A Phenomenological Structural Constitution of Modern Society

So contrary to Karl Marx’s early materialism which posits human consciousness to be the product of material conditions, the logic here is a later structural Marxist one synthesized with a Weberian sociology, which posits that the aggregated mature human being is an aggregation of “conscious” subatomic particles that never encounters the material world directly. Instead, they encounter the world via structures of signification, which structures the world or a particular part of it through the body, consciousness, language, ideology, ideological apparatuses, and mode of production, i.e., social class language game, of those whose power and power positions dictate how the resources of that framework are to be gathered, used, and distributed (means and mode of production). Hence unlike Marx, which views the origins of modern capitalist relations of production via the notion of primitive accumulation, my phenomenological structural ontology is in agreement with Max Weber and views it as the product of the structures of signification of Protestant Christianity, i.e., the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism social class language game under the leadership of white, Protestant, pastors, merchants, and owners, which I juxtapose against the African Vodou Ethic and spirit of communism social class language game of the original inhabitants of the earth under the leadership of priests, priestesses, healers, and elders, who, because of their material abundance, did not develop an antagonistic unready-to-hand and present-at-hand view of the world as their European counterparts. Instead, they developed a present-at-hand worldview based on their initial ready-to-hand encountering of a material world, which readily provided them everything they needed for their existence.

In other words, African peoples, and other people of color originally inhabited the earth, ready-to-hand, in environments with abundance of vital resources. Over time, they developed present-at-hand structural ideologies and ideological apparatuses, agricultural production/komes, Vodou, villages, Lakous, peristyles, under the leadership of priests, priestesses, healers, and elders that formed a tapestry that laid the basis for African cultural/structural unity, which sought to keep the balance, harmony, perfection, and subsistence living they encountered within their material resource framework.

This African cultural/structural unity was diametrically opposed to a European cultural/structural unity that encountered ready-to-hand and unready-to-hand a barren material resource framework. Upon their initial ready-to-hand stance, the European was unable to satisfy their bodily needs in a barren and hostile environment. As a result, they became unready-to-hand, because their environment did not fulfill their basic needs, and sought to fulfill their basic needs through the objectification and externalization of the world, which they sought to exploit and dominate in order to meet their (bodily) needs. They reified their experiences, present-at-hand, as the nature of reality as such, which they sought to extrapolate throughout the world.

What Cheikh Anta Diop called the Southern Cradle-Egyptian Model (African), which I call the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism social class language game, emerged among the Africans, and the Northern Cradle-Greek (European) Model, or the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism social class language game, emerged among the Europeans when they encountered Christianity. The former is characterized as and based on, 1) Abundance of vital resources, 2) Sedentary-agricultural, 3) Gentle, idealistic, peaceful nature with a spirit of justice, 4) Matriarchal family, 5) Emancipation of women in domestic life, 6) territorial state, 7) Xenophilia, 8). Cosmopolitanism, 9) Social Collectivism, 10) Material solidarity—alleviating moral or material misery, 11) Idea of peace, justice, goodness, and optimism, and 12) Literature emphasizes novel tales, fables, and comedy. The latter is characterized as and based on, 1) Bareness of resources, 2) Nomadic-hunting (piracy), 3) Ferocious, warlike nature with spirit of survival, 4) Patriarchal family, 5) Debasement/enslavement of women, 6) City state (fort), 7) Xenophobia, 8) Parochialism, 9) Individualism, 10) Moral solitude, 11) Disgust for existence, pessimism, 12) Literature favors tragedy. Historically, the latter, European model, became constituted and reified present-at-hand as the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism under the leadership of pastors, owners, and merchants; and the former, African model, as the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism under the leadership of priests, priestesses, healers, and elders, i.e., oungan yo, manbo yo, gangan yo, granmoun yo.^[1] Both models converged on the island of Hispaniola, at the height of the slave trade and African enslavement during the eighteenth century, where the enslaved Africans and Taino people of Haiti juxtaposed the latter against the former to overthrow it on the island.

