ABSTRACT
The expression new capitalism is applied to contemporary transformations of capitalism that are characterized by a ‘restructuring’ of the relations between the economic, the political and the social. Governments have reacted differently to these changes but many have adopted or at least made concessions to neo-liberalism, the dominant political project to effect the restructuring of social relations in the new capitalism. The neo-liberalist world order has also been imposed on China, Vietnam and the countries of the former Eastern bloc, so there now seems to be no escape from free market capitalism. The language of new capitalism is replete with empty and ideo logically contested buzzwords, such as ‘flexibility’, ‘knowledge-driven economy’, ‘learning economy’, ‘lifelong learning’, ‘enterprise culture’ and so on. The discourse of ‘flexibility’ is another fetish of new capitalism. In the new capitalism, new knowledges are constantly produced, circulated and consumed as discourses and disseminated through ‘discourse technologies’.
