Disorganised
the point in history at which it begins to
Capitalism
For most of this century Western societies have
been characterised by organised capitalism. John
Urry argues we are now moving into the era of
disorganised capitalism
u ch of the debate about the
current crisis of the Left
has been focused too nar-
rowly on the effects of
Thatcherism per se. This is not to
suggest that the last nine years in
Britain have not been profoundly signi-
ficant, but the concentration on Thatch-
erism ignores three vital questions.
First, and most obviously, what would
have happened in the absence of
Thatcher - would policies have been
entirely different with a different
Conservative leader or with a govern-
ment led by a different party? Second,
what were the economic, social and
political conditions that made Thatch-
erism likely although not inevitable?
And third, even if Thatcherism has
made a major difference to the 1980s,
will its 'ending' mean that it will be
possible to return to the conditions
supposedly existing in the late 1970s?
These are all big questions. They can
only be answered by analysing the
much broader set of changes that have
been taking place within Western
Europe and North America, changes
from 'organised' to 'disorganised' capi-
talism. Thatcherism in the UK has to be
seen as, in part, produced by these very
changes, as crucially important in
facilitating their further development,
and as having ensured that by the 1990s
most of the contours by which we have
historically understood British society
will have been fundamentally redrawn.
I shall begin here by briefly stating what
I mean by 'organised capitalism', a
term I use to characterise Western
societies for the first half to two-thirds
of this century.
There were a number of intercon-
nected features of such organisation;
increasing dominance of large national
economic, social and political institu-
tions over people's lives; increasing
average size of workplaces; rising rate
of capital concentration; banks, indus-
try and the state working together;
residence and plant locations becoming
more and more urbanised; collective
bargaining taking place more and more
on a national scale; the industrial male
working class reaching its greatest
size; and politics and culture reflecting
the confrontation of nationally-
organised social classes.
Politics, for example in Britain, was
very much structured by divisions of
social class. People largely lived in
class homogeneous neighbourhoods,
people voted significantly in terms of
one class or another, other forms of
politics took their patterning from
divisions of social class, although clas-
ses were not simply homogeneous. The
considerable powers of the working
class and the labour movement in many
countries derived from the leading role
of particular groups of workers - of
mainly male workers living in certain
major cities, largely employed in large
plants in manufacturing industry and
mining. Relations within the workplace
structured social conflict and political
life. Furthermore, it seemed that these
processes would continue to grow in
importance - that is, that plants would
get bigger and bigger, that Western
economies would become increasingly
monopolistic, that more and more
people would live in large cities, that
major manufacturing industries would
increasingly dominate whole regions,
that male-based trade unions would
continue to grow and so on.
C
learly not all of these de-
velopments were to be found
simultaneously or in the same
way in all Western countries.
It is useful to distinguish between
organisation 'at the top' and organisa-
tion 'at the bottom'. Organisation at the
top here includes the concentration of
industry, increasing interdependence
of banks, industry and the state;
organisation at the bottom includes the
development of national trade union
bodies, working-class political parties,
and the welfare state.
The following are three of the factors
which determine the timing of, and the
extent to which, capitalism in each
country has become organised. First,
30 MARXISM TODAY OCTOBER 1988
industrialise; the earlier a country
enters its 'take-off, the less organised
its capitalism will be. This is because
countries which are later industrialis-
ers need to begin at higher levels of
concentration and centralisation of
capital to compete with those which
have already been industrialising for
some time. Secondly, the more pre-
capitalist organisations survive into the
capitalist period, the more organised
capitalism will be. On this count,
Britain and Germany became more
highly organised capitalist societies
than France and the USA. The third
factor is size of country. For the
industry of small countries to compete
internationally, resources were chan-
nelled into relatively few firms and
sectors. Co-ordination between the
state and industry was then greatly
facilitated, if not necessitated. At the
same time there would tend to be
higher union densities, more 'organisa-
tion' of labour, where there were
relatively few firms and sectors.
