ABSTRACT
Having qualified the attention post-Marxists pay to the role of capital in social transformation, we cannot minimise the global economic restructuring that arose as a consequence of the post-World-War-Two boom, and the rapid development of new financial systems that took place in the 1970s when the United States went off the gold standard. Two urban events which make visible the changes taking place, subsequently take on symbolic weight: the 1972 dynamiting in St Louis of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Development (exemplifying Le Corbusier’s dream for social engineering by architectural design) as unfit for human habitation and the technical bankruptcy of New York City in 1975.2 In the wake of historical developments, we discern the undercurrents which shape our contemporary condition: the demise of the old industrial locations with the abandonment of fixed capital investments in plant, warehouses, and offices as manufacturing decentralises; the erosion of Keynesian welfare systems and historically developed social contracts between governments, corporations and organised labour; the growth of multinational corporations (several with more economic power than nation states) searching for what Ernst Mandel (who coined the term ‘late-capitalism’) called ‘superprofits’ (Mandel: 1978); the development of flexible and migratory labour pools, the short-term contract, and the reskilling programmes to take advantage of and become adaptable to market trends. Each of these are unavoidable contemporary phenomena and the result of no one agent, policy or ideology (whether Reagan’s Republicanism or Thatcher’s New Right thinking).
