“Late capitalism,” in its current usage, is a catchall phrase for the indignities and absurdities of our contemporary economy, with its yawning inequality and super-powered corporations and shrinking middle class. But what is “late capitalism,” really? Where did the phrase come from, and why did so many people start using it all of a sudden?

For my own part, I vaguely remembered it coming from the writings of Karl Marx—the decadence that precedes the revolution? I polled a few friends, and they all sort of remembered the same thing, something to do with 19th-century Europeans and the inherent instability of the capitalist system. This collective half-remembering turned out to be not quite right. “It’s not Marx’s term,” William Clare Roberts, a political scientist at McGill University, told me.

Rather, it was Marxist thinkers that came up with it to describe the industrialized economies they saw around them. A German economist named Werner Sombart seems to have been the first to use it around the turn of the 20th century, with a Marxist theorist and activist named Ernest Mandel popularizing it a half-century later. For Mandel, “late capitalism” denoted the economic period that started with the end of World War II and ended in the early 1970s, a time that saw the rise of multinational corporations, mass communication, and international finance. Roberts said that the term’s current usage departs somewhat from its original meaning. “It’s not this sense that things are getting so bad that the revolution is going to come,” he told me, “but rather that we see the ligaments of the international system that socialists will be able to seize and use.”

Mandel did warn about the forces of automation, globalization, and wage stagnation , and feared that they would tear at the social fabric by making workers miserable. Still, during the period that he defined as “late capitalism,” the American middle class was flourishing and Europe was healing. “There is an irony to it being [originally] used to refer to the one time things were going well for a while,” Richard Yeselson, a contributing editor at Dissent and an expert on the labor movement, told me, riffing on the term.

“Late capitalism” took on a darker connotation in the works of the 20th-century critical theorists, who borrowed from and critiqued and built on Marx and the Marxists. Members of the Frankfurt School, reeling from the horrors of World War II, saw in it excessive social control on the part of big government and big business. Theodor Adorno argued that “late capitalism” might lead not to socialism, but away from it, by blunting the proletariat’s potential for revolution. “The economic process continues to perpetuate domination over human beings,” he said in a speech on late capitalism in 1968. (If only he could have seen the Jenner-Pepsi ad.)

It was Duke University’s Fredric Jameson who introduced the phrase to a broader English-speaking audience of academics and theorists. “It was a much older and more popular term in German,” Jameson told me. ( Spätkapitalismus , for those wondering.) “It’s very interesting! It’s kind of—how should I say it—symptomatic of people’s feelings about the world. About society itself,” he said, a little surprised and a little chuffed to hear that the term was finding wider appreciation. “It used to be a sort of taboo outside of the left to even mention the word ‘capitalism.’ Now it’s pretty obvious that it’s there, and that’s what it is.”

In his canonical 1984 essay and 1991 book, both titled Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism , Jameson argued that the globalized, post-industrial economy had given rise to postmodernist culture and art. Everything, everywhere, became commodified and consumable. High and low culture collapsed, with art becoming more self-referential and superficial. He told me he saw late capitalism as kicking into gear in the Thatcher and Reagan years, and persisting until today. “It has come out much more fully to the surface of things,” he said, citing the flash crash, derivatives, and “all this consumption by mail.”

It took the emergence of a new, tenacious left to jailbreak it from the ivory tower and push it into wider use. In the wake of the Great Recession, the protestors of the Occupy movement occupied; the Sanders campaign found real, unexpected traction; the Fight for $15 helped convince 19 states and cities to boost their minimum wages up to $15 an hour . Editors and writers on the left founded or expanded publications like Jacobin , The New Inquiry , and n+1 .

Those cerebral outlets helped to fuel renewed interest in Marx and critical theory, as well as late capitalism. David Graeber, a leading figure in Occupy and the coiner of the phrase “We are the 99 percent,” for instance, wrote a long essay for The Baffler that touched on Jameson, Mandel, corporate profitability, flying cars, and, of course, late capitalism. The novel A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism came out to good reviews in 2011. Pop-scholarly uses of the phrase started showing up in more mainstream publications, soaked up, as though by osmosis, from these publications and thinkers on the far left.

The same happened on social media, itself growing rapidly as the recession gave way to the recovery. There were just a handful of mentions of “late capitalism” on Twitter before 2009 , a few hundred in that year , and perhaps a few thousand in the next, many referring to college coursework.

At a just opened bar in Williamsburg that features a mechanical bull. Late capitalism... — Bryan Walsh (@bryanrwalsh) June 19, 2010

Staff are trained to ask: "Did you find what you were looking for?" but the opening times are a secret. Late Capitalism Plastics more like. — Kate Griffin (@griffinkate) April 18, 2010

In 2011, with Occupy taking over Zuccotti Park, it started to take off.

Mommy and Daddy, what did you do in the last days of late capitalism? #occupywallstreet — Boston Review (@BostonReview) September 28, 2011

The new Flipboard for iPhone ad is a sick, terrifying object lesson in the affective turn in late capitalism. But the app looks OK. — Jason Farago (@jsf) December 7, 2011

#xfactor is just a cynical neoliberal intervention by late-capitalism to distract us from the crushing brutalism of I'm a Celebrity — Prof Patrick McGhee (@ProfMcGhee) December 3, 2011

Now, it is everywhere, in thousands of social-media posts and listicles aimed at Millennials and news stories about modern malaise.

Late capitalism is the greatest pic.twitter.com/b9SY7ALKFG — the civil war, why? (@ethanscorey) April 15, 2017

. @Reuters Late capitalism got you like pic.twitter.com/bZ534EMBI4 — holly wood 🌹 (@girlziplocked) April 15, 2017

Is this picture what people mean by "late capitalism"? https://t.co/m47bo89hj4 — Troy (@Torypls) April 14, 2017

Over time, the semantics of the phrase shifted a bit. “Late capitalism” became a catchall for incidents that capture the tragicomic inanity and inequity of contemporary capitalism. Nordstrom selling jeans with fake mud on them for $425. Prisoners’ phone calls costing $14 a minute . Starbucks forcing baristas to write “Come Together” on cups due to the fiscal-cliff showdown .

This usage captures the resurgent left’s anger over the recovery and the inequality that long preceded it—as well as the rage of millions of less politically engaged Americans who nevertheless feel left out and left behind. “I think it’s popular again now because the financial crisis and subsequent decade has really stripped away a veneer on what’s going on in the economy,” Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, told me. “Austerity, runaway top incomes, globalization, populations permanently out of the job market, competition pushed further into our everyday lives. These aren’t new, but they have an extra cruelty that is boiling over everywhere.”

The current usage also captures the perceived froth and foolishness of Silicon Valley. The gig economy in particular provides plenty of late-capitalist fodder, with investors showering cash on platforms to create cheap services for the rich and lazy and no-benefit jobs for the eager and poor. At the same time, traditional jobs seem to be providing less in the way of security, stability, and support, too. “There’s this growing discussion about how work is changing,” Carrie Gleason of the Fair Workweek Initiative told me. “The idea of what stable employment is, or what we can expect in terms of stable employment, is changing. That’s part of this.”

“Late capitalism” skewers inequality, whether businesses’ feverish attempts to sell goods to the richest of the rich (here’s looking at you, $1,200 margarita ) or to provide less and less to the rest (hey, airlines that make economy customers board after pets ). It lampoons brands’ attempts to mimic or co-opt the language, culture, and content of their customers . Conspicuous minimalism, curated and artificial moments of zen , the gaslighting of the lifehacking and wellness movements : This is all late capitalism.

Finally, “late capitalism” gestures to the potential for revolution, whether because the robots end up taking all the jobs or because the proletariat finally rejects all this nonsense. A “late” period always comes at the end of something, after all. “It has the constant referent to revolution,” Roberts said. “‘Late capitalism’ necessarily says, ‘This is a stage we’re going to come out of at some point, whereas ‘neoliberalism’ doesn’t say that, ‘ Shit is fucked up and bullshit ’ doesn’t say that. It hints at a sort of optimism amongst a post-Bernie left, the young left online. Something of the revolutionary horizon of classical Marxism.”

It does all this with a certain concision, erudition, even beauty. It’s ominous and knowing, brainy and pissed-off. “Now is a crazy political time,” Yeselson said. “It’s Trump. It’s Brexit. It’s whatever is going on in France. Why talk about capitalism when nothing seems to be shaken up? But now things are shaken up. Let’s allude to the big, giant, totalistic system that is underneath everything. And let’s give it more than a hint of foreboding. Late capitalism. Late is so pregnant.”

That it has strayed so far from its original meaning? Nobody I spoke with seemed to care, Jameson included, and the phrase has always had a certain malleability anyway. Sombart’s late capitalism differed from Mandel’s differed from Adorno’s differed from Jameson’s. “Late capitalism” often seems more like “the latest in capitalism,” Konczal quipped.

This late capitalism is today’s, then. At least until the brands get ahold of it.

Related Video

Too Late for ‘Late Capitalism’

Kyle baasch.

Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism By Anna Kornbluh Verso, 240 pages, $24.95

Forty years after the publication of Fredric Jameson’s path-breaking New Left Review essay on “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” literature professors continue to beguile suggestible students with the insistence that sleep deprivation, Trumpism, and the entrepreneurial endeavors of the Kardashian family are typical expressions of “late capitalism.” There have been a few attempts to update the periodization, mostly by accentuating the lateness. Hence, a visitor to the website of Verso, the premier left-wing publishing house, will come upon the phrases “very, very late capitalism,” and now “too late capitalism.” The second of these appears in the subtitle of Anna Kornbluh’s new book, Immediacy , which—like any number of Verso titles before it—purports to do for our cultural moment what Jameson did for his.     

The odd thing about the undying attachment to the term “late capitalism,” of which Kornbluh’s book is but the latest manifestation, is that it refers to an epoch that ended, by all serious accounts, in the 1970s. For about eight decades, “late capitalism” meant one thing: a centrally administered market economy. When the German economist and historian Werner Sombart coined the term in the introduction to the first volume of his Modern Capitalism in 1902, he even stated that the term should be used interchangeably with “early socialism.” For Sombart, capitalism was an “historical individual” that had passed through the phases of organic life: from the sheepish infancy of early capitalism as it emerged unevenly in feudal Europe, through the reckless and headstrong individualism of 19th-century high capitalism, to the wizened repose of late capitalism, “quieter, more lawful, more rational, in accordance with its advanced age.” 

In Sombart’s economic sociology, high capitalism is characterized by the “intensified commercialization of economic life, the debasement of all economic processes into purely commercial transactions.” In late-capitalist society, by contrast, the anonymous domination of the market is brought under control, and the psychological anxieties of a competitive economy subside. One finds “an increase in the number of restrictions until the entire system becomes regulated rather than free,” Sombart wrote, such as “factory legislation, social insurance, price regulation,” as well as “works councils [and] trade agreements.” Additionally, “the status of the wage laborer becomes more like that of a government employee,” and such laborers are met with “the living wage, expressing the same principle as that underlying the salary scale of civil servants; in case of unemployment the worker’s pay continues, and in illness or old age he is pensioned.”