Overall, Germany came closest to
approximating to the ideal type out-
lined above of organised capitalism,
achieving high levels of organisation
very early on, both at the top and the
bottom.
y contrast, central to the
British economy have been
the absolute size and inter-
national scope of the finan-
cial sector, the early export of capital
goods, the early shift into production of
services, and especially a sectoral
profile in which concentration was
focused not in the characteristic sec-
tors but in consumer industries such as
food and drink. It was the absence of
horizontal and vertical integration, of
diversification and modern managerial
structures in the key sectors which was
the decisive feature of Britain's mid-
dleman (or Makler) economy. At the
same time it was organised at the
bottom earlier than it organised at the
top, and earlier than many other
societies.
It was, I believe, the developments
outlined earlier towards organised
capitalism which provided many on the
Left with evidence that the powers of
the labour movement would continue to
increase and that a variety of 'collectiv-
ist' and 'statist' initiatives were both
desirable and politically feasible.
However, in the last couple of decades
many of these processes have gone into
reverse in the West and a process of
capitalist disorganisation has been set
in motion. This is outlined at length in
The End Of Organised Capitalism
(Polity, Cambridge 1987, written with
Scott Lash) where we show this with
regard to France, Germany, Sweden
and the USA as well as the UK. There
are a number of interdependent proces-
ses involved here.
1 There has been a 'globalisation' of
economic, social and political rela-
tionships which have undermined the
coherence, wholeness and unity of
individual societies. Such develop-
ments include the growth of multina-
tional corporations whose annual tur-
nover dwarfs the national income of
many individual nation-states; the
spectacular development of electroni-
cally-transmitted information which
enables geographically-distant units to
be organisationally unified; the fragile
growth of international state organisa-
tions which constrain the autonomy of
individual nation-states; the growth of
means of mass communication which
can simultaneously link 20-30% of the
world's population in a shared cultural
experience; the possibility of technolo-
gical disasters that know no national
boundaries; and the awesome realisa-
tion that human existence itself is
dependent upon the relatively unpre-
dictable decisions of the leaders of two
superpowers. There has been a 'globa-
lisation' of economic and social rela-
tionships and of a greatly heightened
awareness of the 'simultaneity' of
events and experiences occurring in
geographically-distant locations.
2 Mass production of standardised
products in manufacturing plants em-
ploying thousands of male workers will
become a thing of the past. What
manufacturing workers there are will
increasingly produce more specialised
products in plants employing consider-
ably fewer workers with higher levels
of capital equipment. Meanwhile, ser-
vice employment has become, and will
continue to become, much more impor-
tant relatively speaking. There have
been a number of interrelated changes
in Britain; sizeable increases in the
number of self-employed people; the
growth in the size of the secondary
labour force so that one-third of the
labour force now consists of part-time,
temporary and home workers; a con-
siderable rise in the rate at which new
firms have been formed and hence in
the number of small firms in both
manufacturing and service industry; a
very large increase in the proportion of
manufacturing employment found in
small enterprises; a sizeable decline in
the numbers of people employed in the
average manufacturing plant even in
very large multi-plant, multinational
enterprises; and a tendency for large
firms to be broken up into smaller
decentralised units, or to develop new
forms of devolved ownership such as
franchising or new sub-contracting
arrangements which enable much more
flexible responses to new products and
markets. In 1981 Sir Adrian Cadbury
described this as follows: 'We will
want, in future, to break these orga-
nisations down into their separate
business units and to give those units
freedom to compete in their particular
markets. Large companies will become
more like federations of small enter-
prises - not because "small is beauti-
ful" but because big is expensive and
inflexible... I would expect tomorrow's
companies... to concentrate on the core
activities of their business, relying for
everything else on specialised sup-
pliers who would compete for their
custom'.
