Robert J. Antonio

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF POLITICS: Climate Change Denial and Political Polarization

Newly elected Republican Senator Paul states succinctly the conservative view of U.S. cooperation with international efforts to stem global warming. Liberals view Paul and friends to be endangering efforts to save the planet. The partisan split, analyzed incisively by McCright and Dunlap, will likely intensify in the wake of the conservative midterm election victories and possible mobilization of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. As McCright and Dunlap note, the partisan split over global warming is entwined with a broader polarization that intensified since the late 1990s. We address facets of American political culture that feed this polarization and support McCright and Dunlap’s critique of “reflexive modernity” theories. For more than a century, American political debates have ensued over two competing policy regimes, market liberalism, stressing unfettered capitalism, strong property rights, and a minimal social safety net, and social liberalism, favoring modest state intervention, redistribution, and welfare provision. 1 By contrast to social democracy and socialism, American social liberalism has not challenged capitalist ownership or management in fundamental ways. Moreover, market liberalism has been well represented in both political parties, even though the Republican Party has been its primary carrier. Both regimes embrace liberal democratic rights (e.g., freedom of speech, assembly, religion), albeit with distinct twists, reflecting different ideologies as well as divergent political alliances and compromises (e.g., the Republican–Christian conservative pact). Each regime has dominated at different historical moments (e.g., compare the culture and policies of the Gilded Age with the Progressive Era or the Roaring Twenties and the New Deal). Hegemonic rule by one of the two regimes has tended to move overall political discourse in its direction and shape accordingly public beliefs about what is politically possible and what is not. Governing in the wake of the Johnsonian Great Society, for example, Republican “conservative” Richard Nixon, supported a minimum annual income, employed price controls, and presided over creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). By contrast, in the aftermath of the Reagan Revolution, Democratic “liberal” Bill Clinton, supported welfare reform, cut the deficit,

After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism1

Revived Weimar‐era “radical conservatism” and fresh “New Right” and “paleoconservative” theories offer a radical cultural critique of global capitalism and liberal democracy. Expressing a broader retribalization and perceived failure of modernization, their defense of communal particularity attacks the multicultural nation‐state, liberal rights, and universal citizenship. This essay links reactionary tribalism to a recurrent 20th‐century theoretical tendency, the “total critique of modernity”—a fusion of oversimplified Nietzschean and Weberian ideas. Historically, total critique has promoted convergence between right and left, such as the current overlapping facets of “radical conservatism” and “strong‐program postmodernism.” Total critique counters the “historicist” method of “internal critique” and the “communication model” characteristic of reflexive social theory. The discussion uncovers the mediating role of social theory in the problematic relationship of science and partially disenchanted public spheres in plural, democratic cultures.

Searching for Justice

Twenty years ago philosophical justifications of economic democracy would have been superfluous. Democratic and egalitarian values seemed to be universally accepted, and critics focused on the gap between ideals and institutional realities. Today, conservatives argue that increased political participation and reduced inequality are too costly, that what is really needed is capital accumulation and economic growth. A looming economic crisis threatens to generate an even stronger assault on democracy. At any rate, the growing debate about democratic legitimacy reflects fears that liberal institutions might be in trouble. Derek Phillips swims against the political stream by arguing for market socialism and economic democracy, entailing the extension of welfare rights, redistribution of income, socialization of large firms, and creation of meaningful work.

Postmodern Storytelling Versus Pragmatic Truth-Seeking: The Discursive Bases of Social Theory*

The task of speaking the truth is an infinite labor: to respect it in its complexity is an obligation that no power can afford to shortchange, unless it would impose the silence of slavery (Foucault 1989, p. 308). . . . the attainment of truth is the outcome of the development of complex and elaborate methods of searching, methods that . . in many respects go against the human grain, so they are adopted only after long discipline in a school of hard knocks (Dewey [1925] 1988, pp. 234-35).