This model of economic evolution dominated the historical consciousness of the modern Western world until the latter half of the 20th century. Theoretical disagreements revolved around the precise dating of the epochal transitions and the normative evaluation of the entire developmental process. Sombart identified the onset of late capitalism with the outbreak of World War I, and he embraced this development. A chauvinist and virulent anti-Semite, he interpreted the war as Germany’s protest against the world-dominating Anglo-American commercial sensibility. During the interwar years of conservative reaction against Weimar liberalism, Sombart extended this interpretation by arguing for the removal of the Jewish merchant spirit from German cultural life to facilitate the emergence of late-capitalist institutions. 

Unsurprisingly, many of the German Jewish intellectuals who were cast into exile in the 1930s criticized Sombart’s conception of late capitalism but without necessarily challenging his developmental schema. The social philosopher Theodor Adorno, for example, saw late capitalism as the logical successor to the 19th-century bourgeois market economy but disparaged this “highly organized and completely centrally administered economy” as “the totalitarian phase of governance.” When Adorno repopularized the term at the April 1968 meeting of the German Sociological Association in his controversial presidential address, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?”, his intention was to convince his listeners that this antiquated phrase was still applicable to the postwar European welfare state, notwithstanding its post-capitalistic features. In the months following Adorno’s lecture, the Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel likewise adopted Sombart’s term as the title of his dissertation on postwar economic prosperity—the Fordist era of job security, affordable housing, and public investment in higher education—which was published as Late Capitalism in 1972. 

“This early-high-late schema lost its applicability in the 1970s.”

This early-high-late schema lost its applicability in the 1970s, when it became clear that capitalism could respond to crises of growth by rehabilitating the laissez-faire economic policies Sombart had identified with 19th-century high capitalism. Indeed, the masterminds of neoliberal reform weren’t solely motivated by their antipathy to bureaucratic administration and their enthusiasm for free enterprise; they also rejected Sombart’s organicist historical periodization, arguing that the rejection of laissez-faire had been driven by contingent political developments, not an inevitable process of evolution. 

If the rise of neoliberalism seemed to undermine the conceptual basis of “late capitalism,” what accounts for its persistence as an organizing concept in contemporary left-wing thought? There is a simple answer. Jameson’s 1984 essay on “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” purportedly took its central term from Mandel, establishing continuity between Sombart’s sociology of late capitalism and the exuberant superficiality of postmodernity. And make no mistake: Jameson’s analysis of the stylistic innovations of the 1970s and ’80s was brilliant. But it had nothing to do with late capitalism. Indeed, one year after the publication of this essay, the pugilistic urban theorist Mike Davis excoriated Jameson in the pages of New Left Review , alerting the reader to his conflation of late capitalism with cultural developments that only began after the recession of the 1970s, that is, after late capitalism had already ended. Late capitalism was defined by International Style architecture, Davis argued, not the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. We can add Brutalism and Levittown to this architectural counterclaim, along with Kafka’s Castle and Huxley’s Brave New World , Hannah Arendt and Lewis Mumford—these protests against the bureaucratic Leviathan defined the culture of late capitalism.

Davis’s critique should have sounded the death knell of this anachronistic misapplication of Sombart’s periodizing concept. Instead, when Jameson expanded his essay into a monograph in 1991, he dismissed Davis, in a footnote, as a “militant” leftist, thereby inaugurating the ragpicker’s ethos that has dominated academic “theory” ever since. Contemporary scholars of culture are late to the conversation; they rummage through the annals of modern intellectual history as though it were a junkyard of scrap terminology, refurbishing concepts that no longer possess a living connection to reality. They don’t even know what these words once meant. 

Kornbluh’s Immediacy is the latest entry in the ever-growing bibliography of “late capitalism.” The occasion for this Jamesonian pastiche is an ongoing dispute within English departments over the usefulness of critical theory for the interpretation of literature and culture. Whereas a small contingent of “post-critical” researchers have been experimenting with interpretive methods that go beyond the paranoid reference to systems of social oppression operating beneath the surface of every text, Kornbluh’s book defends the critic’s ability to cultivate an eye for the calamitous essence of the capitalist totality in every inconspicuous cultural artifact. Adorno called this procedure “social physiognomics,” and Kornbluh positions her project within this tradition.

This would require a comprehensive theory of our present social system, but Kornbluh can’t decide what to call it, when to date its emergence, or how to describe its uniqueness. “Too late capitalism,” she tells us, is “a contradictory moment where the overmuchness of lateness arrests itself.” This slogan competes with “circulation-forward capitalism” and “undead zombie capitalism” to anchor her account of the “zombie phenomenality” of our “petrodepression hellscape.” The basic features of this system include the familiar characteristics of neoliberalism—Kornbluh avoids this concept—like “the gigification of labor,” “just-in-time logistics,” and “attacks on unions, ruthless efficiency standards, expansion of temporary labor,” as well as new features, such as the “instantification of communications,” the “absolutization of time,” and “imperatives for incessant self-facement.” We are witnessing “capitalism’s extremization of its eternal systematic pretext: Things are produced for the purpose of being exchanged.” Obscure references to all three volumes of Marx’s Capital follow. 

“Immediacy,” Kornbluh asserts, is the hegemonic style of “too late capitalism.” Insofar as culture always presents itself as immediate, this marquee argument is peculiar, but Kornbluh means to suggest that there is something about “circulation-forward capitalism” that sucks us into the here and now and inhibits our ability to appreciate the social relations constitutive of everyday life. Popular culture exploits this myopia, from immersive art installations to the ubiquity of first-person narration in fiction. 

Immediacy is itself a manifestation of this trend. We are encouraged to read the book in a way that feels like mindless scrolling as Kornbluh surveys the cultural landscape with a handful of recurring buzzwords that sound as if they were lifted from a Jacuzzi advertisement. “Whirlpooling presence, gushing feeling, welling current—this is the superfluency of ‘stream style,’” she announces in her analysis of Fleabag , the British comedy series. “Binge is the way of life,” she continues further along, “the constant stream an oceanic jet of immersive flow.” “In the liquid emulsion of these modes,” she writes in her discussion of hybrid literary genres, “in their propensity for indistinct blur, in their churning flow, glides the writerly guise of propulsive circulation: frictionless uptake, fluid exchange, pouring directness, jet speed.” 

Much of Immediacy consists of Kornbluh’s pot shots at exemplary products of “too late capitalism.” She reviles Kim Kardashian’s recent collection of selfies, “the burlesque mordancy melding pure profit motive to winking exposé of misogynist image obsession.” Among recent literature, she can’t stand Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “defictionalized omnigeneric fluency,” nor anything written by Maggie Nelson, whose “bounding omnivorism bespeaks immediacy as genre dissolve.” In the domain of moving images, Kornbluh detests streaming video, “the art form par excellence of too late capitalism,” which is “rushing, delugent. We might drown.” She is bored by “the monotonous spill of the sogging stream,” especially that “widening gyre of swirling flush,” AMC’s Better Call Saul . In the world of scholarship, Kornbluh loathes the auto-theory of Paul Preciado and Sara Ahmed, which “liquidates genre in quest of engrossment, repudiates constructions like concepts, trills charisma, and exults sui generis self-springing emanativeness,” not to mention more aphoristic forms of theorizing that “burble with immediacy” by virtue of their “elliptical dance of vaporescence and glut.”

Jameson famously argued that the avant-garde poetry of the 1970s bore a likeness to the dissociated speech of a schizophrenic. Similarly, the mode of contemporary theory practiced by Kornbluh resembles the speech patterns of fluent aphasia, a neurological condition that causes its victims to produce grammatically coherent yet unintelligible sentences that speech pathologists describe as “word salad,” such as: “Medium dissolves, extremes effulge, exposure streams.” Kornbluh’s favorite grammatical construction is an abstract noun followed by a contextually meaningless intransitive verb in a two-word clause, simulating a kind of infantile babbling. “In the extremity of too late capitalism,” she writes, “distance evaporates, thought ebbs, intensity gulps. Whatever.” Page after page, Immediacy discharges these empty phrases in order to disguise the fact that it has nothing to say.

Kornbluh only deviates from this mannered style when referencing current events. “Shit is very bad,” she laments, and we find marbles of this shit scattered throughout the book in the form of hysterical non sequiturs: “One in five students pursues treatment for climate grief.” “The University of Chicago and Temple University have the largest private police forces in the country—and they actually shoot people.” “A small number of hyper-consuming billionaires have irreparably degraded the planet, ergo billions of people will be displaced and killed.” Notice how these allusions to suffering are delivered with an inappropriately blasé intonation, as though reality were something foreign that one learns about in Vox headlines. We are encouraged to believe that, because people are dying and the planet is melting, Marxist literary criticism is urgent, but the relationship between theory and practice remains obscure. Take, for example, Kornbluh’s basic political aspiration: “The masses of people and their social institutions, up to and including the state, must implement transformative solutions like decarbonization, universal care, and vibrant cities that prioritize people over profit, liberate sexuality, and combat racist imperialism with democratic internationalism.” OK. Does roasting Maggie Nelson bring us closer to this desideratum?

“The tragedy of late theory is that it never makes contact with reality.”

The animating principle of Kornbluh’s mode of writing lies in its syncopation of pyrotechnics and posturing: Illusions of serious scholarly activity bar entry to lay readers who feel inadequate to the theorist’s formidable intelligence, but the target reader knows to ignore the smokescreen of neologisms and just vibe with the author’s helpless rejection of our fascist, sexless, ecocidal order. Perhaps Kornbluh is right to suggest that contemporary American consumer culture is shallow, self-absorbed, and politically inconsequential. However, her book will be less informative to readers searching for a sociological diagnosis of this predicament than to readers interested in observing how this superficiality unfolds in the realm of theory. The tragedy of late theory is that it never makes contact with reality.

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Fredric Jameson (1991)

Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Source : Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Verso, 1991. Just two sections from Chapter 1 reproduced here.

The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the “crisis” of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. The case for its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure, generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s.

As the word itself suggests, this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation). Thus abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films of the great auteurs , or the modernist school of poetry (as institutionalised and canonised in the works of Wallace Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them. The enumeration of what follows, then, at once becomes empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art, but also photorealism, and beyond it, the “new expressionism”; the moment, in music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of classical and “popular” styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock (the Beatles and the Stones now standing as the high-modernist moment of that more recent and rapidly evolving tradition); in film, Godard, post-Godard, and experimental cinema and video, but also a whole new type of commercial film (about which more below); Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed, on the one hand, and the French nouveau roman and its succession, on the other, along with alarming new kinds of literary criticism based on some new aesthetic of textuality or écriture ... The list might be extended indefinitely; but does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style and fashion changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation?

