Postmodern Socialism Revisited

Abstract

Globalization rules, or at least globalization talk rules. All talk of socialism, meanwhile, melts into air. How has this come to be? A decade ago, at least in critical circles, the dominant keyword rather was the idea of the postmodern and it, also, had its influence, spreading into the dailies and talk shows. Whatever else it was, the idea of the postmodern was temporal, and it mixed anxiety and hope in the characteristic figure of the sublime. The postmodern was, notoriously, a negative or at best chronological marker, claiming a sense of ‘being after’, being after the modern, being after the postwar dream, the Keynesian Welfare State, after Fordism, after aesthetic modernism. It replayed an earlier period sense of boredom or ennui, a sense of loss, boredom, of only potential movement, later. Globalization, in contrast, is predominantly a spatial, and active term. It indicates boosterism, dynamism, or else rapaciousness and ruin.