Hence, the argument here is that the constitution of modernity is the by-product of the structuralizing and differentiating effects of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, via agricultural, industrial, and postindustrial modes of production, European languages, Protestant ideology, and ideological apparatuses, churches, schools, etc., initially, by the practical consciousness or social class language game of religious, rich, white, Protestant, heterosexual, bourgeois, men in their rejection of the class division and social relations of production of the Catholic feudal order beginning in the sixteenth century.

Building on the rationalization of the primeval pan-psychic field within the God and soul concepts of early Christian dogma, the God of Judaism “was active in history and in current political events rather than in the primordial sacred time of myth” (Armstrong, 1993, pg. 211). Be that as it may, the traditions of Christianity and Islam inherited this sociohistorical metaphysical understanding of God, which made their central motif a confrontation or a personal meeting between God and humanity devoted to ensuring that God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven:

The barbarian tribes from Europe that eventually brought down the Holy Roman Empire in the fifth century of the common era transmogrified the orientalism and aforementioned historical understanding of Christianity highlighted by Karen Armstrong to fit with their initial calculating, crude, and barbarous existence, which would subsequently become embodied, once they converted to Christianity, in the discourse and discursive practices of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism social class language game.

The fall of the Holy Roman Empire would coincide with the rise of imperial Christianity, which began with the evangelism and feudalism of the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic Church, following Constantine’s usurpation of Christianity from the margins of the Roman Empire the fourth century of the Common Era, sought to imperially convert the world’s social actors, and constitute the city of God on earth via, the family, church, feudalism and the aristocratic demeanor. Following the Protestant Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they would subsequently be displaced by the imperial Christianity of the American nation-state embodied in its discourse and discursive practice, the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, by the heteronormativity or social class language game of rich, white, Protestant, heterosexual male merchants.

Beginning in the sixteenth century of the common era, God’s will on earth was no longer constituted around the ideological apparatuses of the family, church, aristocracy, and feudalism of the Catholic Church, but became interpreted as a Hobbesian imperative material struggle of” all against all” in the “flawed and tragic conditions of earthly life” wherein the most pious and egoless souls, which God calls to himself, who accept him, obtained material wealth as a sign of their personal salvation and God’s grace and mercy. Protestant reformers such as the Puritans and Pilgrims zealously sought to convert all of Europe and the known world to their Protestant interpretation of the gospel of Jesus via the social class language game of the patriarchal family, Protestant churches, the modern state, class division, and social relations of mercantile and agricultural capitalist production. Their inability to constitute the city of God or their social class language game in Europe, based on their Protestantism, led to their persecution and the eventual founding of the American nation-state as the city of God grounded in the imperial Christianity of the Protestant Ethic and spirit of capitalism social class language game. This Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, which would zealously and imperially seek to displace the evangelism and feudal discourse and discursive practice of the Catholic Church, the Amerindian world worldviews, Islam, African tribalism, etc., via the patriarchal family, Protestant churches, education, the state, and capitalist relations of production, has nothing to do with the egalitarianism, compassion, and social altruistic message of Jesus as highlighted in the synoptic gospels and the gospel of John as interpreted by the Catholic church, however. Quite the reverse, it fosters class division, inequality, selfishness, self-interested individualism, and materialism reified initially in the discourse and discursive practices, social class language game, of a patriarchal, heterosexual, white male Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism, which discriminated against and marginalized all other practical consciousnesses or ways of organizing society and the world via the patriarchal family, protestant discourse of churches, schools, prisons, class division, the modern state, and the social relations of mercantile, agricultural, industrial, and post-industrial capitalist productions.

Hence with the rise to power of Western European tribes and their Protestant interpretations of Christianity over feudal aristocratic Catholic dogma, the class division and social relations of production of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism and not the egalitarian, compassionate, and social altruistic message of Jesus, as Max Weber (1958) points out, represents what was understood, the set of values—rationality, hard work, economic gain as a sign of one’s predestination, systematic use of time, and a strict asceticism with respect to worldly pleasures and goods—which he claims gave rise to the contemporary capitalist practices that constitute modern societies, and thus American capitalist society, and the existing configuration of bureaucratic power relations, social class language game, within which modern social identity and practical consciousness developed.