It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism – as it will be outlined in the following pages – initially began to emerge. More decisively than in the other arts or media, postmodernist positions in architecture have been inseparable from an implacable critique of architectural high modernism and of Frank Lloyd Wright or the so-called international style (Le Corbusier, Mies, etc), where formal criticism and analysis (of the high-modernist transformation of the building into a virtual sculpture, or monumental “duck,” as Robert Venturi puts it), are at one with reconsiderations on the level of urbanism and of the aesthetic institution. High modernism is thus credited with the destruction of the fabric of the traditional city and its older neighbourhood culture (by way of the radical disjunction of the new Utopian high-modernist building from its surrounding context), while the prophetic elitism and authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly identified in the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master.

Postmodernism in architecture will then logically enough stage itself as a kind of aesthetic populism, as the very title of Venturi’s influential manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas , suggests. However we may ultimately wish to evaluate this populist rhetoric, it has at least the merit of drawing our attention to one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms enumerated above: namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories, and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis and the American New Criticism all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole “degraded” landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply “quote” as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance.

Nor should the break in question be thought of as a purely cultural affair: indeed, theories of the postmodern – whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation – bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalisations which, at much the same time bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptised “Postindustrial society” (Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society or high tech, and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely, the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle. The Marxist tradition has therefore resisted them with vehemence, with the signal except on of the economist Ernest Mandel, whose book Late Capitalism sets out not merely to anatomise the historic originality of this new society (which he sees as a third stage or moment in the evolution of capital) but also to demonstrate that it is, if an thing, a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it. I will return to t is argument later; suffice it for the moment to anticipate a point that will be argued in Chapter 2, namely, that every position on postmodernism in culture – whether apologia or stigmatisation – is also at one and the same time, and necessarily , an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today.

A last preliminary word on method: what follows is not to be read as stylistic description, as the account of one cultural style or movement among others. I have rather meant to offer a periodising hypothesis, and that at a moment in which the very conception of historical periodisation has come to seem most problematical indeed. I have argued elsewhere that all isolated or discrete cultural analysis always involves a buried or repressed theory of historical periodisation; in any case, the conception of the “genealogy” largely lays to rest traditional theoretical worries about so-called linear history, theories of “stages,” and teleological historiography. In the present context, however, lengthier theoretical discussion of such (very real) issues can perhaps be replaced by a few substantive remarks.

One of the concerns frequently aroused by periodising hypotheses is that these tend to obliterate difference and to project an idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity (bounded on either side by inexplicable chronological metamorphoses and punctuation marks). This is, however, precisely why it seems to me essential to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features.

Consider, for example, the powerful alternative position that postmodernism is itself little more than one more stage of modernism proper (if not, indeed, of the even older romanticism); it may indeed be conceded that all the features of postmodernism I am about to enumerate can be detected, full-blown, in this or that preceding modernism (including such astonishing genealogical precursors as Gertrude Stein, Raymond Roussel, or Marcel Duchamp, who may be considered outright postmodernists, avant la lettre ). What has not been taken into account by this view, however, is the social position of the older modernism, or better still, its passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and post-Victorian bourgeoisie for whom its forms and ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive, and generally “antisocial.” It will be argued here, however, that a mutation in the sphere of culture has rendered such attitudes archaic. Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly, they now strike us, on the whole, as rather “realistic,” and this is the result of a canonisation and academic institutionalisation of the modern movement generally that can be to the late 1950s. This is surety one of the most plausible explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern movement as a set of dead classics, which “weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” as Marx once said in a different context.

As for the postmodern revolt against all that, however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive features – from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments of high modernism – no longer scandalise anyone and are not only received with the greatest complacency but have themselves become institutionalised and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society.

What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage. Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship. It will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it. Later I will suggest that these two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project. Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.

The first point to be made about the conception of periodisation in dominance, therefore, is that even if all the constitutive features of postmodernism were identical with and coterminous to those of an older modernism – a position I feel to be demonstrably erroneous but which only an even lengthier analysis of modernism proper could dispel the two phenomena would still remain utterly distinct in their meaning antisocial function, owing to the very different positioning of postmodernism in the economic system of late capital and, beyond that, to the transformation of the very sphere of culture in contemporary society.

This point will be further discussed at the conclusion of this book. I must now briefly address a different kind of objection to periodisation, a concern about its possible obliteration of heterogeneity, one most often expressed by the Left. And it is certain that there is a strange quasi-Sartrean irony – a “winner loses” logic which tends to surround any effort to describe a “system,” a totalising dynamic, as these are detected in the movement of contemporary society. What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic – the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example – the more powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of his work is thereby paralysed, and the impulses of negation and revolt, not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.

I have felt, however, that it was only in the light of some conception of a dominant cultural logic or hegemonic norm that genuine difference could be measured and assessed. I am very far from feeling that all cultural production today is postmodern in the broad sense I will be conferring on this term. The postmodern is, however, the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses – what Raymond Williams has usefully termed “residual” and “emergent” forms of cultural production – must make their way. If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable. At any rate, this has been the political spirit in which the following analysis was devised: to project some conception of a new systematic cultural norm and its reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective forms of any radical cultural politics today.

The exposition will take up in turn the following constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary “theory” and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose “schizophrenic” structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone – what I will call “intensities” – which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a whole new technology, which is itself a figure for a whole new economic world system; and, after a brief account of postmodernist mutations in the lived experience of built space itself, some reflections on the mission of political art in the bewildering new world space of late or multinational capital.

The conception of postmodernism outlined here is a historical rather than a merely stylistic one. I cannot stress too greatly the radical distinction between a view for which the postmodern is one (optional) style among many others available and one which seeks to grasp it as the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism: the two approaches in fact generate two very different ways of conceptualising the phenomenon as a whole: on the one hand, moral judgments (about which it is indifferent whether they are positive or negative), and, on the other, a genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in History.

Of some positive moral evaluation of postmodernism little needs to be said: the complacent (yet delirious) camp-following celebration of this aesthetic new world (including its social and economic dimension, greeted with equal enthusiasm under the slogan of “postindustrial society”) is surely unacceptable, although it may be somewhat less obvious that current fantasies about the salvational nature of high technology, from chips to robots – fantasies entertained not only by both left and right governments in distress but also by many intellectuals – are also essentially of a piece with more vulgar apologies for postmodernism.

But in that case it is only consequent to reject moralising condemnations of the postmodern and of its essential triviality when juxtaposed against the Utopian “high seriousness” of the great modernisms: judgments one finds both on the Left and on the radical Right. And no doubt the logic of the simulacrum, with its transformation of older realities into television images, does more than merely replicate the logic of late capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it. Meanwhile, for political groups which seek actively to intervene in history and to modify its otherwise passive momentum (whether with a view toward channelling it into a socialist transformation of society or diverting it into the regressive re-establishment of some simpler fantasy past), there cannot but be much that is deplorable and reprehensible in a cultural form of image addiction which, by transforming the past into visual mirages, stereotypes, or texts, effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and of the collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future change to fantasies of sheer catastrophe and inexplicable cataclysm, from visions of “terrorism” on the social level to those of cancer on the personal. Yet if postmodernism is a historical phenomenon, then the attempt to conceptualise it in terms of moral or moralising judgments must finally be identified as a category mistake. All of which becomes more obvious when we interrogate the position of the cultural critic and moralist; the latter, along with all the rest of us, is now so deeply immersed in postmodernist space, so deeply suffused and infected by its new cultural categories, that the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable.

The distinction I am proposing here knows one canonical form in Hegel’s differentiation of the thinking of individual morality or moralising from that whole very different realm of collective social values and practices. But it finds its definitive form in Marx’s demonstration of the materialist dialectic, most notably in those classic pages of the Manifesto which teach the hard lesson of some more genuinely dialectical way to think historical development and change. The topic of the lesson is, of course, the historical development of capitalism itself and the deployment of a specific bourgeois culture. In a well-known passage Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think this development positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst.

The lapse from this austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance of the taking of moral positions is inveterate and all too human: still, the urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.

Such an effort suggests two immediate questions, with which we will conclude these reflections. Can we in fact identify some “moment of truth” within the more evident “moments of falsehood” of postmodern culture? And, even if we can do so, is there not something ultimately paralysing in the dialectical view of historical development proposed above; does it not tend to demobilise us and to surrender us to passivity and helplessness by systematically obliterating possibilities of action under the impenetrable fog of historical inevitability? It is appropriate to discuss these two (related) issues in terms of current possibilities for some effective contemporary cultural politics and for the construction of a genuine political culture.

To focus the problem in this way is, of course, immediately to raise the more genuine issue of the fate of culture generally, and of the function of culture specifically, as one social level or instance, in the postmodern era. Everything in the previous discussion suggests that what we have been calling postmodernism is inseparable from, and unthinkable without the hypothesis of, some fundamental mutation of the sphere of culture in the world of late capitalism which includes a momentous modification of its social function. Older discussions of the space, function, or sphere of culture (mostly notably Herbert Marcuse’s classic essay The Affirmative Character of Culture ) have insisted on what a different language would call the “semi-autonomy” of the cultural realm: its ghostly, yet Utopian, existence, for good or ill, above the practical world of the existent, whose mirror image it throws back in forms which vary from the legitimations of flattering resemblance to the contestatory indictments of critical satire or Utopian pain.

What we must now ask ourselves is whether it is not precisely this semi-autonomy of the cultural sphere which has been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue that culture is today no longer endowed with the relative autonomy it once enjoyed as one level among others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in pre-capitalist societies) is not necessarily to imply its disappearance or extinction. Quite the contrary; we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life – from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself – can be said to have become “cultural” in some original and yet untheorised sense. This proposition is, however, substantively quite consistent with the previous diagnosis of a society of the image or the simulacrum and a transformation of the “real” into so many pseudo-events.

It also suggests that some of our most cherished and time-honoured radical conceptions about the nature of cultural politics may thereby find themselves outmoded. However distinct those conceptions – which range from slogans of negativity, opposition, and subversion to critique and reflexivity – may have been, they all shared a single, fundamentally spatial, presupposition, which may be resumed in the equally time-honoured formula of “critical distance.” No theory of cultural politics current on the Left today has been able to do without one notion or another of a certain minimal aesthetic distance, of the possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital, from which to assault this last. What the burden of our preceding demonstration suggests, however, is that distance in general (including “critical distance” in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new space of postmodernism. We are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone theoretically) incapable of distantiation; meanwhile, it has already been observed how the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonising those very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity. The shorthand language of co-optation is for this reason omnipresent on the left, but would now seem to offer a most inadequate theoretical basis for understanding a situation in which we all, in one way or another, dimly feel that not only punctual and local counter-culture forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare but also even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it.

What we must now affirm is that it is precisely this whole extraordinarily demoralising and depressing original new global space which is the “moment of truth” of postmodernism. What has been called the postmodernist “sublime” is only the moment in which this content has become most explicit, has moved the closest to the surface of consciousness as a coherent new type of space in its own right – even though a certain figural concealment or disguise is still at work here, most notably in the high-tech thematics in which the new spatial content is still dramatised and articulated. Yet the earlier features of the postmodern which were enumerated above can all now be seen as themselves partial (yet constitutive) aspects of the same general spatial object.