Climate Change, the Resource Crunch, and The Global Growth Imperative

During the great post–World War II economic expansion, modernization theorists held that the new American capitalism balanced mass production and mass consumption, meshed profitability with labors interests, and ended class conflict. They thought that Keynesian policies insured a near full-employment, low-inflation, continuous growth economy. They viewed the United States as the “new lead society,” eliminating industrial capitalisms backward features and progressing toward modernitys penultimate “postindustrial” stage.7 Many Americans believed that the ideal of “consumer freedom,” forged early in the century, had been widely realized and epitomized American democracys superiority to communism.8 However, critics held that the new capitalism did not solve all of classical capitalisms problems (e.g., poverty) and that much increased consumption generated new types of cultural and political problems. John Kenneth Galbraith argued that mainstream economists assumed that human nature dictates an unlimited “urgency of wants,” naturalizing ever increasing production and consumption and precluding the distinction of goods required to meet basic needs from those that stoke wasteful, destructive appetites. In his view, mainstream economists’ individualistic, acquisitive presuppositions crown consumers sovereign and obscure cultural forces, especially advertising, that generate and channel desire and elevate possessions and consumption into the prime measures of self-worth. Galbraith held that productions “paramount position” and related “imperatives of consumer demand” create dependence on economic growth and generate new imbalances and insecurities.9 Harsher critics held that the consumer culture blinded middle-class Americans to injustice, despotic bureaucracy, and drudge work (e.g., Mills, 1961; Marcuse, 1964). But even these radical critics implied that postwar capitalism unlocked the secret of sustained economic growth.

Is Prosumer Capitalism on the Rise

George Ritzer’s current TSQ piece adds to his distinguished record of innovative work on consumption and rationalization, providing new twists to his analyses of prosumption, especially its significance for capitalism. Although building on Alvin Toffler’s groundbreaking ideas about prosumption, Ritzer breaks sharply from his predecessor’s highly optimistic vision of the process. Toffler held that prosumption would stall or reverse post–World War II era industrial capitalism’s ever-increasing differentiation of production and consumption, and diminish the need for more intensive and extensive mass markets to mediate contradictory demands of the two relatively independent spheres. He contended that rapidly spreading prosumer practices were generating a relative “de-marketization” of society, increasing autonomy, self-reliance, and free-time, reducing bureaucracy and alienation, and fashioning a much more felicitous, sustainable ecology, culture, and democracy. Toffler (1981:270–3) considered marketoriented types of prosumption (e.g., self-service gas stations, ATMs) to be updated methods of capitalist externalization of labor costs. Ritzer implies the same. However, Toffler (1981:481, passim) argued that an expanding decommodified “prosumer sector,” stressing “production for use,” rather than “production for exchange,” was the driver of nascent “Third Wave Civilization.” Turning Toffler’s new age vision on its head, Ritzer asserts that dawning “prosumer capitalism” is intensifying and extending sharply commodification and its contradictions—accelerated exploitation, job loss, underemployment, debt, frenetic hyperconsumption, and euphoric alienation (à la Marcuse—blithe unawareness and even enjoyment of what besets us). Ritzer’s (2015a:14–15) latest argument about an emergent “vast web” of seamlessly integrated “smart prosuming machines,” absent human agents, suggests a Ritzerian version of The Matrix on the rise. Ritzer mentions passingly and dubiously empowering possibilities of nonprofit Internet sites (e.g., Wikipedia, blogs) and of other supposedly self-regulated facets of prosumption. Semiqualifications aside, Ritzer contends that capitalists have all the necessary means to continue to “capture prosumption” and far too much at stake to let this control slip away. Heralding mounting exploitation and domination, his declinist “grand narrative” of “producer>consumer>prosumer capitalism” theorizes possible unexplored dynamics and structures contributing to the neoliberal regime’s reproduction and expansion. Below I pose a few critical questions about the essay to provoke discussion and possibly further inquiry.