The purposive-rationality of these Protestant ideas and practices, mediated and overdetermined by the concepts of class, race, and nation, in other words, historicized social positions, based on racial, national identity, and economic gain for its own sake (class) through the accumulation of capital or profit in a “calling,” initially mercantile, agricultural, and industrial relations of production, by which social actors or subjects were differentiated and subjugated (predestined or capitalists/damned or laborers) in the society and the world. Rich, white, heterosexual men universalized, present-at-hand, their ideology, through ideological apparatuses, the patriarchal family, church, schools, prisons, the modern state, class division, and the social relations of production, against all other practical consciousnesses, African polygamous tribalism, homosexuality, etc., arrived at through drives of the body, impulses of subatomic particles, and the deferment of meaning in ego-centered communicative discourse, for their embourgeoisement. From the late seventeenth century to the present, the ideology and ideological apparatuses of the modern state, family, church, and education, class division, and the social relations of production enframed by the Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism of rich, white, heterosexual, Protestant, men would be the structure, language, ideology, ideological apparatuses, and communicative discourse within which social identities were constituted, differentiated, discriminated against, and marginalized.

This theoretical framework differs from both Marxist and non-Marxist structural interpretations of the constitution of modern society in that it begins with the socioreligious cultural (ideal) conceptions that initially structured the social integrative practices that gave rise to the society, while the Marxist and neo-Marxist schools derive the terms from which they begin their analysis from the (material) social relations of production. These two viewpoints, systems and social integration, as my structural approach implies, are inextricably linked, however, and represents the relational structural-cultural framework organized around social relations of production, class division, and the modern state and its ideology and ideological apparatuses, i.e., nuclear family, education, prisons, etc., which determined social identity and practices in modern societies. In other words, although philosophically we are able to think these two approaches apart as idealism and materialism, they are not necessarily entirely separable in reality in my phenomenological structural logic.

Although this relationship appears paradoxical, since protestant beliefs did not embrace the idea of economic gain for its own sake,

The affinity between the Protestantism of a sect and their purposive-rational actions, as I understand Weber to be saying, gave rise to the economic organization of modern society, systems integration, as the social psychological practices and ego-ideals (rationally calculating individuals attempting to prove their predestination reflected in their economic gains) of a form of Protestantism, social integration, were rationally and purposively incorporated into the physical world through the bureaucratic organization of the material resource framework around language, ideology, ideological apparatuses, the patriarchal family, church, schools, state, prisons, and economy, social relations of production, in order to direct and constitute the identity and practices of social actors and societies for economic gain. (In some instances, as in the attempt of the Puritans to usurp power and takeover the English nation-state of the seventeenth century under Oliver Cromwell, bureaucratic means or structural practices—purposive-formal-rational action to organize the lived world—were established around already existing material elements which were re-conceptualized by the sect of rich, white, Protestant, men to foster a society based on wealth, economic gain or capital accumulation as a sign of their salvation in the eyes of God and others).

Thus, the sociohistorical logic here is that following the Protestant Reformations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as rich, white, heterosexual Protestant men and their ethos encountered social problems in their attempt to reconfigure or reconstitute sixteenth and seventeenth century European catholic feudal governments, mode of production, ideology, and ideological apparatuses, along the lines of their social class language game, Protestantism and social relations of production, they became a discriminated against “other” (Puritans, Pilgrims, Calvinists, Lutherans, etc.) minority in the Feudal (catholic) social structure of Europe of the middle ages. Subsequently, these newly created and marginalized “others” left Europe and reformulated society, in the form of the American social structure by recursively reorganizing and reproducing their “other” Protestant form of being-in-the-world, i.e. Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism, via the organization of the state and its ideological apparatuses, family, church, and schools, class division, and social relations of production, i.e., mercantile, agricultural, industrial, and subsequently postindustrial beginning in the 1970s.

