Late Industrial Capitalism 1: “Making Things in America”

To propose that there is such a phenomenon as late industrial capitalism is, of course, to break with the conventional chronology of capitalist development. Schematically rendered: feudalism ↔ industrialism (the first stage in the invention of machinery that reorganizes human labor, and, indeed, human life, completely disrupting life as previously lived) ↔ increased mechanization, greater efficiency (Taylorism, the assembly line, increased mass production; post–World War II, the creation of mass consumerism) ↔ postindustrial capitalism / late capitalism (the decline of manufacturing, replaced by a service economy and the rise of finance capital). One of the defining features of late capitalism, as Fredric Jameson has long since instructed us,1 is that it makes of everything a commodity—not only material resources but everything, including, saliently, the aesthetic: art, culture, the media, advertising, and so on—to say nothing of the ways in which postmodern capitalism technologically dominates our age.2 The shocking effect of late capitalism, as elucidated by Jameson in his critique of Ernst Mandel’s Late Capitalism, is that it is showing itself to be the “purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas.”3

So pure a form of capital will brook no residualism. Those economic modes that are incompatible with late industrial capitalism will no longer, Jameson writes, be allowed to endure: “This purer capitalism of our own time thus eliminates the enclaves of precapitalist organization it had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a tributary way.”4 If the logic of Mandel’s chronology of capitalism is the dialectic, and as such can “tolerate” the residual (the dominant mode of capital production can abide—accommodate and coexist with—older modes of production, as long as that mode does not threaten it as an economic practice), then the logic of late capitalism is more consistent with the spirit at of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan—all residuals will be eliminated in a fashion that will surely be “nasty and brutish.” In place of the dialectic comes an absolute rupture: the complete severing of the new, surging, mode of capital from its predecessor, a predecessor made obsolete and redundant by this new insurgent named late capitalism.