CHAPTER ONE—THE TEMPORALITY OF MODERNITY

Popular Ideas of Modernity
There are, however, two important features to note about the common, unformulated, concept of modernity:

• the subjects of modernity like to think of themselves as somehow different from all other ages and they also believe that modernity is the culmination of human development; and
• modernity is taken as a description which is not geographically restricted, and can be used about any part of the world.

Definition of Modernity
Modernity is the economic and cultural system which emerged first in the late eighteenth century in Britain as a result of the technological innovations of the preceding century. Note, however, that the historical scheme of the book is strongly anti-teleological and does not lay down that the preceding centuries of western history were destined to lead up to the moment of modernity. Modernity is better regarded as a chance, and very unfortunate, alignment of certain economic, political and social technologies.

Definition of a Temporality
A temporality is the cultural organisation of time, space, work, exchanges, trade, &c. Naturally a temporality will concern first the economic organisation of society.

Points about the Model
The following points should be noted about the theoretical model:

• no temporality, not even modernity, is entirely homogeneous, but temporalities can best be thought of as superimposed on top of one another, the latest being that which has most political effect;
• the effect of a temporality on any particular person, depends on gender, age, location, social mobility. It is the common property of dominant temporalities to exploit older temporalities; modernity specialises in this, which makes the model of stratified temporalities a useful one, as clearly modernity, in its expansion, does not revolutionise all temporalities equally;
• there have been two great shifts of temporalities in human history: the first from hunter/gatherer societies to the various temporalities of agricultural societies, the second, much more speedy and profound, from those agricultural temporalities to the industrial temporalities of modernity.

The Impact of Modernity
Thus we can say that modernity has revolutionised the temporalities of pre-modern times, and has, from the very beginning, aspired towards one world economy. However it is important to realise that this colonisation proceeds both internally and externally.

The Green Revolution as Example of External Colonisation
Faced with a the problems of a growing population in the Third World, first-world plant-breeders and biologists developed various super-crops and introduced them throughout the Third World:

• the multinational companies who financed the development of these crops also coordinated the sale and distribution of the chemical fertilisers necessary for the crops;
• traditional and locally suitable seed varieties were replaced and seed-merchanting was taken out of local hands;
• the ecology of traditional agriculture was disrupted by pesticides, and insect-controlling birds, fish and amphibians (which had also been supplementary sources of protein) disappeared;
• third-world agriculture became part of the world economy, peasant farmers were dispossessed of their land and flooded to the cities, aggravating the population problem.

Modernity’s Dynamic
Modernity is constantly engaged in absorbing other temporalities and colonising new cultural and geographical spaces. This is because of:

• the search for new resources and labour;
• the intensification of production;
• the search for new markets, since it is much easier to find a new market, than to succeed in an already-established one.

Lack of a Concept of Limits
We should recognise that nowhere in the cultural apparatus of modernity is there anything that can provide a concept of limits. Indeed that there can be no limits to economic development is part of the dogma of modernity’s economics.

Modernity’s Tautological Rationale
Modernity sees economic development as a necessity to supply the crying needs of an always expanding population. But the needs it supplies, and the population is fosters, are entirely of its own making.

CHAPTER TWO—A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF CAPITAL

• aggressive individualistic liberalism and the pursuit of Free Trade;
• a crude territorial imperialism; and
• the uneven and unstable nature of capital development, characterised by great ‘boom and bust’ economic cycles, culminating in the Great Depression of 1929-33.

Middle Capitalism
Although this period began in earnest after WWII, many of its elements had their origins much earlier. This period of capitalism was characterised by:

• a form of colonialism less concerned with the control of territory than with the control of resources and the inclusion of the ‘less developed’ world in the modernistic sphere;
• the adoption of Fordism in industry, with a consequent intensification in production and the birth of the ‘Consumer Society’;
• the adoption of quasi-Keynesian, full-employment economic policies by many governments in industrialised countries and the construction of many versions of the Welfare State;
• the mechanism of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and ‘pegged’ rates of exchange;
• the increasing concentration of economic activity in large national and international enterprises; and
• the identification of democracy with capitalism.