The rules of conduct and ideological apparatuses of the new American society, in other words, were formulated to facilitate the relational logic, ends (substantive rationality), of their, rich, white, heterosexual Protestant men, form of Protestantism, individualism, humanitarianism, rationalism, economic gain, or loss, as a sign of one’s election or “damned-ness” in a particular “calling,” mercantile, agricultural, industrial, and postindustrial capital, which “embedded” social or cultural relations in what became the modern American political-economic system. With this sociohistorical conversion, within the Westphalian nation-state system, of Western society in general and American society in particular, from a catholic feudal social order to a Protestant capitalist social order through the purposive-rationality or social class language game of rich, white, heterosexual Protestant men against all other forms of being-in-the-world, the Protestant ethic became an allowed religion of the society, and thus the “metaphysical” ideas of the Protestant Church became joined with the power and discursive practices of the American Protestant nation-state government as organized around ideological apparatuses, i.e., prisons, the family, church, school, state, class division, and work or the social relations of production. This “invisible” marriage of church and state led to the formation of the “visible” universal ideals/ideologies (liberalism, democracy, individualism, bourgeois classism, and nationalism) of the American nation-state under god to direct the material economic practices of all social actors, and over time caused the American nation-state/government to refine its doctrine and develop its structure in a way that best served its purposive-rational end, economic gain as a sign of the country and its citizens’ salvation and predestination in mercantile, agricultural, industrial, and postindustrial social relations of production, within the emerging global (colonial) economic world-system, which they would gain control of following World War II through transnational ideological apparatuses such as the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), United Nations (UN), etc.

In materialist terms, the endless accumulation of economic gain, capital, or profit by rich white heterosexual Protestant men became “the defining characteristic and raison d’ être of this [social] system,” which over time pushed “towards the commodification of everything, the absolute increase of world production, and a complex and sophisticated social division of labor based on class” or the amount of capital (economic gain) one had accumulated (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991, pg. 107). As Jürgen Habermas concludes of this process by which the integrative substantive-rationality of a form of Protestantism, “the spirit of capitalism,” came to dominate modern times by the systemic purposive-rational action of its power agents:

In this understanding of the origins and organizational basis of modernity and its paragon modern American capitalist society, where “the cultural struggle for distinction is intricately connected to the economic distribution of material goods, which it both legitimates and reproduces” (Gartman, 2002, pg. 257), Weber’s explanation, as Jürgen Habermas points out,

These two analytic levels, systems and social integration, are not separate if the understanding of the constitution of modernity is understood through my phenomenological structural and organizational logic. The argument from this Althusserian structural position is that the “predestined” white Protestant entrepreneurial males, a once marginalized group in pre-modern or feudal (catholic) Europe, by re-conceptualizing and maintaining the control of the then feudal market and state within the mythical realities or social class language game of their heterosexual bourgeois male Protestantism, reified their Protestant “practical consciousness” with the state and its ideological apparatuses, prisons, family, church, schools, etc. This Protestant metaphysical cultural value or ideology, in other words, they rationalized with reality and existence as such, in institutions or ideological apparatuses, prisons, the family, church, schools, capitalist global market economy and bourgeois state, operating “through materialized metaphors beyond logical or empirical proof, on ungroundable premises, on nonobservable substances” (Friedland, 2002, pg. 384), in order to mechanically and systemically interpellate, constitute, and direct (embourgeois) the identity and agential moments or purposive-rationality of all social actors of the world for the sole purpose of accumulating economic gain (Marx’s “capital accumulation”) as a sign of their election or progress in the world against those who either were damned as revealed by their poverty in the social relations of production of the society, or conceived of other practical consciousnesses arrived at through the deferment of meaning in ego-centered communicative action.

Class division and the organization of work, mercantile, agricultural, industrial, and postindustrial, for economic gain or profit in modern society was mechanically constituted as white Protestant heterosexual males believing themselves to be “predestined” came as a social class to militarily dominate and control the ontological security of the world and its people of color, who, within their social class language game, they interpellated as the irrational damned or laborers working in the aforementioned social relations of production, through subsequently global institutions or ideological apparatuses like the Protestant churches, schools, the IMF, World Bank, United Nations, etc., in order to (re) produce economic gain for those (predestined) who owned the means and modes of work or production. To put the matter simply, the logic here is that “the spirit of capitalism,” which is characteristic of modernity in general and American society in particular, is the socioreligious discursive practice or purposive rationality (mythopraxis) of a form of cultural Protestantism that gave rise to the class identity of social actors, who became differentiated by class, race, and sexual divisions and their social behavioral (methodical) relation to the means and mode of work in modern societies.

