Summary of 2-3 Central Themes of Harvey's the Condition of Postmodernity Essay

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Postmodernism

Capitalism entered a new 'postmodern' phase in the 1970s and 1980s in which small-scale and entrepreneurial enterprises revived, and became the most dynamic sector of the economy in the West. This revival coincided with the reemergence of free market conservatism under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at the same time, along with a culture that became more aggressively competitive, egotistic and individualistic. During the same period, economists and sociologists rediscovered "sweatshops and…informal activities of all kinds" as the older Fordist mass production industries declined and shifted labor to low-wage regions in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. Labor, production and capital markets all become more "flexible" and mobile (Harvey, 10990, p. 190). All of these trends had already existed for decades, to be sure, but the new computer and communications technologies accelerated them greatly. Postmodern political-economy is "a fantastic world of booming paper wealth and assets," prone to severe crashes and cycles of boom and bust like the 1930s and late-19th Century (Harvey, p. 357). Such crashes occurred in 1987 on Wall Street, in the Asian Meltdown of 1997-98, that spread to other emerging markets very quickly, in the collapse of the high tech bubble in 2000-01, and most spectacularly in the great recession of 2008-09.

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Harvey and other theorists predicted that these crashes would continue and intensify long before they actually occurred.

Harvey characterized modernism as it existed from the 19th Century to the 1960s as based on Fordist mass production and consumption (at least in the Western world and Japan), bureaucracy, collectivism, labor unions and the welfare state. Its culture was materialistic, authoritarian; paranoid and alienated, symbolized by the anonymity of the big city and the large organization. Postmodernism is more laissez faire and free market, individualistic, entrepreneurial and decentralized, based finances, services and virtual money….....

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