Late Capitalism
Late Capitalism had its origin in the oil prices rises of the 1970s and the contemporaneous discovery that rates of exchange could no longer be fixed. It carries on many of the concerns of Middle Capitalism, notably the interest in the intensification of production, however, it also represents a return to some of the conditions of Early Capitalism, notably the obsession with Free Trade, private enterprise, ‘deregulation’ and the lack of concern for full-employment. It is characterised by:

• high levels of unemployment;
• the reappearance of periodic ‘boom and bust’ economic cycles;
• a depression of commodity prices and a calling-in of third-world debt; and
• a frenzy of advertising and marketing, together with a desperate search for new markets.

Postmodernism
There is current a belief that modernity is about to change into ‘Postmodernity’. However the idea of the post-modern is first and foremost an aesthetic, and one which continues in a fairly obvious way the Romantic aesthetics of modernity. Such political claims that postmodernism does make (that the new technologies of communication will deconstruct the political structures of modernity and return power from the centre to the margins) are overstated:

• capitalism has not ended, it has become more intense in the last twenty years;
• the new technologies of communication, far from ending the monopoly of industry and capital, will only reinforce it; and
• although the service and communication industries are now more important than they were, modernity is still founded solidly on the development of capital in traditional industries, as a glance at any economy, developed or developing, will demonstrate.

Accordingly in this book the term ‘praeter-modernity’ is used for any paradigm beyond modernity.

The Nature of Capitalism
There is currently a nostalgia amongst many commentators for the balmy days of Middle Capitalism. However, this nostalgia is misplaced; Middle Capitalism was an anomalous and unsustainable episode, during which, moreover, the colonialising and expansive dynamic of modernity was completely unabated. Capitalism is the same in whatever guise it appears.

CHAPTER THREE—THE SUBJECTIVITY OF MODERNITY

The Subjectivity of Modernity
The subjectivity of modernity has the following characteristics:

• as modernity is the most materially well-equipped culture in history there is a widespread conviction that it is therefore also better in some absolute sense than any other culture; and
• there is a conviction that the subjects of modernity possess freedom in the way subjects of other cultures have not done. Of course the one freedom we might possess, which would demonstrate this freedom, the freedom not to be our modernistic selves, is the one freedom we cannot possess, and cannot grant anyone else.

Modernistic Personal Freedom
The idea of personal freedom, ie liberalism, is entirely modernistic and linked indissolubly with modernity’s economic growth, since;

• the ‘aesthetic response’ to modernity, that is, a liberal ‘moral’ critique, has always been subsumed by the economic imperative, and the consummation of a non-materialistic society is always postponed, until some further economic growth has taken place; and
• the exercise of freedom by the few is at the expense of the many, whose oppression and lack of freedoms support it.

Modernistic Scheme of Values
There is ‘no limit or certain boundary’ (Adam Smith) to the desire unleashed by modernity:

• in place of the traditional Seven Sins (desires for), modernity has a sort of generalised desire which obliterates any notion of the proper limits of human action;
• modernistic anti-materialism can often be a parody of the extreme nature of modernity’s materialism.

An ‘Immoral’ Critique
It is difficult to mount a critique of modernity, or any culture, since societies are not sets of moral rules, but social systems, and have as their only ethical end their own reproduction. However, modernity, uniquely, invites such a general critique because its instability and unsustainability compromise its continuance.

CHAPTER FOUR—MARX AND MARXISM

• Marx’s understanding of modernity is in keeping with the subjectivity of modernity;
• the future paradises of liberalism and communism differ only in the matter of whether the individual or the class is the basis of society.

Marx’s Thought
Moreover, the following further limitations of Marx’s thought must be noted:

• all Marx’s works are Eurocentric in their emphasis and the static ‘Asiatic’ mode of production is always the undynamic economic nightmare haunting Marx’s work;
• all Marx’s works have as their basis the bourgeois paradigm;
• Marx assumed that modernity had replaced ‘real’ relations of production with false ones, which communism would replace with real ones again. In fact there are no real relations of production anywhere, nor is capitalism inherently contradictory.

What it Leaves Out
Furthermore, Marx’s thought does not include the following necessary observations:

• the recognition that European expansion is necessary for modernistic economic growth—Marx often seems to be grateful to imperialism for its energetic subversion of other cultures;
• the fact that modernity is likely to prejudice its own continuance, and at the same time that of all other societies.

Capitalism and Communism
Although neither Marx nor Engels went into much detail about communist society, it would be disingenuous not to associate their names with the various communist societies of the twentieth century: all communist societies have been as colonialist and as environmentally destructive as their capitalist counterparts;

• all have taken orthodox industrialisation as their path towards the future (cf the transition of China from a communist state to ‘the world’s fastest growing economy’);
• just as liberalism’s dreams of justice are infinitely deferred, so are communism’s.