The metaphysics of the Protestant Ethic as initially interpreted by rich, white, Protestant men, in other words, structured, through their bodies, languages, ideologies (Protestantism, liberalism, racism, etc.), and ideological apparatuses, the physical material world wherein individual social relations and actions were constituted and (re) produced through the organization of work, the modern state, class division, and the praxis of capitalist relations of production.

Thus, the Enlightenment project or attempt to constitute society based on democratically arrived at rational rules of conduct which are sanctioned which began in the seventeenth century with philosophers and artists never materialized as rich, white, heterosexual, bourgeois Protestant males, the emerging power elites of the seventeenth century, incorporated the products of scientific reason and rationality itself into their Protestant metaphysics or social class language game so as to facilitate their purposive socioreligious rationale of economic gain via capitalist relations of production. So it is not that modernity and the organization of the contemporary social world under the hegemony of the American nation-state represents the ever-increasing rationalization of the world, which dates from the Enlightenment. Instead, it represents the ever-increasing mystification of the world around the discursive practices, “mythopraxis” (Marshall Sahlins’ term), or social class language game of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. The reason and rationality of the scientific method, which comes out of the Enlightenment project, was not constituted as a distinct social class language game to direct society under the leadership of scientists and philosophers; instead, the rational-empiricism that would come to dominate the seventeenth century became a facilitator for promoting the ethos of an emerging Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism reified in the discourse and discursive practices of the nation-state and its ideological apparatuses, i.e., education, church, family, etc., and organization of work or social relations of production under the leadership and social class language games of rich, white, Protestant, heterosexual men.

Hence, the Americentric dominated form of modernity, neoliberalism with its emphasis on family life, individualism, education, class division, free markets, free trade, political and economic liberalism, outsourcing of jobs, privatization, etc., which contemporarily dominates the world in and through the discourse of globalization represents the continual attempt to homogenize and universalize social identities and social practices the world over to fit within the metaphysical discourse and discursive practices of agents of the Protestant Ethic who purposively rationalized the discourse of their metaphysic into the laws and practices of their society and global institutions against the metaphysics of adherents of the Enlightenment, the poor, and other metaphysics. Hence, the mythical realities of rich, white, Protestant, heterosexual bourgeois males canonized in laws and social institutions determined their praxis, and relationally attempted to determine the praxis of all “others” they encountered in their quest to prove their predestination. It should also be mentioned that modern societies in the global economic world-system, as all became interpellated as owners and workers, itself became a dialectical totality that underwent reproduction and transformation based on internal contradictions and class differentiation based upon capital accumulation motivated by the desire to acquire capital or economic gain for its own sake as prescribed by the substantive-rationality or social class language game of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991; Smith, 1996). In fact, the modern political and economic ideologies of liberalism, conservatism, and radicalism are grounded in, and can be deduced from, the metaphysics of “the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism”: radicalism representing a revolutionary response against the ideals and practices of liberal bourgeois heterosexual white male Protestantism that included bourgeois technical rationality, individualism, class inequality, racialism, and heterosexism; conservatism, representing strict commitment to its ideologies of individualism, class inequality, heterosexism, religiosity, and racialism; and liberalism was deduced from the Christian (Protestant) ethic of individual humanism, rationalism, anti-dogmatism, classism, and the liberal democratic capitalist state’s ability to foster that ethic.

Globalization

From the sixteenth century to the present, the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism social class language game under the leadership of rich, white, Protestant, heterosexual men became the structural framework within which all peoples of the world were interpellated, embourgeoised, and differentiated via European languages, white male/female bodies, ideology, ideological apparatuses of the nation-state, and modes of production. The contemporary phenomenon of globalization under American hegemony is the continuing attempt, under the leadership of an embourgeoised hybrid, multiracial, multisexual, multinational, etc., upper-class of owners and high-level executives, who, unready-to-hand (because of the discriminatory effects of their societies, which prevented them from participating in it), in the 1960s dialectically sought equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with their white counterparts, to structure the world within the structural metaphysics or social class language game of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism against other practices and organizations of realities arrived at through the drives of the body, impulses of subatomic particles, and the deferment in ego-centered communicative discourse. Albeit the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism social class language game under American hegemony today, unlike when Weber was writing when the emphasis in the agricultural and industrial modes of producing that wealth was simply capital accumulation, is defined by economic gain for its own sake and material (personal) wealth as a sign of God’s grace and blessings.^[2]