3 There have been enormous changes
in the spatial organisation of produc-
tion. Companies are now able to operate
on a world scale, to move in and out of
countries taking advantage of different
wage and strike rates, to subdivide
their operations in pursuit of a global
strategy, to force workers to compete
with each other to gain or keep new
production. As the New York Times put
it, firms had to 'automate, emigrate, or
evaporate'. For example, the compo-
nents that make up the Apple II E
microcomputer are produced in a
bewildering array of factories, in Cali-
fornia and Texas in the USA, in Cork
and in Denmark and West Germany in
Europe, and in Japan, Taiwan, Singa-
pore and in various other countries in
south-east Asia. The 42 chips that are
put together in each Apple micro-
computer have travelled in total at
least a million miles before being
combined together. The development
of new forms of electronically-
transmitted information and of jet
transport and travel have permitted
extraordinary levels of vertical disin-
tegration and spatial relocation. Even
within the UK there has been a marked
tendency for whatever new industry
there is to be located outside the major
cities, and for there to be extremely
high rates of depopulation from the
major conurbations, and the general
growth of employment and population
away from the industrial heartlands of
Britain.
4 At the same time that employers
appear to be much more mobile and
innovative, the workforce seems to be
increasingly defensive and conserva-
tive - seeking to preserve or even to
return to outmoded patterns of indus-
try, technology and values. Employers
increasingly appear as progressive, as
being on the side of the new, as being
not in favour of the status quo but in
favour of change, breaking with tradi-
tion, and modernising for the future.
Simultaneously, a number of develop-
ments have served to bring about a
heightened identification of workers in
the private sector with their firms. This
has in turn encouraged a commitment
to the career chances given by the
firms' internal labour market, to be-
coming employee-shareholders, and
collective bargaining at the level of the
individual enterprise.
5 Social life, culture and politics are no
longer predominantly organised in
terms of social class. This is partly
because current inequalities of income,
wealth and power do not produce
homogeneous social classes which
share common experiences of class
deprivation, or even vote the same way
at elections. It is also because a much
wider variety of other social groups are
now willing and able to organise. Such
social movements struggle around
issues of gender, the environment,
nuclear weapons, urban inequalities,
racial discrimination, social amenities,
31 MARXISM TODAY OCTOBER 1988
level of rates and so on. Such groups
are generally organised on a relatively
decentralised basis - in the case of
urban riots with no real organisation at
all - and the focus of their hostility is
particularly to the 'state' and some-
times to the labour movement itself.
Indeed we may well see increasing
amounts of social conflict simply be-
cause there are simply more bases now
of opposition in contemporary Britain.
In a paradoxical sense fewer and fewer
groups have a strong vested interest in
the status quo. But that in turn means
that the labour movement no longer has
a monopoly on opposition and struggle.
Social conflict has become more plur-
alistic, structured by a much wider
variety of interests, and involving very
many different enemies including the
'Social state, bureaucracies, male trade union-
conflict has ists, white workers, and so on.
6 And finally, culture too has changed.
become more Popular music, styles of dress, new
pluralistic, development in film, tv and theatre
structured by have been in part structured by a
strong opposition to authority, and
a much wider especially to the authority of 'age'. It
variety of was a consequence of the political and
interests, cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s
and involving that personal identity and individual
self-assertion became highly valued
very many goals of human experience in the West.
different But this emphasis not only challenges
enemies' authority structures such as the family,
the school, the monarchy, the police
and courts and so on; it also questions
the basis of joining and participating in
collective organisations such as trade
unions. As Raphael Samuel has argued:
'Collectivity... is seen rather as an
instrument of coercion, promoting uni-
formity rather then diversity, intimi-
dating the individual, and subordinat-
ing the minority to the unthinking
mass.' There has thus grown up a
suspicion of the centralised organisa-
tion, whether it is a trade union, a
professional association, an education-
al institution, a political party, or a
pressure group. This kind of radical
individualism has contradictory
effects. It leads to challenges to author-
ity in many spheres of social life while
making it harder to sustain oppositional
collectivities and collective action.
T
his set of developments has
been generated by a number
of processes: the growth of
the electronic mass media,
the disruption of class homogeneous
neighbourhoods, and the development
of a relatively unattached middle class.