Thus it would be more correct to say that during the Cold War of 1948-1990, what was a stake was simply the rivalry of two versions of capitalism.

Communism in the Third World
That communism has been so attractive to third-world resistance movements and anti-western governments indicates a deeper level of colonisation: Marxism in this case overshadows many indigenous cultural resources.

Socialism’s Moral Critique
Like liberalism’s, socialism’s critique of modernity can only be a local, ‘moral’ one, one which in nothing more than a concern for discrimination of the correct type of economic growth, and whether it is a humane one.

Anti-humanist Politics
Although one’s instinct is to hope for a egalitarian, redistributional society, of the kind foreseen by many green socialists, there is no guarantee that this is the sort of society which could emerge in praeter-modernity; we simply do not know what praeter-modernity will look like and it could easily incorporate some very unpalatable elements in it. Moreover it likely that any political movement seeking to overturn modernity will have to downplay its egalitarianism in order to win over various constituencies.

CHAPTER FIVE—HEGENOMY

• the fact that there have been, and are, many different societies in human history, all with different schemes of value and ‘rules’ shows that such rules are contingent, historical artefacts, heterogeneous, various, polyphyletic and illogical, but having one feature in common, that they are social rules, not natural behaviour; moreover
• human societies are never in full ‘ecological fit’ with their environment, but the most stable and long-lasting societies are those which contrive always to have an ample reserve of resources.

How Social Change Occurs
Any account of hegenomy must include a theory of social change:

• the most prominent feature of any society is mainly lack of change, however, in the long run societies ‘drift’ as a result of the many contingencies occurring constantly;
• sudden change occurs as a result of conquest or colonisation from outside, or by ecological factors, or by a sudden new alignment of social technologies.
• We can recognise all these dynamics in modernity: the sameness and slow change of modernity over the last 200 years, but also modernity’s abrupt beginnings, and its likely end, as a result of ecological collapse.

The Natural Status of Modernity
In common with other cultures modernity claims a natural status, for example the world-market is likened to the flow of energy in natural ecosystems:

• ironically the world-market is now so large that it does behave like a natural system, ie chaotically and unpredictably; however
• it is easy to see that modernity is not natural, for example there is no ‘natural rate of profit’, but the rate of profit varies between the major capitalist countries in accordance with social customs and expectations.

Reason for Modernity’s ‘Success’
All societies are, or have been, concerned with welfare, and most are concerned with wealth, however to describe them all as being modernity in disguise is either anachronistic or disingenuous. However one reason for modernity’s success is that it is pre-eminently the social paradigm which multiplies technology and capital, and these are traditional symbols of power too:

• thus the leaders of other cultures are, and were, ‘bought’ with superior quantities of technology, for example, firearms and other weaponry.

Cultural Capital
We must refine the usual model of the brute hegenomistic strength of modernity by introducing the notion of cultural capital. This is basically social prestige, which is awarded for services rendered (to modernity):

• cultural and financial capital are not always identical, but are rarely completely divorced;
• authority and prestige are connected with perks over and above high salaries;
• until the 1960s opposition to modernity usually came from people with no cultural capital: women, gypsies, small-holders, indigenous people; however
• since the 1960s the Peace Movement has ushered in an alternative lifestyle with its own cultural capital; but
• beyond the motives of personal advantage, there is still a common belief that modernity is genuinely a better way of life, and the poverty of ‘underdeveloped’ nations (in truth entirely of modernity’s making) is adduced as proof of this.

The Rationality of Modernity
In pre-modern societies there was no less fascination with wealth than in modernity, but not everything was directed to the one end, as now. As Weber pointed out, this feature of modernity is what makes it look so reasonable, when in fact it is more rapacious and ravening than any other paradigm.

Governmentality
One of the most interesting of current political theories is that of ‘governmentality’, that is that it is the apparatus of the modern state (invented in seventeenth-century Germany) to which we owe our present prosperity and peace and that this regime of the governmental is independent of the dynamic of capital. This theory is a comforting one if only for the reason that it suggests that the apparatus of governmental supervision and control, which currently polices modernity’s polity, is not ideologically caught up with it, but might serve praeter-modernity too. However besides this we must note:

• our prosperity is neither general nor well-enough established to celebrate;
• domestic peace is a dubious concept in view the social strife of the world (1 million people a year are killed by their own governments), and it leaves out of the reckoning modernity’s colonial wars;
• ecological problems can hardly be a matter of modernistic government policies, since they strike at the heart of capitalist reproduction;
• it is obvious that at present governmental supervision and control are the sheepdogs of modernistic economic development.

