"...American capitalism has resoundingly re-asserted its primacy in all fields-economic, political, military, cultural-with an unprecedented eight-year boom. However inflated are asset values on Wall Street, burdened with debt private households, or large the current trade deficits, there is little doubt that the underlying competitive position of US business has been critically strengthened."
Per capita growth in this expansion has been pretty dismal, lower than the 1970s, the EU and Japan have grown about as quickly, while the US is $2 trillion in debt to the latter and must import $400 billion a year to keep itself afloat. But okay, Perry isn't an economist, we can forgive him for that. Other sections of the article, though, are dubious:
"At the same time, there is a wider intellectual spectrum with few or no Marxist origins, defining itself as loosely on the left, that is in movement today. Taking the fields of philosophy, sociology and economics, it would include the work of Habermas, Derrida, Barry; Bourdieu, Mann, Runciman; Stiglitz, Sen, Dasgupta. Here criss-crossing shifts of position can be seen, previously moderate thinkers becoming radicalized as neo-liberal hegemony has become more absolute, while others once more radical have become reconciled to elements of the conventional wisdom. But more significant than these eddies is a common feature of much of this range of work: the combination of bold intellectual ambition and broad disciplinary synthesis with timorous or truistic commitments in the political field itself-a far cry from the robust and passionate world of Weber, Keynes or Russell."
Bourdieu is a powerful, original thinker, a multinational Marxist through and through, who puts his body on the picket lines as well as his theory. Things get hairy, though, when Perry tries to rise to the concrete:
"By contrast, commanding the field of direct political constructions of the time, the Right has provided one fluent vision of where the world is going, or has stopped, after another -- Fukuyama, Brzezinski, Huntington, Yergin, Luttwak, Friedman. These are writers that unite a single powerful thesis with a fluent popular style, designed not for an academic readership but a broad international public."
AIGH!!! These writers are the Secobarbitol Half-Dozen, whose neoliberal utopias are as boring as their written output. I'm all for refunctioning the ideology of neoliberalism in a radical turn, but then you have to talk about Scott McNealy, Billion Dollar Bill, Linus Torvalds and John Carmack.
"For, counter-balancing the negative developments in the metropolitan zone of the past period, there has been one enormous cultural gain at large peripheral producers in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America. This is very poorly covered in the West, and should be a priority for the Left to address. One good text on Hou Xiao Xien, Kiarostami, Sembene, Leduc is worth a hundred -- no matter how critical -- on Spielberg or Coppola."
(Ugh). There are so many problems here. Critical theory may or may not have anything significant to say about Spielberg, but you can't put blinders on theoreticians. Our job is not to parade forth model 3rd world texts like the 1960s Left paraded forth 3rd world revolutionaries, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh..." postdated as "Bao, Bao, Bao Ninh...". There are lots of interesting things happening in mass culture today, but he says not a word about hip hop, video, anime, the Web, videogames, etc. nor anything coherent about the Pacific Rim cultures or, for that matter, anything at all about the European Union or its gorgeously complex, diverse cultural resistances. It's like this essay was written by one of Kusturica's satirical characters in the latter's hilarious, dizzying "Underground" or something. Perry needs to, like, get an 850 Mz Athlon with an ISDN connection and soak up some of the radical vibes out there. To hell with mourning Cold War capitalism, let's see some creative thinking about e-socialism.
-- Dennis