Global capital now operates with unprecedented freedom from organized resistance.

Evidence

Saul Landau has observed of our current situation that there has never been a moment in the history of capitalism when this last enjoyed greater elbowroom and space for maneuver: all the threatening forces it generated against itself in the past — labor movements and insurgencies, mass socialist parties, even socialist states themselves — seem today in full disarray when not in one way or another effectively neutralized; for the moment, global capital seems able to follow its own nature and inclinations, without the traditional precautions. … The postmodern may well in that sense be little more than a transitional period between two stages of capitalism, in which the earlier forms of the economic are in the process of being restructured on a global scale, including the older forms of labor and its traditional organizational institutions and concepts. That a new international proletariat (taking forms we cannot yet imagine) will reemerge from this convulsive upheaval it needs no prophet to predict: we ourselves are still in the trough, however, and no one can say how long we still stay there. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 892

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s attempt to cognitively map their own position in the world system and test whether postmodernism-as-cultural-dominant is falsifiable against changing capitalist structures. — connects to: A new form of capital called cloud capital has emerged with unprecedented commanding power.
• QUESTION: The claim that ‘a new international proletariat will reemerge’ is a predictive assertion worth pressure-testing — does it redeem the cultural-dominant thesis or undermine it?