CHAPTER SIX—MATTERS ECOLOGICAL

• there are no immediate solutions to the ecological problems which modernity has created;
• if ecological constraints are figured as a crisis this can only give the impression that ecological nemesis is at hand, whereas we have no idea when the ‘breaking point’ will come—though we know that natural systems have enormous resilience in the face of change, but that when they begin to change they do so very rapidly.

Ecological Limits
The reality of ecological limits can be and is variously denied:

• modernity is a complete socioeconomic system resistant to change in any of its dynamics;
• the prospect of long-term ecological damage is always overshadowed by the short-term imperatives of growth and business as usual;
• there is a wide-spread delusion that the effects of ecological damage can be overcome by further technological advance.

Two Concerns over Resources
We must distinguish between two sorts of concern about the degradation of resources:

• the first sort, exemplified by the first wave of green awareness, was concerned with the likely exhaustion of the necessary raw materials for further economic growth, ‘The Limits to Growth’—these concerns have been shown to be exaggerated;
• a newer concern is with the complete breakdown of ecosystems, the destruction of which would make all life more difficult or impossible.

2nd Hand Ecological Destruction
A further important point to make is that whereas modernity is responsible for the ecological damage wreaked on the planet, insofar as ecological damage was negligible or local 200 years ago, it is often difficult to pin the blame securely:

• modernity passes on its demands so that it is the poorest of people, and often those outside modernity’s direct control, who are often seen as the guilty party;
• it is often said that poor countries are poor, not because of exploitation, but because they have few resources, yet it was modernity which drew the political map of the world and rarely in pre-modern times was a poorly-resourced area (eg the Sahel) politically divorced from richer areas, as it is likely to be now.

Major Ecological Concerns
The major ecological concerns as presently known are:

1. Global Warming:

• the likely disruption of the global climate induced by rising levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere;

2. Ozone Depletion:

• the destruction of the natural atmospheric UV shield by anthropogenic chemicals;

3. Degradation of Resources:

• forest resources, fish-stocks, and many other resources are being used up faster than they can be replaced; however
• in addition to this is the concern over loss of humus, soil, water from water-tables, fertility of arable land, and the ability of the biosphere to absorb further pollution;

4.Pollution:

• the point is being reached at which the gains made in health in the developed world in the last 200 years are being undone by pollution-induced diseases and conditions;

5. Population:

• never seen as a direct result of modernity’s expansion of the sphere of commerce, but something other, usually black, people do elsewhere, and their own fault;

6. AIDS/HIV:

• not usually thought of as an environmental problem, but the most obvious symptom of the ‘global market’ in diseases, pests, weeds and feral animals;

7. Depletion of Biological Diversity:

• which disrupts whole environments and precludes the possible future uses of the species in question.

Final Considerations
Throughout its history modernity has remained profitable by failing to pay for the environmental use-value it abuses; however:

• the longer modernity goes on the greater the environmental destruction;
• as economic expansion is seem as the only goal of society ecological data inconvenient for this world-view is ignored, or never collected in the first place; moreover
• ‘[Environmental] problems are now beginning to compound themselves interactively in ways which challenge even near-term predictions’; finally
• the fundamental basis of all environmental problems is the expansion of the economic sphere of modernity beyond safe bounds.

Nature
The protection of the natural world has been the main focus of such opposition as modernity has so far received. However the green movement has been bedevilled by the unhelpful and Romantic notion of ‘wilderness’:

• in fact there no such thing is wilderness, and if there were, logically, no one could visit it;
• there is, moreover, no such thing as Nature, only the various cultural constructs of nature which obtain in various cultures (by the same token, however, there is no such thing as ‘humanity’, but only ‘people-in-nature’).

The problem with the idea of wilderness is that it cordons off certain areas, usually a long plane or car ride away, and puts the rest of the world up for grabs, whereas what is needed is for all parts of the world to be equally respected, sacred and used (though not modernistically, which would entail their destruction). Moreover, like the ‘gains’ of liberal politics, there is nothing to indicate that the ‘gains’ of liberal environmentalism are not reversible.