The argument for a certain authenticity in these otherwise patently ideological productions depends on the prior proposition that what we have been calling postmodern (or multinational) space is not merely a cultural ideology or fantasy but has genuine historical (and socioeconomic) reality as a third great original expansion of capitalism around the globe (after the earlier expansions of the national market and the older imperialist system, which each had their own cultural specificity and generated new types of space appropriate to their dynamics). The distorted and unreflexive attempts of newer cultural production to explore and to express this new space must then also, in their own fashion, be considered as so many approaches to the representation of (a new) reality (to use a more antiquated language). As paradoxical as the terms may seem, they may thus, following a classic interpretive option, be read as peculiar new forms of realism (or at least of the mimesis of reality), while at the same time they can equally well be analysed as so many attempts to distract and divert us from that reality or to disguise its contradictions and resolve them in the guise of various formal mystifications.

As for that reality itself, however – the as yet untheorised original space of some new “world system” of multinational or late capitalism, a space whose negative or baleful aspects are only too obvious – the dialectic requires us to hold equally to a positive or “progressive” evaluation of its emergence, as Marx did for the world market as the horizon of national economies, or as Lenin did for the older imperialist global network. For neither Marx nor Lenin was socialism a matter of returning to smaller (and thereby less repressive and comprehensive) systems of social organisation; rather, the dimensions attained by capital in their own times were grasped as the promise, the framework, and the precondition for the achievement of some new and more comprehensive socialism. Is this not the case with the yet more global and totalising space of the new world system, which demands the intervention and elaboration of an internationalism of a radically new type? The disastrous realignment of socialist revolution with the older nationalisms (not only in Southeast Asia), whose results have necessarily aroused much serious recent left reflection, can be adduced in support of this position.

But if all this is so, then at least one possible form of a new radical cultural politics becomes evident, with a final aesthetic proviso that must quickly be noted. Left cultural producers and theorists – particularly those formed by bourgeois cultural traditions issuing from romanticism and valorising spontaneous, instinctive, or unconscious forms of “genius,” but also for very obvious historical reasons such as Zhdanovism and the sorry consequences of political and party interventions in the arts have often by reaction allowed themselves to be unduly intimidated by the repudiation, in bourgeois aesthetics and most notably in high modernism, of one of the age-old functions of art – the pedagogical and the didactic. The teaching function of art was, however, always stressed in classical times (even though it there mainly took the form of moral lessons), while the prodigious and still imperfectly understood work of Brecht reaffirms, in a new and formally innovative and original way, for the moment of modernism proper, a complex new conception of the relationship between culture and pedagogy.

The cultural model I will propose similarly foregrounds the cognitive and pedagogical dimensions of political art and culture, dimensions stressed in very different ways by both Lukacs and Brecht (for the distinct moments of realism and modernism, respectively).

We cannot, however, return to aesthetic practices elaborated on the basis of historical situations and dilemmas which are no longer ours. Meanwhile, the conception of space that has been developed here suggests that a model of political culture appropriate to our own situation will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental organising concern. I will therefore provisionally define the aesthetic of this new (and hypothetical) cultural form as an aesthetic of cognitive mapping.

In a classic work, The Image of the City , Kevin Lynch taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built perspectives) obtain, are the most obvious examples. Disalienation in the traditional city, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories. Lynch’s own work is limited by the deliberate restriction of his topic to the problems of city form as such; yet it becomes extraordinarily suggestive when projected outward onto some of the larger national and global spaces we have touched on here. Nor should it be too hastily assumed that his model – while it clearly raises very central issues of representation as such – is in any way easily vitiated by the conventional poststructural critiques of the “ideology of representation” or mimesis. The cognitive map is not exactly mimetic in that older sense; indeed, the theoretical issues it poses allow us to renew the analysis of representation on a higher and much more complex level.

There is, for one thing, a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.” Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.

Yet Lynch’s work also suggests a further line of development insofar as cartography itself constitutes its key mediatory instance. A return to the history of this science (which is also an art) shows us that Lynch’s model does not yet, in fact, really correspond to what will become map-making. Lynch’s subjects are rather clearly involved in pre-cartographic operations whose results traditionally are described as itineraries rather than as maps: diagrams organised around the still subject-centred or existential journey of the traveller, along which various significant key features are marked oases, mountain ranges, rivers, monuments, and the like. The most highly developed form of such diagrams is the nautical itinerary, the sea chart, or portulans, where coastal features are noted for the use of Mediterranean navigators who rarely venture out into the open sea.

Yet the compass at once introduces a new dimension into sea charts, a dimension that will utterly transform the problematic of the itinerary and allow us to pose the problem of a genuine cognitive mapping in a far more complex way. For the new instruments - compass, sextant, and theodolite – correspond not merely to new geographic and navigational problems (the difficult matter of determining longitude, particularly on the curving surface of the planet, as opposed to the simpler matter of latitude, which European navigators can still empirically determine by ocular inspection of the African coast); they also introduce a whole new coordinate: the relationship to the totality, particularly as it is mediated by the stars and by new operations like that of triangulation. At this point, cognitive mapping in the broader sense comes to require the coordination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality.

Finally, with the first globe (1490) and the invention of the Mercator projection at about the same time, yet a third dimension of cartography emerges, which at once involves what we would today call the nature of representational codes, the intrinsic structures of the various media, the intervention, into more naive mimetic conceptions of mapping, of the whole new fundamental question of the languages of representation itself, in particular the unresolvable (well-nigh Heisenbergian) dilemma of the transfer of curved space to flat charts. At this point it becomes clear that there can be no true maps (at the same time it also becomes clear that there can be scientific progress, or better still, a dialectical advance, in the various historical moments of map-making).

Transcoding all this now into the very different problematic of the Althusserian definition of ideology, one would want to make two points. The first is that the Althusserian concept now allows us to rethink these specialised geographical and cartographic issues in terms of social space – in terms, for example, of social class and national or international context, in terms of the ways in which we all necessarily also cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national, and international class realities. Yet to reformulate the problem in this way is also to come starkly up against those very difficulties in mapping which are posed in heightened and original ways by that very global space of the postmodernist or multinational moment which has been under discussion here. These are not merely theoretical issues; they have urgent practical political consequences, as is evident from the conventional feelings of First World subjects that existentially (or “empirically”) they really do inhabit a “postindustrial society” from which traditional production has disappeared and in which social classes of the classical type no longer exist – a conviction which has immediate effects on political praxis.

The second point is that a return to the Lacanian underpinnings of Althusser’s theory can afford some useful and suggestive methodological enrichments. Althusser’s formulation remobilises an older and henceforth classical Marxian distinction between science and ideology that is not without value for us even today. The existential – the positioning of the individual subject, the experience of daily life, the monadic “point of view” on the world to which we are necessarily, as biological subjects, restricted – is in Althusser’s formula implicitly opposed to the realm of abstract knowledge, a realm which, as Lacan reminds us, is never positioned in or actualised by any concrete subject but rather by that structural void called le sujet supposé savoir (the subject supposed to know), a subject-place of knowledge. What is affirmed is not that we cannot know the world and its totality in some abstract or “scientific” way. Marxian “science” provides just such a way of knowing and conceptualising the world abstractly, in the sense in which, for example, Mandel’s great book offers a rich and elaborated knowledge of that global world system, of which it has never been said here that it was unknowable but merely that it was unrepresentable, which is a very different matter. The Althusserian formula, in other words, designates a gap, a rift, between existential experience and scientific knowledge. Ideology has then the function of somehow inventing a way of articulating those two distinct dimensions with each other. What a historicist view of this definition would want to add is that such coordination, the production of functioning and living ideologies, is distinct in different historical situations, and, above all, that there may be historical situations in which it is not possible at all – and this would seem to be our situation in the current crisis.

But the Lacanian system is threefold, and not dualistic. To the Marxian-Althusserian opposition of ideology and science correspond only two of Lacan’s tripartite functions: the Imaginary and the Real, respectively.

Our digression on cartography, however, with its final revelation of a properly representational dialectic of the codes and capacities of individual languages or media, reminds us that what has until now been omitted was the dimension of the Lacanian Symbolic itself.

An aesthetic of cognitive mapping – a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system – will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice. This is not then, clearly, a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object – the world space of multinational capital – at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralised by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.

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• Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Summary

by Fredric Jameson

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Jameson is a Marxist Political Theorist (which is actually a school of philosophy, not just politics). He wrote this book as an elaboration on an article by the same title which was received as controversial.

He begins by outlining a basic Hegelian dialectic model, where a status quo (thesis) is confronted by a new competitive idea (antithesis) for the formation of an adapted status quo (synthesis). This is the basic outline that led Engels and Marx to publish "The Communist Manifesto ," so Jameson applies this basic model of analysis to Postmodernism and Capitalism.

He returns to the issue of narrative. The Modernists argued that humans operated on essential narratives, like myths, which unite us, but Postmodernism brought the rejection of "meta-narratives." A meta-narrative is a theoretical abstraction from a real story (for the purposes of interpretation typically, since analyzing the structure of a narrative can help show what the story "means"). Jameson argues that Postmodernism represents the culture's new awareness of meta-narratives, their resultant skepticism, and the rise of irony and detachment in Western art.

Then he turns to culture to show that the effect of Postmodern ideology is the rejection of truth-claims. Whenever someone says they know the truth, our Postmodern society would reject the truth-claim without entertaining it.

This led to the rise of what Jameson calls "corporate capitalism," as businesses tried to navigate a new market. He mentions the Austrian school (especially Adorno, who wrote the authoritative book on Postmodernism and media, "Dialectic of Enlightenment," an important book about society and the value of art in human enlightenment). He agrees that in film, literature, architecture, and visual arts, the combination of Postmodernism with Capitalism did lead to the elimination of meaningful art from the culture.

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• Introduction

Crushing the Myth of Late-Stage Capitalism

Capitalism is the only economic system that includes reliable, built-in incentives for creative people to improve it by getting rid of bad ideas, products, and companies, and replacing them with better ones in a reasonable time frame, without violence. Capitalism is not a product with a beginning-middle-end life cycle. It’s an organically evolving system, in a constantly shifting state of change and adaptation. Any part of it – products, services, technology, and people – things that don’t work or don’t deliver value are replaced with things that do.

Late-stage capitalism is a phrase used by people who want to imply that capitalism is doomed to fail (usually soon). The phrase is growing in popularity as a way to critique capitalism and promote alternate economic systems.

In this essay, I’ll share some arguments for why capitalism is the best available system for solving problems and reducing suffering. But let’s start with a little history.

