New social movements and the global proletariat both stem from multinational capitalism.

Evidence

The emergence of the “new social movements” is an extraordinary historical phenomenon that is mystified by the explanation so many postmodernist ideologues feel themselves able to propose; namely, that the new small groups arise in the void left by the disappearance of social classes and in the rubble of the political movements organized around those. How classes could be expected to disappear, save in the unique special-case scenario of socialism, has never been clear to me; but the global restructuration of production and the introduction of radically new technologies — that have flung workers in archaic factories out of work, displaced new kinds of industry to unexpected parts of the world, and recruited work forces different from the traditional ones in a variety of features, from gender to skill and nationality — explain why so many people have been willing to think so, at least for a time. Thus the new social movements and the newly emergent global proletariat both result from the prodigious expansion of capitalism in its third (or “multinational”) stage; both are in that sense “postmodern,” at least in terms of the account of Postmodernism offered here. Meanwhile, it becomes a little clearer why the alternative view, that the small groups are, in fact, the substitute for a disappearing working class, makes the new micropolitics available for the more obscene celebrations of contemporary capitalist pluralism and democracy: the system congratulating itself for producing ever greater quantities of structurally unemployable subjects. What really needs to be explained here is not the ideological exploitation but rather the capacity of a postmodern public to conceive of two such radically incommensurable and contradictory representations all at once: the tendential immiseration of American society (filed away under the rubric of “drugs”) and the self-congratulatory rhetoric of pluralism (generally activated in contact with the topic of socialist societies). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 695

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ‘cognitive map of own position in the world system’ goal — the simultaneity of immiseration and pluralist self-congratulation is exactly the kind of contradictory coexistence the reader wants to map. — connects to: Marxist categories still explain contemporary multinational and media capitalism — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 48