CHAPTER SEVEN—CAPITALISM OUT OF CONTROL

• long-term sustainability of culture is shown only by those cultures which contrive to preserve spare resources;
• modernity’s over-specialisation and reliance on power-hungry technology is inflexible;
• modernity has replaced, or is actively colonising, other cultural systems which might offer alternative possibilities for the long-term survival of human societies;
• modernity, more than any other paradigm, marginalises women’s work, which loses its difference and is subordinated to the greater economic good.

The Asian Economies
It is no longer possible to regard modernity simply as western culture imposed on the rest of the world, since it has now been adopted enthusiastically by the largest economies of Asia, those nations with a Confucian, statist culture.

International Capitalism
International capitalism has many expressions, of which the following are the most important:

1. Free Trade:

• although all nations pay lip-service to Free Trade, and try to evade it whenever possible, it is the prime symbol of international capitalism—yet it is also the most damaging of all aspects of capitalism, usually to the less developed nations, which see their resources lost, and their economies modernised with no gain to themselves;

2. Regional Trading Blocs:

• these police Free Trade more rigorously than the mechanisms of global Free Trade;

3. Multinational Companies:

• many of these are larger than the economies of small nations and all are engaged in seeking out new resources and new markets;

4. The International Currency Market:

• this trades billions of dollars a day, and no one economy is immune from its vagaries, yet it has no better rationale than its own non-linear dynamics;

5. International Media and Information Networks:

• these, by and large, are simply agents of capitalism and do nothing but disseminate sickly western aspirations around the world.

Modernity Inherently Discriminatory
Modernity is inherently discriminatory because it cannot allow all the world’s inhabitants to enjoy the levels of consumption of those of the developed world. As Gandhi put it ‘if it took Britain half the globe to develop, how many worlds will it take India?’

An Urgent Future Task
Because of the disruption and chaos caused by modernity hardly any groups or societies in the world can claim to be wholly authentic, nor is it worth using this criterion to contest worth or precedence. The most urgent task of praetermodernity will be the refabrication of authenticities.

CHAPTER EIGHT—OPPOSITION

• by accepting modernity’s unsustainability and cultural imperialism Marxists and liberals cannot offer a critique of modernity’s global reach.

Impediments to Opposition
Opposition to modernity in the developed world which goes beyond a moral critique will have to overcome the following problems:

• people fear that without further economic development there will be no jobs and life will become impossible;
• the middle-classes are usually very wary of any perceived threat to their ‘living standards’ (as traditionally measured);
• workers’ organisations are the cat’s paw of capitalism in good times, and in bad times have no muscle;
• ‘democracy’ is widely perceived as being linked indissolubly with capitalism;
• the media, as a way of securing advertising revenue, put forward an affluent lifestyle as a desideratum to be aspired to;
• In the developing world any opposition to modernity, instead of being ignored, is likely to be violently extirpated.

Changing Institutions
It is in any case merely a modernistic delusion to think that consciousness-raising is the best means of achieving change. Any opposition of modernity must spend as much or more time winning over the institutions of modernity. Besides this praetermodernity will need its own institutions, since it is obvious that any praetermodern state will not be characterised by anarchist freedom (that is the characteristic of modernity) but, at least initially, by an institutional regime of governmental control and management.

A Tactical Platform
A practical opposition to modernity must bear the following points in mind:

• oppositional politics must recognise that the owners of capital are the wielders of political power, thus any proposal for change must give the impression of being in their best interests;
• similarly any proposal for change must be able to placate the fears of the middle classes over their living standards;
• the goal of bringing an orderly end to modernity should not be confused with the search for justice, peace, equality, rights &c &c, which are important goals, but ones internal to any particular culture.

CHAPTER NINE—THE FUTURE

Praetermodernity
The proposed solution to the problems of modernity will undoubtedly seem to be a very shocking one, yet it will hardly effect the majority of the world’s population, who are so ill-paid and so busy working to keep the developed nations’ standards of living up they have no time or money to concern themselves with western lifestyles.
Ironically it is we in the developed countries who are least well equipped to deal with the changes of praetermodernity (for, even if business is allowed to continue as usual, something like the above scenario will eventually occur anyway, as it has done previously after the collapse of every over-extended political paradigm).
We will undoubtedly need myths to replace those of human development and economic growth which we have grown up in, and two which spring to mind are:

• the notion of even-handed trade or exchange, one which involves no inequality on either side;
• that of ‘invisible growth’, the sort of quiet and slow betterment of conditions which people, of all cultures, have carried out, quietly, throughout history.

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