It has been suggested that what results
is a relatively depthless world in which
people no longer pursue lifetime pro-
jects and seek short-term advantage in
a kind.of 'calculating hedonism'. Peo-
ple's lives are not therefore viewed as
the pursuit of ideals, or as part of a
collective project. They are much more
like those immortalised in the writing
of Erving Goffman, of whose vision of
human life Clifford Geertz has said:
'Life is just a bowl of strategies'.
It is fairly clear how these develop-
ments feed into support for the Right
and its evident hostility to the 'collec-
tive' and especially to the 'state'. I
would also argue though that in recent
years a kind of 'disorganised opposi-
tional/socialist' politics has been de-
veloping (in part associated with this
journal). In this it is accepted that the
certainties and optimism associated
with 'organised capitalism' are evapor-
ating and this is reflected in three key
developments. First, there is a reap-
praisal of the possibilities of using the
state to correct inequities and injus-
tices generated within the economy and
society. Indeed it is maintained that
there is and should be a limit to politics
and the state, that there are trans-
formed boundaries. Second, it is pre-
sumed that the 'class struggle' does not
contain a dynamic sufficient in itself to
transform modern societies in a social-
ist direction. And in particular, it is
held that the working class, whatever
its powers once were, certainly now
does not possess on its own the powers
to force through a socialist transforma-
tion of modern Britain.
A
nd third, it is believed that
there is an important
realm of 'small-p' politics,
of civil society, which is
neither purely private nor purely pub-
lic, and that many disorganising de-
velopments are generating a more
complex and politically contested set of
spheres of social life; of culture,
leisure, arts and architecture, con-
sumption, environmentalism, femin-
ism, ethnicity, local democracy, and so
on. Many of these spheres have become
areas of political conflict as civil
society and a cultural fragmentation
have developed apace.
The structures of contemporary capi-
talism have thus been transformed by
three simultaneous processes: of globa-
lisation from above, of decentralisation
from below, and of disintegration from
within, with the development of a
powerful middle or service class which
has been particularly instrumental in
the generation of a more diverse,
pluralistic and politically-contested
civil society.
In conclusion, then, it was a character-
istic of organised capitalism that the
basic parameters of politics were set
by social class, particularly by the
struggle of labour and capital.
Although some of the features of such
struggle remain, they are now overlain
by a variety of alternative' bases of
organisation, of new social movements,
of an instrumental collectivism, of an
internationalised classless culture, of
an anti-state neo-liberalism, and of the
growth of the institutional and cultural
resources of a powerful service class
intermediate between capital and
labour. The structures of the 'modern'
world are being transformed, and
although the social relations between
labour and capital structure those
developments internationally (with
capital being reorganised), the patterns
33 MARXISM TODAY OCTOBER 1988
of social life and social struggle within
different advanced nation-states are
becoming decidedly disorganised.
F
urthermore, it is part of the
disorganising of Western capi-
talism that relatively 'class-
less' cultural forms of civil
society have become of greater import-
ance in the structuring of social life.
Contemporary culture permits an ex-
traordinarily heightened availability of
'Companies social situations, events, myths and
are now able images which cohere around and 'con-
to operate on struct' diverse 'subjects', not merely
the class-subject beloved by socialists,
a world or the market-generated subject
scale, taking favoured by neo-liberals. With the sea
advantage of change in modern society, with the fact
different that large organisations, workplaces
and cities are no longer getting more
wage and and more powerful relative to each
strike rates individual, the processes of forming,
to subdivide fixing and reproducing 'subjects' is
their increasingly 'cultural' or 'small-p' poli-
tical, formed in diverse ways out of a
operations in myriad myths and images, of consumer
pursuit of a products, of available 'lifestyles', of a
global diverse civil society, not at all based on
strategy' where one lives or who one knows, that
is, on those who are immediately
present in one's class milieu.
To paraphrase the famous phrase
from the Communist Manifesto, the
fast-frozen relations of organised capi-
talism - which were structured around
class, city, region, nation, the party,
and even the word - are melting into
air. •