Contemporarily, “culture of globalization” and the “globalization as culture” metaphors represent two sociological approaches to understanding the contemporary post-modern phenomenon we call globalization, the current configuration of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, under American hegemony (1970s-2000s). These two sociopolitical understandings regarding the origins and nature of globalization, as Kevin Archer et al (2007) points out, have “set off a vigorous and at times rancorous debate within the social sciences” (2007, pg. 2). On one side of the debate you have theorists who emphasize the “culture of globalization” and argue the idea that “the constitutive role of culture is critical for grasping the continued hegemony of capitalism in the form of globalization. . . Culture, they assert is increasingly being co-opted and deployed as a new accumulation strategy to broaden and deepen the frontiers of capitalism and to displace its inherent crisis tendencies” (Archer, 2007, pg. 2-3). In a word, in the continual hegemonic quest of capitalism to equalize the conditions of the world to serve capital, globalization, in the eyes of “culture of globalization” theorists, represents a stage of capitalism’s development highlighted by the commodification of culture as a means for accumulating profits from the purchasing and consuming power of a transnational class of administrative bourgeoisies and professional cosmopolitan elites in core, semi-periphery, and periphery nation-states who subscribe to the social integrative norms of liberal bourgeois Protestantism (hard work, economic gain, political and economic liberalism, consumption, etc.).

In other words, the material and symbolic cultural elements of the cultures of the world are commodified by the upper class of owners and high-level executives of core countries—where finance capital and service jobs predominate—to make a profit or produce surplus-value—given the declining significance of profit from industrial production that have been shipped or outsourced to semi-periphery and periphery nations giving rise to their national bourgeoisies whose cultural practices and tastes have been nationalized—by fulfilling the consumption tastes of the financiers, administrative bourgeoisies, professional classes, and cosmopolitan elites of nation-states throughout the world who control their masses as a surplus labor force and cultural producers for global capital. Globalization, therefore, is the integration of the cultural realm and individual experiences into the commodity chains of the capitalist elites, who homogenize, through the media and other “ideological state apparatuses,” the behavior and tastes of global social actors as consumers thereby homogenizing the cultural practices and tastes of the middle and under class peoples of the world in order to generate profit in postindustrial economies such as the US and UK.

This “culture-of-globalization” understanding of globalization or the postmodern condition in late capitalist development is a well-supported position, which highlights, in the twenty-first century, the continued hegemony of capitalism or capitalist relations of production in the form of globalization (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Kellner, 1988; Giddens, 1991; Harvey, 1989, 1990; Jameson, 1984, 1991). This line of thinking, in which theorists point to the underlining drive of globalization as the continuing historical push to socially, economically, and politically (under) develop the rest of the world along the lines, or as a simulacrum, of Western American and European Societies to facilitate capital accumulation, began with European colonialism, continued through the “development project” of the Cold-war era, and now is embodied in the globalization process. This historical process is highlighted in modernization, development, dependent development, world-systems theories, and contemporarily it is a trend outlined in the theoretical works of postmodern theorists such as David Harvey (1989, 1990) and Fredric Jameson (1984, 1991) who view globalization as postmodern or the cultural logic of capitalist development in core or developed countries. “Culture of globalization” theorists, such as Harvey and Jameson, therefore, view globalization as the new initiative, with the same intentions, replacing the accumulation and modernization project of colonialism and development.