Prevalence of the Phrase Late-Stage Capitalism in Literature, 1945-2019

If you haven’t been paying attention, it may seem like this is a relatively new phrase, promoting a new theory. But its roots go back to the 1880s, when Marxist economist Werner Sombart coined the phrase late capitalism , eagerly referring to Karl Marx’s theory that the materialistic excesses of bourgeois capitalism would lead to social revolution.

Late capitalism as a concept must have been irresistible to the budding Marxists, since it implied that the long-promised revolution was right around the corner.

Late-Stage Capitalism Originated as Late Capitalism in Marxist Literature in the 1880s

I’ll be charitable and assume that most contemporary people who use the phrase late-stage capitalism are doing so naively, making a logical leap that capitalism’s problems are symptoms of its inevitable decline. Still, some use it to promote alternative systems like socialism, communism, anarchism, or other forms of wealth redistribution. They may be doing this subtly or explicitly, but the message is the same: capitalism isn’t working, and it’s about to fail.

It’s important to discuss our viewpoints so we can detect errors in our thinking. But the phrase late-stage capitalism is particularly flawed. It begs the question twice, making two false assumptions: First, that capitalism has predefined stages. And second, that we must be in one of the later ones.

Late stage-capitalism also implicitly fails to recognize that rather than being in some “late stage” of capitalism, we are in fact so early with capitalism that we are still at the beginning of a potentially infinite stream of capitalist growth that not only benefits everyone on Earth, but can continue to do so as long as people exist.

Why the Idea of Late-stage Capitalism is Flawed

Late-stage capitalism as a concept has two critical issues:

• The phrase is contains logical flaws which render it meaningless.
• People who use it mistake valid problems with capitalism for critical ones. 

The Phrase Late-Stage Capitalism is Logically Flawed

Late-stage capitalism smuggles in two glaring logical fallacies. It implies that capitalism has some known, predefined quantity of stages, and that it’s possible to know which stage we are currently in.

We can always look back in history and group events stages. So it is tempting to think we might do the same looking forward. But this is impossible.

How would we know how many stages to predict? It would be like trying to say how long a poem will be having never heard it before.

With capitalism, there is no way of knowing whether there are stages at all, or whether the present stage is late or early. Humans are constantly creating new knowledge, and unpredictable events happen all the time, both of which make future events impossible to predict.

Even if we take the concept of “stages” as true, a person alive 100,000 years ago would not know to characterize their era as the Stone Age, since they would have no way to predict the end of the Stone Age by the forthcoming discoveries of metallurgy, or the invention of copper, bronze, or iron tools. They would not even be aware of the concept of characterizing past eras by the materials used to make tools.

And even the people of the 1960s, who enthusiastically referred to their time as the Space Age , were utterly wrong in predicting that space exploration would define their era. Instead, we got the internet, smartphones, and the metaverse. We’ll have to leave advanced space exploration for some future age.

In the same way, how would people alive today possibly know what stage of capitalism we are in?

It is possible to point out valid problems with capitalism, and theorize how they might lead to capitalism’s downfall. But there is no way of knowing if these problems are characteristic of an early, mid, or late stage. Nor can anyone know if we are about to solve these problems, or if they are relatively minor in comparison to future problems 1000 years from now, which could be many times worse.

Critics of capitalism might guess that we are presently in a late stage, and it’s possible they are correct. But only in the sense that any random guess not prohibited by the laws of physics could be correct.

As it’s commonly used, the phrase late-stage capitalism is also a bad explanation , since the person using it can make infinite variations if their theory turns out to be incorrect. No matter what happens, they can always claim we are in a late stage of capitalism, and that if we wait just a bit longer , they’ll be proven correct. Moreso, if some unpredictable event were to lead to the end of capitalism, they would take credit for their prediction, even though their prediction was the result of random luck.

For those reasons, anyone who tells you we’re currently experiencing a late stage of capitalism is no better than a sidewalk prophet carrying a cardboard sign, raving about the end of the world.

The Other Error with Late-Stage Capitalism: Valid Problems with Capitalism are not Critical Flaws

Critics of capitalism make another crucial error when they conflate the correct idea that capitalism has legitimate problems with the wrong idea that it is fatally flawed .

Mature people understand that problems are inevitable . In your home, eventually your sink will leak; your air conditioner will go kaput; your driveway will need repaving.

You might tolerate these issues for a while, or you might fix them right away. But none of them are good reasons to predict that your home is about to collapse completely, or that we are experiencing “late-stage housing.” The sensible thing to do is to keep up with the maintenance, or replace faulty items with better ones, instead of knocking the house down and building a new one.

So we can acknowledge that capitalism currently has the following known problems, without making an illogical leap to assume that capitalism is critically flawed.

Real problems we currently experience in capitalism

• Oligopolies
• Tragedy-of-the-commons (self-interest issues)
• Issues with demand-inelastic goods and services
• Economic and status inequality
• Instability
• Risks of worker exploitation

People may have different opinions about the severity and significance of these problems. Nobody intelligent would deny they exist. But what many miss, is that a capitalistic economy is both the source of these problems and the best solution we have for them .

Capitalism is the only economic system that includes reliable, built-in incentives for creative people to improve it by getting rid of bad ideas, products, and companies, and replacing them with better ones in a reasonable time frame, without violence.

Capitalism is not a product with a beginning-middle-end life cycle. It’s an organically evolving system, in a constantly shifting state of change and adaptation. Any part of it – products, services, technology, and people – things that don’t work or don’t deliver value are replaced with things that do.

In this way, capitalism is like representative democracy.

How capitalism is like representative democracy

Both representative democracy and capitalism are antifragile systems with built-in error correction mechanisms. They leverage the power of people to make choices and take action based on their individual preferences, actions which they are accountable for.

All systems have problems, but when mechanisms exist for participants to create solutions, those solutions improve the system for everyone. It is true that those solutions create even more problems, but solving problems is vastly preferable to stewing in them. And all solutions contain new knowledge that prevents worse problems in the future.

Both systems, capitalism and representative democracy, have built-in feedback mechanisms for people to try solutions to problems, then discard the ideas that don’t work relatively quickly. Anything can be improved upon if people are willing to try.

In a democracy, solutions take the form of new political ideas, spread and improved through discourse and debate, and implemented through voting for representatives who enact policy. When representatives put bad policies in place, voters can push for those policies (and sometimes the representatives) to be removed and for new ones to be tried.

In capitalism, solutions take the form of products, services, and employment arrangements created by entrepreneurs and employees that spread and improve through price signals, competition, purchasing, and employment decisions in the labor market. Companies usually get rapid feedback through reduced sales when ideas or products go wrong. They can then try new approaches or go out of business.

Something counterintuitive but crucial to understanding both representative democracy and capitalism is that when they work well, they create more problems. This seems wrong because problems are bad, but when problems are solved, they tend to replace worse problems with not-as-bad problems, and in this way we make progress. When people solve problems, they also increase our shared store of general-purpose knowledge, which in turn creates better ideas, and so on.

More About How Problems Are Solved Under Capitalism

Most arguments for capitalism rightly focus on so-called free-market solutions. These free-market solutions are the source of capitalism’s strength and resilience. When I say “free market,” I don’t mean completely unregulated markets, just the most open markets that society can live with.

There are also situations where free-market solutions can create situations where everyone is worse off. Under those circumstances, government regulation may be necessary, provided it is done under a system where it is easy to remove regulations which turn out to create more harm than they solve.

Free-Market Solutions

Problems are solved via the free market by companies and entrepreneurs creating new products and through consumer purchasing signals. If people like a product, they’ll pay more for it. If they have a problem with a product, they can stop buying it. That means if they wish to influence the company, they can leverage the fact that a company needs money to survive.

Knowing this, people can buy less of a company’s products, or use their right to free speech to voice their concerns publicly about a product or company, dissuading others from purchasing those products. And in extreme cases, they can join an advocacy group and petition their government to regulate the product.

All of these actions reduce revenue for the company, and it will respond in a way that it believes will allow it to survive. Over time, this process will result in the company solving the problem with the product, finding a new product-market fit , discontinuing that particular product, or going out of business entirely.

The same thing applies to conditions for workers. Just as the public can choose between competing products, under capitalism, people can choose between competing workplaces. 

Consider what happens when people are dissatisfied with a company under other economic systems like socialism or communism. What is the motive of a state-run company? Is it to export products to sell at a profit for the government? Provide products for citizens? Provide jobs? Or provide positions of power for local politicians in exchange for political favors? 

In most state-run economies, citizens have to take the government at their word. Thus, they cannot know the honest answers and have no clear way to take action if that company is causing a problem.

Regulatory Solutions to Capitalism’s Problems

Sometimes, a problem will cause people to be harmed before the free-market process can correct it. A certain amount of harm is expected in any system. Still, we should take steps to avoid severe or recurring harm, as long as those steps don’t cause too many unintended consequences.

Limited democratic government regulation is an excellent way to handle this. A good example is regulation solving the problem of air pollution in cities. EPA regulations reduced smog and improved air quality and health outcomes for people living in cities, a tradeoff that was worth the downside of reducing industrial output.

But we should always err on the side of as little regulation as possible and ensure that any regulation can be repealed if it turns out to be too onerous. Regulation doesn’t just prevent problems, it also creates them by preventing solutions to future concerns. For example, we could now have practically unlimited cheap, clean, carbon-free energy; however, some environmental groups have made it so it’s currently impossible or too expensive to develop nuclear power plants because of their stance against the production of any amount of nuclear waste. 

Another free-market problem with a regulatory solution is monopoly/oligopoly. By controlling the market, these situations make it too difficult, if not impossible, for new entries into an industry. New products are not developed, and society loses out. In these cases, regulators might step in to break up an oligopoly or prevent a company from getting monopoly power in the first place. But they should be careful not to create the same problem they are attempting to solve by limiting a large but not-yet monopolistic company’s ability to innovate.

Regulations can also prevent small companies from competing fairly. Large companies who want to add barriers to entry in their industry have lobbied for some of the most burdensome regulations. One such regulatory barrier is the franchise agreements that telecommunications companies often have with local governments. These agreements often grant exclusivity to a single provider in a given area, making it difficult for new competitors to enter the market. Another is healthcare, where only large, established companies have the resources to complete large-scale clinical trials needed to bring new drugs to market.

Companies or customers becoming untrustworthy can be another problem in a free-market system. When buyers or sellers refuse to honor agreements, the cost and risk of doing business increase, and the whole system can break down, making developing new ideas and products less likely. It is, therefore, pragmatic for governments to play a role in enforcing contracts.

We should also touch on the problem of instability created when people feel (rightly or wrongly) that the current economic system has wronged them. In the past, this perception of oppression has led to violence, and even government collapse. Ironically, this has not happened yet with capitalism when paired with representative democracy, possibly because alternative systems have already been tried with little success.

A final free-market problem with capitalism that could benefit from regulation is in cases where certain goods or services have strong inelasticity of demand. For example, consumers purchasing utilities or life-saving prescription drugs will likely pay whatever price if there are no acceptable alternatives. For this reason, you could argue that markets for these goods are not free, and capitalism does not work well in these situations. 

