After the 1979 Conservative election victory in Britain and its repetition in 1983, Labour was intellectually comatose, such energy as it had mainly dissipated in factionalism, between a conservative leadership and a radical wing which yet seemed to look backwards. It was outside Labour, in a journal which had gradually floated itself off from the Communist Party of Great Britain, Marxism Today, where a serious reckoning was being made, even in advance of Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power, through path-breaking essays like Eric Hobsbawm’s ‘The forward march of Labour halted’ (September 1978) and Stuart Hall’s ‘The great moving right show’ (January 1979). And as the Iron Curtain was about to come down on the Communist political family—including its ‘Eurocommunist’ dissidents—in October 1988 Marxism Today published a startling diagnosis of the strange world in which the left now found itself, encapsulating a look forward into the 1990s in the phrase ‘new times’.
The special issue of Marxism Today devoted to this theme slaughtered many sacred cows, essentially arguing that the left was like a beached whale in a ‘post-Fordist’ world of ‘lean’ or ‘just-in-time’ production, where the old mass-production lines were being replaced by boutique production for diverse and demanding consumers. ‘Organised’ post-war capitalism, a relatively stable world in which big corporations recognised trade unions as an institutional voice of (at least male) workers and advanced capitalist states secured relatively full employment (at least for men) with a national welfare floor, was giving way to ‘disorganised’ capitalism, where capital roamed the globe and small and medium enterprises were often at the heart of innovation. The ‘new times’ analysis extended from the economic to the cultural arena, urging the left to recognise that it now inhabited a world characterised by what Antonio Gramsci had prefigured as ‘individualistic society’.
Informational
Since then, what defines this new form of capitalism has become clearer. It was described as ‘informational’ by Castells (1996) and ‘cognitive’ by Boutang (2008). If Fordism raised the productivity of labour quantitatively by building upon the Taylorist disaggregation of the labour process into simple, repeatable parts, co-ordinating them via a production line whose speed management controlled, informational/cognitive capitalism pursues qualitative innovation by cultivating and capturing the knowledge in workers’ heads.
