New social movements resist easy classification as products of or correctives to capitalism.

Evidence

Two positions must be distinguished here, which are both wrong. On the one hand, for a properly postmodern “cynical reason,” and in the spirit of the preceding rhetorical questions, the new social movements are simply the result — the concomitants and the products — of capitalism itself in its final and most unfettered stage. On the other hand, for a radical-liberal populism such movements are always to be seen as the local victories and the painful achievements and conquests of small groups of people in struggle (who are themselves figures for class struggle in general, as that has determined all the institutions of history, very much including capitalism itself). In short, and no longer to put so fine a point on it, are the “new social movements” consequences and aftereffects of late capitalism? Are they new units generated by the system itself in its interminable inner self-differentiation and self-reproduction? Or are they very precisely new “agents of history” who spring into being in resistance to the system as forms of opposition to it, forcing it against the direction of its own internal logic into new reforms and internal modifications? But this is precisely a false opposition, about which it would be just as satisfactory to say that both positions are right; the crucial issue is the theoretical dilemma, replicated in both, of some seeming explanatory choice between the alternatives of agency and system. In reality, however, there is no such choice, and both explanations or models — absolutely inconsistent with each other — are also incommensurable with each other and must be rigorously separated at the same time that they are deployed simultaneously. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 705

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames the agency-versus-system dilemma that defines how to theorize social movements under late capitalism.
• QUESTION: This reconciliation of inconsistent models—rigorously separated yet deployed simultaneously—bears on whether the ‘cultural dominant’ thesis is itself falsifiable in the same way.
• XREF: connects to: New social movements directly resist the colonization of the lifeworld — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 406; Labels like platform capitalism obscure today’s actual systemic transformation. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 457