However, we should remain open to the idea that free-market capitalism can provide benefits even here. For example, while the United States is known for having costly healthcare, it is also the world’s leading source of medical advances and scientific discoveries , likely because of the substantial financial incentives for developing beneficial new treatments. It’s worth noting that the more affordable healthcare systems in other countries directly benefit from the innovation that comes out of the US system.

What About the Problem of Inequality in Capitalism?

For some, inequality is the most glaring problem with capitalism. Some people think it is morally wrong for some people to have so much while others have so little . It seems unfair. 

Others may make instrumentalist arguments. They may point out that high inequality reduces social cohesion because people become suspicious of each other when they perceive unfair outcomes. Or they may wrongly believe that inequality is a sign of malfeasance because wealth accumulation can only happen by taking it from other people. And further still, some might argue that inequality leads to power being held by relatively few wealthy people.

Moralist Arguments About Inequality

Moral arguments against capitalism are based on fairness. For example, someone might believe that housing is a human right or that no one should starve while billionaires exist . These are moral positions worthy of discussion, but it needs to be determined how we might implement the changes suggested by these slogans without causing even worse problems.

It is hard to claim that we should redistribute property, for example, since that may lead to significant violence, and worse outcomes should the beneficiaries of the redistribution fail to contribute to society adequately, or should the property be redistributed unfairly.  Large-scale communal property and wealth redistribution systems have been tried without long-term success . Most communist and socialist countries eventually spiral into dictatorships or oligarchies with extreme inequality.

A solution that causes more damage than the problem it’s trying to solve is not a solution. The best way to address the problems of capitalism is to increase our moral and political knowledge. Increased knowledge will reduce suffering and decrease the chance of violence. But without better theories, it would be unwise to take significant action.

Instrumentalist Arguments About Inequality

The instrumentalist arguments are more concrete, such as the idea that financial inequality causes social instability because people compare themselves to others and claim that the differences result from social unfairness. It is unclear whether this is human nature or a persistent antirational meme, but when someone perceives another as having cheated or taken advantage of others to get ahead, they tend to become naturally suspicious.

The problem is, in most cases, those suspicions are unfounded. Most wealthy people earned their money in ways (at least in principle) available to almost anyone. 

The case of inheritances is more problematic for people to accept because someone who inherits money is different from the person who created a valuable product or service. In other words, “they didn’t earn it.” 

But we should nevertheless accept generational wealth, because telling people how to allocate resources to their own family is morally wrong. So long as people are legally and socially responsible for their family members, they should get the most say in how to care for them. And the effect of inheritances appears to be vastly overstated anyhow. A 2018 study found that only 21% of millionaires inherited any money at all. And another in 2019 found that only 24% received an inheritance.

Those who believe wealthy people get their wealth by taking it from someone else do not realize that the world is not a zero-sum game. One person gaining wealth does not mean another person has lost it. Global wealth has increased significantly over time, leading to many escaping poverty .

How could total wealth have grown if wealthy people took their wealth from others? It couldn’t have. Wealth is not ill-gotten by default; it is almost always created by someone bringing a product or service to market that others find valuable enough to pay for.

Another instrumentalist critique of inequality is it concentrates problem-solving ability unfairly among the wealthy. For example, Elon Musk would not have been able to create Tesla and solve the problems of making electric vehicles cool, affordable, and popular or significantly reducing the cost of orbital transport at SpaceX, without first having acquired sufficient wealth through the development and sale of his first company Zip2 .

It is reasonable to claim that many more people with highly beneficial product ideas cannot realize their ideas because they lack access to wealth. It would undoubtedly be great if everyone on Earth had the wealth and inclination to tackle big problems like this. Yet, under capitalism, anyone with a good idea and an internet connection can pitch their idea to an investor . If people believe in the idea, it could be funded, even if its profitability is unclear .

Alternate economic systems would require the person’s idea to be approved by a central authority, which would prevent most good ideas from being tried. So while it’s true that under capitalism, the ability to invest is mainly limited to the wealthy, there are opportunities for getting funding for a new idea or product, as opposed to having a limited central authority making all investment decisions.

It Sounds Like You Don’t Care About the Poor

I probably care more about the poor, and humanity in general, than most people. This is partially, because I have myself been very poor. After making a few terrible life choices, I spent about two years living in poverty, frequently without enough money to buy food. Only 10% of Americans are in that situation, but I can commiserate with them. Having to steal your groceries so you can eat something before bed is not a situation I would wish on anyone.

We will face massive problems in the future. These may include a lack of education, disease, and food and energy insecurity. The poor will bear the brunt of these issues, and our goal as a society should be to get as many people out of extreme poverty as possible by continuing the trend of the last 200 years under capitalism. 

And while global poverty is rapidly declining, even the wealthiest person today is still extremely poor compared to possible future living standards. 99% of all the kings and queens in history did not have on-demand access to a hot shower, much less Amazon Prime. There is no reason we cannot continue to make the same kind of progress in the future.

There are also much bigger problems which could eradicate every poor person on Earth, not to mention every other human. Here I’m thinking of global pandemics, giant meteors, gamma-ray bursts, the rather colonialist and inevitable expansion of the Sun, and so on.

No laws of physics prevent us from solving these problems; if one of them eradicates humanity, it will be our fault for not progressing fast enough . The responsibility for solving these problems and others is ours. These solutions require rapid growth in wealth and knowledge, precisely the kind of rapid growth we can achieve under capitalism.

Isn’t This Just Techno-Utopianism?

No. All forms of utopianism are silly because they assume that if we could just fix all the problems, that life would be perfect. But we can never fix all the problems. Problems are inevitable, remember?

However, we can reduce the likelihood that any one problem will cause massive suffering by making sustained technological, social, moral, and political progress.

Nothing prevents humans from improving our understanding of any form of knowledge. Thus, we should commit to systems allowing for rapid experimentation and falsification of our ideas. We will make an infinite stream of mistakes. But we can also create an infinite stream of new knowledge which improves people’s lives.

It’s not a utopia; it’s just our best shot at a future with a positive technological, social, moral, and political outcome.

Why the Idea of Late-Stage Capitalism Is So Attractive

1. people believe they would be happier or more free if they were living under a different system.

This might be the most common refrain of anticapitalists. They imagine themselves as able to pursue some full-time creative activity which is currently not possible under capitalism.

The greatest trick capitalist propaganda ever pulled was convincing people that "freedom" meant something like "being able to choose between 27 different flavors of ice cream", and not "having the material conditions of life allow for the pursuit of your own creative potential". — Existential Comics (find me on bluesky) (@existentialcoms) April 19, 2020

Two major issues with this type of thinking are:

• It’s a bad explanation for living an unfulfilled life, because no matter someone’s situation, they can always say they would be able to self-actualize if only they had more time, money, etc.
• It imagines that the replacement system is somehow able to provide more adequate food, shelter, and time for creative pursuits than capitalism. But historically, people living under replacement systems like socialism/communism have had to spend much of their time and energy navigating the idiosyncrasies of a corrupt system, waiting in line for basic necessities, working a job they don’t have any passion for, and living in uninspiring government housing.

2. Capitalism can feel like too much responsibility

Work sucks. I know. It’s nice to imagine a system where you don’t have to work so hard or make so many choices. Capitalism is an environment for people who are comfortable making choices, like which car to buy, what career to choose, and where to live. That may not be for everyone.

But under capitalism, you can easily choose to coast by while respecting the choice of others who want to embrace the system. Alternative economic systems do not offer this choice, so I suspect most people would choose capitalism if given the option. The boats go from Cuba to Florida. No one risks the journey in the other direction.

3. It explains valid frustrations with capitalism

The concept of late-stage capitalism is attractive because it helps to provide a framework for understanding economic, social, and environmental problems. People feel constrained because they see that they are dependent on others for earning money to pay for things. Identifying capitalism as the root cause of these problems can make it easier for people to understand and articulate their concerns and connect with others who share their views.

4. It prompts people to think about alternative systems

Concern that capitalism is nearing a “late stage” may help people consider improvements, alternatives, and better versions of capitalism.

5. It helps people improve their status (real or imagined)

Using the phrase late-stage capitalism allows the speaker to imply they have special knowledge about the future. While they often have no practical suggestion for a replacement system, they still enjoy a real or imagined social benefit from acting as if they know the next big thing.

6. It helps people feel better by shifting blame and responsibility to external factors

People may use the concept of late-stage capitalism as a way of expressing their frustration or dissatisfaction with their current economic situation. For example, they may attribute their economic struggles to external factors such as corporate greed, systemic inequality, or government policies rather than their own actions or circumstances.

This may be a valid critique in some cases, as external forces can contribute to an individual’s economic inequality and hardship. But under capitalism, the vast majority of individual situations can be self-improved by individual work and creativity. Alternative systems do not allow people to control their situation as readily as capitalism does.

7. It’s a manifestation of envy

While many people who critique capitalism do so from a place of empathy, solidarity, and a desire for a more just and equitable society, others feel a sense of latent envy when they see others operating more successfully than they are under capitalism. Many would feel secure if capitalism were to end and be replaced by a system with enforced equality.

Abandoning Late-Stage Capitalism

Hopefully by this point, you’ve been convinced that the idea of late-stage capitalism is so flawed as to be useless. Besides the logical flaws that come with predicting the future, the error-correcting properties of capitalism, especially in a representative democracy with thoughtful regulation, mean that capitalism is potentially the only system that can deliver the kind of growth needed to solve fundamental problems like poverty, not to mention existential problems which could kill billions, or even wipe out the human species. While it has many legitimate concerns, capitalism can be their source and solution .

I’ll leave you with a story my father-in-law told me about his friend Eugene who grew up in the Soviet Union. My father-in-law had asked Eugene what they were taught about the United States growing up. 

Eugene said that they were taught that capitalism was a theory, a model that the US tried and failed. But the catch was their US history ended with pictures of the 1929 crash and the Dust Bowl. Eugene said they never really learned much else, and capitalism was downplayed as a failed model for Soviet students.  He continued by saying that occasionally, people would suggest that they heard that the US was different from what they were being taught. But they had no contact with the outside world because the government protected them (against enemies). He said that this talk was shut down for fear that the government would convict you of promoting propaganda. I share this as it’s relevant vis-a-vis alternative methods to capitalism. Imagine a model like China, North Korea, Cuba, or the former USSR – the only way it works is if you keep your people from communicating with the outside world, and the only information they get is from the state. It’s hard to fathom, but that is how they live. Think about what the state must do to preserve this model.  If you can only get your food from one restaurant and are not even allowed to know there are other restaurants, the one you have may not seem too bad. Either way, he said, you don’t have a choice.

I run a small SEO consulting business in San Francisco, CA. I like to write a little bit and get in arguments with my friends. It’s the only way I can make sense of the world.

