ABSTRACT
In 1990, in his speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, George Bush invoked the utopian figure of the millennium as he called for a new world order, an order of peace and prosperity that would remove the darkness of the Cold War.1 In 1980, Ronald Reagan invoked another utopian figure: the “city on the hill” that recalled the dream of a New World that would inspire everyone with its harmony and enterprise. However, in the years between Reagan’s imagery rooted in the local history of the Americas and Bush’s image that envelopes the globe, neither humanity nor the environment has benefited from these utopian gestures. Indeed, and increasingly, since the beginning of the 1990s-with the emergence of the U.S. as the singular world superpower and with continued economic, political, cultural, and ecological devastation-the world historical situation has become ever more dystopian. What both presidents celebrated in their official utopian tropes was not
the betterment of humanity and the earth, but the triumph of planetary capital. Engaged in a massive restructuring since the end of the postwar boom in the 1970s and helped by the rise to power of the Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl administrations in the 1980s, the forces of global capital have generally succeeded in shifting from an industrial-based system of production and consumption (fordism) to an information-based system that operates through more flexible methods of exploitation, accumulation, and control (postfordism or, as a recent commentator has put it, sonyism). Multinational corporations based in and supported by powerful nationstates have transformed themselves into truly transnational corporations able to reduce the role of the nation-state to the limited function of providing national and, in the case of the U.S., global security. Under the utopian flags of free choice and free market, planetary capital now manages workers and consumers through a “casino economy” with a world-wide division of labor in a world-market of goods and services. At the same time, it has abandoned entire geographical regions and masses of people since they are no longer, or not yet, needed for the economic machine.2
