Millennial dreams : contemporary culture and capital in the North / Paul Smith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smith, Paul Alan, 1954-

Series:

Haymarket series

The Haymarket series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Social history--1970-.

Social history.

Economic history--1990-.

Economic history.

International relations--Social aspects.

International relations.

Physical Description:

viii, 275 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Verso, 1997.

Summary:

What are the implications for culture and politics of the current fashion for talking about globalization? In a powerful study of capitalism in the advanced industrial North, Paul Smith demystifies much of the cant that surrounds this discourse and offers searching analysis of a series of cultural phenomena that have emerged in Germany, Britain, and the United States during the 1990s. Opening with a comparison of the rhetoric and the reality of globalization, Smith then makes a study of these three North Atlantic capitalist societies on the eve of the millennium. In Germany he concentrates on the outcomes of unification, in particular on the license to loot the former East Germany. Turning to Britain, he poignantly describes the serried legacies of Thatcherism, including the movement of resistance against the poll tax that ended her dozen-year reign. Then, in a culminating tour de force, he describes the mediatization of US culture that reached its apogee during the Gulf War and is now visible everywhere in the corporate hyping of the Internet and the WorldWide Web.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1859849180

1859840388

OCLC:

36393761