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Rachel Connolly

This Brand is Late Capitalism

I call them “this thing is late capitalism” essays . There are several variations on this genre of lifestyle writing. They don’t always invoke the “late capitalism” phrase explicitly, but all offer a critique of a popular brand or product in terms of its relationship to the system . Some are formulated as takedowns of companies that market themselves as millennial-friendly, or environmentally focused or, most often, feminist. In these essays, a writer will explain that, while this brand claims to be offering you empowerment, it is selling you a product at the end of the day: the enlightened brand is actually capitalist, but you might be fooled into thinking otherwise. Another type is the one in which writers chronicle their journey as they use a selection of hip, socially conscious products for a week, ultimately finding that, although these products promised to improve their life, it has, disappointingly, remained the same. Even the fanciest things cannot make you a better version of yourself, the writer will conclude, but it’s easy to be conned into thinking they might. Finally, there are the essays that credulously profile a company seeking to make a statement about, or better still, “shake up” capitalism.

There is, of course, crossover here, and many such essays fall under more than one grouping. But a few common features apply across the board: they are heavy on analysis but low on data; they make statements about the millennial experience that apply primarily to those who are relatively wealthy, living in cities, and in possession of one or more college degrees; they take it as a given that the marketing targeted by “cool” companies at this particular demographic is received without cynicism; and they all conclude with a kind of “no ethical consumption under capitalism” mantra. Recently, as I’ve noticed more and more of these essays appearing across the internet, on everything from Sweetgreen salads to puffer jackets, I’ve found myself wondering: What is the point?

A few months ago, BuzzFeed News writer Anne Helen Petersen wrote a glowing profile of the millennial-focused company Pattern as it launched Equal Parts, a brand of cookware aimed at time-strapped young professionals that offers a cooking “coach” text service, consisting of friendly reminders and advice, designed to make preparing meals seem less overwhelming. Petersen set out to discover “what an anti-burnout company, operating within American capitalism might actually look like.” The answer, it turns out, is pretty much like a regular company with slightly more flexible maternity leave; a loose (but not official) policy to not work later than 6 p.m.; and signs on the wall reminding employees to “ENJOY DAILY LIFE.”

As I’ve noticed more and more of these essays appearing across the internet, on everything from Sweetgreen salads to puffer jackets, I’ve found myself wondering: What is the point?

Still, Petersen breathlessly details how Equal Parts’ cookware and text service (“not unlike having a mom-like figure . . . only without the baggage of actually texting with your mom”) appeals to a growing need among millennials for something called “domestic cozy,” and how “cooking just to cook ” can be an “antidote, or at the very least, a form of resistance to the feeling that everything you do in your life should be optimized”—even when that “coziness” will set you back $449, the cost of Equal Parts’ “complete kitchen” set. She acknowledges that reminding wealthy young people to make dinner for themselves is a “bougie solution to a bougie problem” but stresses that the company’s philosophy is that “bougieness doesn’t obviate problem-ness.” For millennials, she argues, a company like Pattern may actually be part of the answer to the pressing question of: “How can we actually change the patterns of our lives—in a way that accommodates their current complexities without capitulating to them?” Optimization, here, is assumed not to be optional. Rather than an active choice some young people make to get ahead, it’s presented as something everyone must endure. The idea that, instead of cheerfully channeling their anxiety into home-cooking, millennials should (or even could) reduce life’s “complexities” by refusing to engage with the quest to joylessly gamify everything, is not discussed. Instead, paying somebody to text you about your dinner plans and buying some nice kitchen knives becomes a “form of resistance.”

Patagonia, known for its focus on sustainability, is often the recipient of similarly glowing coverage. A September 2019 profile in Time magazine argued that the company is “reimagining capitalism.” But, as is detailed in the piece, Patagonia makes new and upgraded products every year; offers deals like free shipping to encourage more online shopping; and markets its products heavily. It has reportedly made around $1 billion in annual revenue in recent years. The relatively high price point of their products—a standard fleece starts at about $100—may discourage over-consumption, but it also fosters exclusivity that lends the brand additional cachet. In what way is this helping to reimagine a competitive, market-based economic system?

Projecting radicalism onto brands because of superficial differences in their business strategy, like harder-wearing products, or a slightly more relaxed corporate culture, steers the conversation away from what genuine change might look like. The ability that individuals have to change their own patterns of consumption is minimized, too. Instead of buying secondhand, or (god forbid) spending a stretch of time without buying anything new at all, the reevaluation of consumer habits these essays tend to suggest is buying nicer things. And usually more expensive things, at that.

In a recent example of the “enlightened products journey” essay, The Atlantic writer Amanda Mull headed to the Goop store to spend $1,279 on whatever she wanted. Her mission? To see whether Goop products “really could improve my life.” Predictably, her purchases mostly fell flat. A $249 hair dryer did not give her the “hair of an Instagram influencer,” expensive face oil ended up all over the floor, and a luxury bath bomb turned the water brown. “As the experiment went on, I began to suspect that the health company I had been promised would never quite materialize. I tried to take every vitamin sachet and dose of Goop-branded melatonin with the sincere belief that I might just be one day away from feeling better than I ever knew I could,” she mused, as if anyone on earth, let alone a journalist on the consumerism beat, approaches lifestyle accessories with this level of sincerity.

The piece concludes on an indictment of the luxury wellness industry, as Mull explains that “buying the most luxurious version of a thing you don’t really need doesn’t make it more useful” and argues that companies like Goop take advantage of women not well-served by traditional medicine ( a point made in these pages by Jessa Crispin in 2018). But Goop, by now, is known less as a wellness brand and more as an object of ridicule, particularly since a viral 2018 profile in the The New York Times Magazine exposed issues in the company’s approach to fact-checking. It’s not likely that many of Goop’s customers are unaware of this Times -revealed scandal. They know the secrets; they know the jokes; they buy Goop anyway. Like all high-end lifestyle brands, Goop does not sell the promise of health so much as the ability to tastefully advertise that one has the money and taste to shop at a place like Goop. Women aren’t, by and large, being tricked by Goop’s marketing; they’re making a choice to align themselves with its brand statement.

A similar essay in Vox saw the writer Rebecca Jennings try the nicest and most expensive wardrobe and lifestyle basics from “disruptive” companies like Everlane, Casper, Quip, and Care/of. She ends the weeklong experiment devastated to discover that “the products, despite being worth thousands of dollars, have not managed to neutralize my bodily functions or my laziness about cleaning or the lingering guilt of ghosting.” Again: Are young professionals really conned into buying luxury products in the belief that they will “neutralize their bodily functions”? Presenting the pursuit of status objects as the result of an earnest desire for a rich inner life obscures the uncomfortable truth that these objects are often a way of signaling, to ourselves as well as others, that we have made it.

It is true that, in the era of hyper-targeted digital adverts, marketing is more omnipresent than ever. Using Instagram and Twitter (or even Facebook, if you’re that way inclined) can feel like working for free, making data for these companies to sell to other companies, who then sell us back a fragmented, incomplete, yet perfected version of ourselves in the form of aspirational lifestyle ads. And yet, there’s something insidiously disempowering about resigning ourselves to the idea that this deluge of marketing must work in exactly the way advertisers want it to. People are more complicated than their search history and likes. However manipulative their tactics, companies don’t, as these essays frame it, make people buy things.

A 2019 essay on the puffer jacket as a symbol of late capitalism argued that “under [its] terms . . . anything that streamlines day-to-day tasks that are only peripherally necessary for its functioning—eating, commuting, and, yes, dressing—is to be encouraged, rewarded, and, of course, sold back to us.” The author goes on to explain that “our clothing choices have been shaped by the demands of optimization. Time spent layering knitwear, scarves, and overcoats is time not spent answering emails or online shopping” . . . as if nobody has ever worn both a puffer jacket and a scarf. Even by the standards of “this thing is late capitalism” essays, positing that puffer jackets are part of a conspiracy to make people work more is pretty out there. Yet this is the logical end point of a line of thinking that doesn’t really hold anybody responsible for anything. Even the people buying $1,000 Canada Goose jackets live at the mercy of the system! What can any of us really do, apart from answer emails and online shop?

Take the many pieces that have been written railing against the twee women’s networking club The Wing, with its apparently feminist ethos but exclusively high price. Few have made any of the women who choose to join The Wing the subject of their ire. One essay describes how the club’s brightly colored, floral-patterned spaces demonstrate how “the radical potential of ‘playful’ and ‘zany’ aesthetics can be appropriated to mask a capitalist logic”—as though the workings of capitalism are “masked” for those women who can afford to pay The Wing’s $2,350 single location yearly fee. Writer Eloise Hendy continues: “The Wing offer[s] women luxurious ‘treats’ while profiting from their desire to escape or reform society’s ills.” But The Wing serves primarily as a space for professional women to meet and advance their careers; it is not a forum for people campaigning against homelessness or poverty. Are Wing members being unwittingly used by a deceptive and exploitative company, or are they willing contributors to a system that is working pretty well for them already?

It is easy to complain about our collective helplessness, and convenient to flatten all experiences of the capitalist demand for productivity.

Another essay, on the makeup brand Glossier, deconstructs the way its marketing cunningly ensnares well-educated, millennial women who are smart enough to see the trap it sets, yet powerless to resist all the same. A fake pink rooftop set up in the Glossier store is, of course, the “logical result of late capitalism.” The project is cynical, a “store pretending it isn’t a store”; the brand “seeks to optimize pleasure for the buyer to the point of erasing the customer-brand distinction entirely.” And yet, the piece concludes, what choice do these smart young women have but to buy Glossier’s products? “Glossier understands that you can hate what you want, feel bad for wanting what you want, but want it anyway, without being reduced to a fool.” You can be smart, this piece stresses, very smart, and still your choice to place an order on “boy brow” is not up to you. Not really.  

These essays all borrow from more substantive and radical criticisms of marketing made decades ago, like in Naomi Klein’s No Logo , or the countercultural magazine Adbusters . But most of them come to conclusions that feel curiously flat. While these earlier works advocated boycotts and protesting, “this thing is late capitalism” essays end instead on a note of knowing resignation. They point out that brands are insidious, and capitalism is oppressive, but conclude that, though awareness of this may be widespread, our power to act on it is minimal. These writers are right, of course, to argue that individual change won’t bring about the end to capitalism. But that doesn’t mean that choice does not exist.

Ultimately, linking a brand or cultural trend to “late capitalism” is an undemanding way to affect profundity and a kind of superficial universality. It is easy to complain about our collective helplessness, and convenient to flatten all experiences of the capitalist demand for productivity, as if an honest parallel can be made between the self-imposed short lunch breaks of an upwardly mobile urban millennial with two degrees and the timed bathroom breaks of an Amazon factory worker. All workers experience exploitation of some sort under capitalism, but it’s not an act of solidarity to obscure the very uneven way this manifests. No Logo was just as engaged with the conditions of marginalized workers in sweatshops as it was with brand saturation, but such considerations are conspicuously absent from “this thing is late capitalism” discourse.  

