Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism

Abstract

We live in difficult times, in times of monstrous chimeras and evil dreams and criminal follies.-JosephConrad, Under Western EyesThe global triumph of capitalism at the millennium, its Second Coming, raises a number of conundrums for our understanding of history at the end of the century.Some of its corollaries-''plagues of the 'new world order,' '' Jacques Derrida (1994: 91) calls them, unable to resist apocalyptic imagery-have been the subject of clamorous debate.Others receive less mention.Thus, for example, populist polemics have dwelt on the planetary conjuncture, for good or ill, of ''homogenization and difference'' (e.g., Barber 1992); on the simultaneous, synergistic spiraling of wealth and poverty; on the rise of a ''new feudalism,'' a phoenix disfigured, of worldwide proportions (cf.Connelly and Kennedy 1994). 1 For its part, scholarly debate has focused on the confounding effects of rampant liberalization: on whether it engenders truly global flows of capital or concentrates circulation to a few major sites (Hirst and Thompson 1996); on whether it undermines, sustains, or reinvents the sovereignty of nation-states (Sassen 1996); on whether it frees up, curbs, or compartmentalizes the movement of labor (see the Geschiere and Nyamnjoh essay in this volume); on whether the current fixation with democracy, its resurrection in so many places, implies a measure of mass empowerment or an ''emptying out of [its] meaning,'' its reduction ''to paper'' (Negri 1999: 9;Comaroff and Comaroff 1997). 2 Equally in question is why the present infatuation with civil society has been accompanied by alarming increases in civic strife, by an escalation of civil war, and by reports of the dramatic growth in many countries of domestic violence, rape, child abuse, prison populations, and most dra-