Introduction

The words of Marx and Engels described the great disruptive transformation of the industrial revolution, but could just as easily be used today to describe the era of neo-liberal globalisation, an era that covers the last three decades. Recent shocks make the future of this form of globalisation uncertain: the continued integration of the nations and regions of the world, however, is likely to continue apace, even if only because of economic necessity and environmental crisis. Both of these phenomena leave no part of the world untouched. The industrial revolution, as Marx and Engels described, involved not just the ‘revolutionizing of production’: the dynamism of capitalism is not just creative, but also profoundly disruptive to ‘all social conditions’. The current process of globalisation is driven not by steam and colonialism, as industrialisation was in Marx’s time, but by information technology, multinational corporations and multilateral institutions (one continuity between both periods is the role of a political and military hegemon prepared to use or threaten violence to foster the spread of its vision of global integration, although the country itself is no longer the same). Marx and Engels knew, as we know today, that the revolutionising of production and the spread of the relations of capitalism around the world affect more than just the sphere of economics. All social relations, including culture, are drawn inexorably into capitalism’s influence. Indeed, culture is at once shaped by processes of exchange and helps to shape them. The forces of production act on culture, but culture can also be a force of production in itself – as the creative industries so powerfully demonstrate. This may not be an entirely new phenomenon, but the importance of culture in processes of exchange today almost certainly is.