Every brand and company and product is, of course, an instrument of capitalism. It isn’t sharp or perceptive to point this out; it’s stating the obvious. These essays do a lot of work, but that work is less about identifying an under-reported phenomenon, or illuminating a new way of thinking about life under capitalism, and more about absolving readers of their participation, however active or enthusiastic, in it. At what point does participation cross over from subjugation and become, instead, complicity? At what point does complicity become propagation? I don’t really know the answer, but my guess is: a few pay grades below purchasing Equal Parts’ cooking coach subscription service.

Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Essay (Article Review)

In Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism, the author argues that architecture, which dominates the western culture, is an aesthetical form of cultural logic used to express postmodernism. Much of the expressions in paintings and philosophy show the true meaning of postmodernism. Architecture is a new form of aesthetically popular culture that takes political dimensions depending on the aesthetical features used to express a piece of an architect. Here, the higher forms of commercial (postmodernism) cultures have the merit of influencing people to decide the group to which an aesthetical feature belongs. Aesthetics is about the impressions people develop from what their eyes see.

“….a point that will be argued,…… namely that, every position on postmodernism in culture –whether apologia or stigmatization is also at one and the same time, necessarily, and implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today (Jameson 1991, 2). Here, a stylistic description of architecture shows the relationship between architecture and the cultural style of people, which often translate into the political dispositions of the people.

I agree with the statement because people with different cultures have different ways of doing things and architecture is one of the crucial tools used to express the culture of the people. The connection between culture and the political disposition of the people is evidently expressed in the objects they make. Typically, culture dictates the things people do and the way they relate with their environment (Jameson 1991).

“Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which in the form of commissions and land values it has virtually unmediated relationship” (Jameson 1991, 4). It is argued that architecture is necessary in shaping the culture of the people because it is an economic necessity that people must learn to accept to live with.

I agree with the author who argues that different consumers have different preferences for different products because each product appeals differently to each consumer. Production has become a dominant culture in the modern society because it is one of the economic activities where architecture is deeply embedded. The author presents many examples of buildings that represent architectural modernism, which represent the vernacular of the American city fabric (Jameson 1991). The architects of John Potman, which include the Peachree and the Renaissance Centers in Detroit, are good examples used to represent the lexicon and syntax of the language of the people in the modern society.

“….I believe one has to see such ‘people movers’ (Portman’s own term, adapted from Disney) as somewhat more significant than mere functions and engineering components” (Jameson 1991, 41). The ‘people movers’ are the lifts and mechanical devices that make movement easier and faster for the people who used to walk on their feet before engineers invented the mechanical devices architects use in modern architecture.

I disagree with the author about the components used to move the people within a building because Portman’s space does not merely consist of mechanical components but extra ordinary linguistic innovations of his work (Jameson 1991). Architects express the problem being addressed in a language that easily conveys the meaning of architecture to the target audience. Here, the new meaning enables people to develop new perceptions about a piece of an architect by using words and aesthetics properly.

Bibliography

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.

• Chicago (A-D)
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IvyPanda. (2022, June 7). Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. https://ivypanda.com/essays/architecture-postmodernism-article-by-jameson/

"Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." IvyPanda , 7 June 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/architecture-postmodernism-article-by-jameson/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism'. 7 June.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." June 7, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/architecture-postmodernism-article-by-jameson/.

1. IvyPanda . "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." June 7, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/architecture-postmodernism-article-by-jameson/.

IvyPanda . "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." June 7, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/architecture-postmodernism-article-by-jameson/.

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cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism “ Essay

Fredric Jameson is admired as a standout amongst the most imperative and persuasive artistic and social pundit and theoretician in the Marxist convention of the English speaking world . In his work “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” Jameson endeavors to portray the way of social creation in the second half of the twentieth century, the period of late capitalism, and to recognize it from different manifestations of social generation of going before capitalist periods. A generous part of Jameson’s “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” is committed to differential investigation of masterpieces and building design from what Jameson terms “high innovation” and postmodern works. He describes the postmodern mode of generation as a “social prevailing” in the wake of ideas like “depthlessness” or the concealment of depth, the fading of influence and pastiche, terms which as per Jameson identify with the postmodern type of production and experience.  

The idea of postmodernism quickly raises the issue of periodization, involved by the prefix “post-” doled out to the time of modernism. What was the starting point of modernism and when did it end? Is it safe to say that it is conceivable to define clear boundaries between modernism and postmodernism? Jameson accepts that it is conceivable to discuss social modes with in a characterized course of events. In any case, he limits his periodization of postmodernism to the unbinding idea of social

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Guest Essay

Scientists Just Gave Humanity an Overdue Reality Check. The World Will Be Better for It.

By Stephen Lezak

Mr. Lezak is a researcher at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford who studies the politics of climate change.

The world’s leading institution on geology declined a proposal on Wednesday to confirm that the planet has entered a new geologic epoch , doubling down on its bombshell announcement earlier this month. The notion that we’re in the “Anthropocene” — the proposed name for a geologic period defined by extensive human disturbance — has become a common theme in environmental circles for the last 15 years. To many proponents, the term is an essential vindication, the planetary equivalent of a long-sought diagnosis of a mysterious illness. But geologists weren’t convinced.

The international geology commission’s decision this week to uphold its vote of 12 to 4 may seem confusing, since by some measures humans have already become the dominant geologic force on the earth’s surface. But setting the science aside for a moment, there’s a reason to celebrate, because the politics behind the Anthropocene label were rotten to begin with.

For starters, the word Anthropocene problematically implies that humans as a species are responsible for the sorry state of the earth’s environments. While technically true, only a fraction of humanity, driven by greed and rapacious capitalism, is responsible for burning through the planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate. Billions of humans still lead lives with relatively modest environmental footprints, yet the terminology of the Anthropocene wrongly lays blame at their feet. Responding to the vote, a group of outside scientists wisely noted in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution that “our impacts have less to do with being human and more to do with ways of being human.”

What’s more, inaugurating a new geologic epoch is an unacceptable act of defeatism. Geologic epochs are not fleeting moments. The shortest one, the Holocene — the one we live in — is 11,700 years long and counting. The idea that we are entering a new epoch defined by human-caused environmental disaster implies that we won’t be getting out of this mess anytime soon. In that way, the Anthropocene forecloses on the possibility that the geologic future might be better than the present.

By placing Homo sapiens center stage, the Anthropocene also deepens a stark and inaccurate distinction between humanity and the planet that sustains us. The idea of “nature” as something separate from humankind is a figment of the Western imagination. We should be wary of language that further separates us from the broader constellation of life to which we belong.

Before the recent vote, the Anthropocene epoch had cleared several key hurdles on the path to scientific consensus. The International Commission on Stratigraphy, the global authority on demarcating the planet’s history, established a dedicated working group in 2009. Ten years later, the group formally recommended adopting the new epoch. But the proposal still had to be approved by a matryoshka doll of committees within the commission and its parent body, the International Union of Geological Sciences.

By all accounts, the process leading up to the vote was highly contentious. After the initial vote was held, scientists in the minority called for it to be annulled , citing procedural issues. This week, the committee’s parent authority stepped in to uphold the results.

Ultimately, what scuttled the proposal was disagreement about where to mark the end of the Holocene. The Anthropocene Working Group had settled on 1952, the year that airborne plutonium residue from testing hydrogen bombs fell across broad stretches of the planet. That ash, scientists reasoned, would leave a sedimentary signature akin to the boundaries that mark ancient geologic transitions. But scientists at the stratigraphy commission objected — what about the dawn of agriculture or the Industrial Revolution? After all, the human footprint on the planet long predates the atomic age.

“It’s very obvious to me that human activity started long before 1952,” Phil Gibbard, a founding member of the Anthropocene Working Group who is the secretary-general of the commission, said when we spoke on Thursday. “It just didn’t make sense to draw a rigid boundary within my lifetime.”

In recent years, philosophers have bandied about alternative names: the Capitalocene , the Plantationocene and even the Ravencene , a reference to the raven who figures widely in North Pacific Indigenous mythology as a trickster figure, reminding humans to be humble amid our destructive capacity. For my part, I’m partial to “post-Holocene,” an admission that the world is vastly different than it was 10,000 years ago, but that we can’t possibly predict — or name — what it might look like in another 10,000 years.

In the end, it might be too late to find a better term. The “Anthropocene” has already entered the popular lexicon, from the cover of The Economist to the title of a Grimes album. The scientists who coined the term do not have the power to extinguish it.

Whatever we choose to call these troubled times, what matters most is that we keep an open mind about what the future holds and maintain an appreciation for the complexity of the issues we face. The scars humanity leaves upon the earth are much too fraught to be represented with a single line drawn across time.

Looking ahead, we should follow the geologists’ lead and keep a healthy skepticism of the A-word. After all, nothing is more hubristic than reckless tyrants who names the world after themselves — think Stalingrad, Constantinople or Alexandria.

Geologists will continue to disagree over what to call the present era. The rest of us must continue the difficult politics of caring for a planet that can (still) support a panoply of life.

Stephen Lezak is a researcher at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford who studies the politics of climate change.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Global South: Incarceration and Resistance

The editors of this special issue of the Global South are seeking contributors whose work engages with questions of incarceration and movements for resistance and abolition. As many major works regarding the development of mass incarceration in the United States draw explicit links between the development of the prison and the legacies of U.S. slavery and Jim Crow practices, this issue is, rather (or also), interested in examining the development of the prison-industrial complex through a global south perspective. In 2001, Angela Y. Davis encouraged readers that “…in the era of the prison-industrial complex, activists must pose hard questions about the relationship between global capitalism and the spread of U.S.-style prisons throughout the world”—questions that have only become increasingly relevant today. We invite proposals that explore the developments of the role of prisons and other carceral spaces in conversation with global lineages of slavery and segregation, global capitalism/imperialism, practices of immigrant detainment, the environment, and national and transnational movements for resistance. We welcome broadened definitions of prison/confinement for articulating modes of state violence throughout the Global South; likewise, we welcome critical interrogations of contemporary terms and understandings of incarceration in the spirit of Dylan Rodríguez’s recent unpacking of the term “mass incarceration”.

Possible Topics Include:

• Private prison industries across the Global South
• Global explorations of the development of prisons and grassroots resistance strategies. 
• Global South prison abolitionist movements
• Analyses of gender, race, sexuality, and class (or the intersections thereof) relations within carceral systems
• State and post-industrial/late capitalist turns toward prison and prison construction
• Global, anti-imperial/anti-colonial abolitionist visions and practices
• Prison regimes beyond U.S. prison prototype
• Examination of the “direct links between “corporate globalization and the Prison-Industrial Complex” (Berger et al)
• Refugeeism, Global South refugees, detention centers, and global southern spaces of confinement 
• Global South prisons and COVID-19

This issue is slated for publication in Fall 2025, so contributors will have a calendar year to draft their complete 7,000-10,000-word essays. Please send abstracts of up to 500 words (in MLA style) and a 100-word biographical statement to guest editors Juyoun Jang and Allison M. Serraes, at [email protected] and [email protected] , by April 1, 2024.