The Soviet collapse and neoliberal advance explain Jameson’s sharpening postmodern critique.

Evidence

But if we ask ourselves what the cultural slide he criticizes might correspond to, the answer is chronologically clear. When Jameson first started writing about postmodernism in the early eighties, the regimes of Reagan and Thatcher were already setting the pace in the West, the USSR was in the last throes of Brezhnevism, and national liberation a fading memory in most of the Third World. But the world-wide triumph of capitalism was still to come. Even as he finished Postmodernism, at the threshold of the nineties, the 136 Soviet state still nominally existed. It is the complete extinction of the Communist alternative, its virtual deletion from the historical record, followed by the relentless advance of neoliberalism through the Third World, eliminating one vestige of economic autonomy after another — a process now rolling through the last bastions of East Asia itself — that forms the background to Jameson’s now more uncompromising tone. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 307

Categorization

• XREF: The end of history/end of Communism theme ties to Fukuyama and Kojève debates within postmodernism literature. — connects to: Soviet ideology’s global appeal collapsed when its economy stagnated — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 252; The economic and cultural shifts of 1973 crystallized postmodernism as a new landscape — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 29

Broader Connections

• Soviet ideology’s global appeal collapsed when its economy stagnated #corroborates (0.72) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 252
• The economic and cultural shifts of 1973 crystallized postmodernism as a new landscape #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 29