Postindustrial society narratives ideologically mask continuing class struggle.

Evidence

Nor should the break in question be thought of as a purely cultural affair: indeed, theories of the postmodern — whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation — bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized “postindustrial society” (Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society or high tech, and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely, the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle. The Marxist tradition has therefore resisted them with vehemence, with the signal exception of the economist Ernest Mandel, whose book Late Capitalism sets out not merely to anatomize the historic originality of this new society (which he sees as a third stage or moment in the evolution of capital) but also to demonstrate that it is, if anything, a purer stage of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it. I will return to this argument later; suffice it for the moment to anticipate a point that will be argued in chapter 2, namely, that every position on Postmodernism in culture — whether apologia or stigmatization — is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 39

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s core task: the claim that postmodernism is a cultural dominant tied to late capitalism, where every aesthetic position is necessarily a political stance. — connects to: Bourgeois ideology conceals that domination persists beneath the rhetoric of productive work. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 130; Under monopoly capitalism classes persist objectively while becoming socially invisible. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 680; Class struggle has been neutralized in both liberal and communist societies — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 155 (+7 more)
• SEED: Potential essay angle: using Mandel’s claim that late capitalism is a purer stage of capital to interrogate Silicon Valley’s ‘postindustrial’ self-narrative.