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 rather than production. Its workforce was more white-collar than blue-collar, and its culture was schizophrenic, chaotic, pluralist and eclectic. Politically, postmodernism favored celebrities and charismatic, transformational leaders rather than faceless managers and bureaucrats (Harvey, p. 340). Some philosophers who were hailed as postmodernists like Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man were better characterized as anti-modernists with fascist sympathies, but postmodern culture and political-economy should not be dismissed as synonymous with fascism. Indeed, it is more neoliberal, chaotic and disorganized than totalitarian, and seems to have no center. Its ideologies are more ephemeral than concrete or totalizing. Unlike classical Marxism, postmodernist politics emphasizes culture, gender, race and religion -- identity politics -- rather than unified metanarratives and ideologies centered on social class. Postmodern technology has caused a sense of shrinking, compressed time and space in which a constant stream of disconnected and incoherent images seem more real (or hyper-real) than concrete reality itself. New Left politics of the 1960s and 1970s were harbingers of postmodernity, although their emphasis on gender, race, sexuality and the counterculture "connected better with anarchism and libertarianism than with traditional Marxism, and set the New Left against traditional working-class attitudes and institutions" (Harvey, p. 357). One of the great ironies of the postern era is how the politics of the New Left and New Right interested in this peculiar way that undermined organized labor and the welfare state, and unleashed a revival of free market capitalism. Although the New Left radicals and hippies of the 1960s could hardly have intended this, in the end the fact that their movements coexisted in the same time and space as the New Right or Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan turned out to be anything but coincidental.

REFERENCE

Harvey, D. (1990). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.