Hazards of neoliberalism: delayed electric power restoration after Hurricane Ike

This case study explores how neoliberal policies shape the impacts of a natural disaster. We investigate the reactions to major damages to the electric power system and the restoration of power in the wake of Hurricane Ike, which devastated the Houston, Texas, metropolitan area in September 2008. We argue that the neoliberal policy agenda insured a minimalist approach to the crisis and generated dissatisfaction among many residents. The short-term profitability imperative shifted reconstruction costs to consumers, and prevented efforts to upgrade the electric power infrastructure to prepare for future disasters. We illustrate the serious obstacles for disaster mitigation and recovery posed by neoliberal policies that privatize public goods and socialize private costs. Neoliberalism neither addresses the needs of a highly stratified public nor their long-term interests and safety.

Locating The civil sphere

Jeff Alexander (2006) has too many productive years ahead for The Civil Sphere to be called a culminating text, but it is a tome (793 pages) that refines basic threads of roughly three decades of previous work. He builds directly on his The Meanings of Social Life (2003), which integrated and drew heavily on themes from many of his earlier essays on cultural sociology. In Meanings, Alexander (2003:193–228) spoke of the need for a “neomodernist” intervention in the big interdisciplinary discourse over successor approaches to post-World War II, modernization theories. Civil society has had a central place in these debates, because its vitality is entwined with the fundamental question of whether liberal democracy is substantive or merely formal. Treating full modernity as a grand normative end, modernization theorists held that modernizing rationalization processes, in addition to elevating living conditions, propel realization of democratic ideals and generate the immanent standards needed to assess the progress. Starting in the1960s, Alexander (2003:206) contended, critical intellectuals and radical social movements attacked and, eventually, destroyed modernization theory’s “ideological, discursive, and mythological core.” Postmodernists radically deflated utopian, collectivist, and universalistic ideals, which they portrayed as the prime source of the previous era’s excesses. Dethroned as the telos of history, Alexander explained, the idea of modernity was redefined as “backwardness.” However, he argued that recent shifts, expressed in discourses about global democracy and markets, restored the cultural grounds for universalism and utopianism and made possible the formulation of a neomodernist position that could champion more plural, inclusive democracy against chauvinistic, particularistic forces. Alexander asserted that this theoretical move should preserve the postmodernist linguistic turn, but shorn of its relativism and pessimism. In The Civil Sphere, he develops comprehensively this neomodernist perspective.

Periodizing Globalization: From Cold War Modernization to the Bush Doctrine

We address here how the U.S. neoliberal policy regime developed and how its reconstructed vision of modernization, which culminated, under the rubric of globalization, was neutralized by 9/11 and neoconservative geopolitics. We analyze the phases in the rise of neoliberalism, and provide a detailed map of its vision of global modernization at its high tide under Clinton. We also address how the Bush Doctrines unilateral, preemptive polices and the consequent War on Terror and Iraq War eroded U.S. legitimacy as the globalization systems hegmon and shifted the discourse from globalization to empire. Cold War modernization theorists, neoliberal globalization advocates, and Bush doctrine neoconservatives all drew on an American exceptionalist tradition that portrays the U.S. as modernitys “lead society,” attaches universal significance to its values, policies, and institutions, and urges their worldwide diffusion. All three traditions ignore or diminish the importance of substantive equality and social justice. We suggest that consequent U.S. policy problems might be averted by recovery of a suppressed side of the American tradition that stresses social justice and holds that democracy must start at home and be spread by example rather than by exhortation or force. Overall, we explore the contradictory U.S. role in an emergent post-Cold War world.

For Social Theory: Alvin Gouldner's Last Project and Beyond

Theorists often point to social theorys normativity, but Gouldners later works provide the most explicit, comprehensive treatment of it as post-traditional normative discourse – a practice distinct from sociology and sociological theory, yet linked historically and analytically to them. His argument about the need for a discourse space to debate social sciences normative directions and to strengthen its connections to civil society is relevant today. Because Gouldners approach has gaps and is somewhat fragmented I will reconstruct his argument about social theory per se. Although I point to problems that derive from his incomplete pragmatic turn, his approach offers an excellent departure point for discussing the meaning of social theory.