The homogenization, accumulation, and “modernization” project in European colonialism operated through the establishment of either colonies of settlement, “which often eliminate[d] indigenous people,” or rule, where colonial administrators reorganize[d] existing cultures by imposing new inequalities [(around class, gender, race, and caste)] to facilitate their exploitation, wherein an unequal division of agricultural (monoculture) labor was physically and psychologically forced upon the peoples of color the world over to sustain the industrial and manufacturing cultural life of Europeans, while simultaneously disrupting, destroying, and reconfiguring the cultural practices and tastes of the colonized peoples within the binary (structural) logic of the (European) colonizer (McMichael, 2008 pg. 27). As Philip McMichael (2008, pg. 31) observed of the European colonization process,

The sociocultural outcome of this exploitative and oppressive socioeconomic military system was a racialized social structural relationship relationally constituted based on the “unequal” colonial division of labor and “unequal” ecological exchanges, which divided the social actors of the world between white, Christian, civilized, and “developed” European colonizers (masters) whose “burden” was to civilize and (under) develop the “undeveloped,” “backward,” non-European, colonized, colored, other, “heathens” (slaves) of the world. This European civilizing of the non-European colored “heathens” of the world initially took place through the Christian churches of the West, whose biblical tenets and metaphysics were used to justify the master/slave relationship of colonialism as well as teach its work ethic, which eventually homogenized the social actions of social actors to benefit the white male power elites of an emerging gendered, racialized, and religious global capitalist world-system that developed the white colonizer, while simultaneously underdeveloping the colored colonized who were systematically forced to become agents of the Protestant ethic in agricultural production. A hybrid administrative bourgeoisie, and the poor seeking to be like them, emerged among the colonizers.

The end of the socioeconomic military colonial system in the form of decolonization in the twentieth century did not end the colonizer/colonized relational relationship, but gave rise to a new nation-state system of civilizing, domination, and exploitation within the hegemony of this emerging gendered, racialized, and religious global capitalism. Decolonization gave birth to what Philip McMichael calls, “the development project.” According to McMichael, “[t]he mid-twentieth century development project (1940s-1970s), an internationally orchestrated program of national economic growth, with foreign financial, technological, and military assistance under the conditions of the Cold War, managed the aftermath of collapsing European and Japanese empires within the idealistic terms of the United nations and its focus on [national-state] governments implementing a human rights-based social contract with their citizens. . . to equalize conditions across the world in laying the foundations of a global market that progressively overshadowed the states charged with development in the initial post-World War II era” (McMichael, 2008, pg. 21). Hence, the development project from the postcolonial era to the 1970s emphasized and continued the “unequal” colonial division of labor and “unequal” ecological exchanges within an Americentric dominated capitalist world-system subdivided into three geopolitical segments to benefit capitalist accumulation: the First World, the developed capitalist Western countries plus Japan with America the model for development; the Second World comprised of Communist Soviet blocs; and the Third World comprised of postcolonial bloc of nations.

Whereas under colonialism, as McMichael notes, “[t]he basic pattern was to establish in the colonies specialized extraction and production of raw materials and primary products that were unavailable in Europe. In turn, these products fueled European manufacturing as industrial inputs and foodstuffs for its industrial labor force” (31), in the development phase of postcolonial capitalism, the process was reversed as the First World sought to take advantage of the desire of the postcolonial elites, the administrative bourgeoisie, of the Third World to develop their nation-states along the lines of the industrial First World. The basic global pattern was to establish in the emerging postcolonial “Third-World” nation-states specialized manufacturing and industrial production sites that were outsourced from the First World. In turn, the outsourcing of these manufacturing and industrial jobs by the First World to take advantage of the urban underemployment and low-wage economy caused by the de-agriculturalization of Third World countries fueled First World, especially American, agribusinesses that channeled food surpluses, under a “food-aid-regime,” to Third World countries. “In agriculture, the Third World’s share of world agricultural exports fell from 53 to 31 percent between 1950 and 1980, while the American granary consolidated its critical role in world agricultural trade. By the 1980s, the United States was producing 17 percent of the world’s wheat, 63 percent of its corn, and 63 percent of its soybean; its share of world exports was 36 percent in wheat, 70 percent in corn, and 59 percent in soybeans” (McMichael, 2008, pgs. 67-68). What developed from this global economic relationship was that Third World industrialization outlined by W.W. Rostow’s stages of development fueled First world economic growth agriculturally and technologically, while underdeveloping some Third World countries, and dependently developing others within the capitalist global world-system, hence recolonizing the Third World as they became indebted given their need to import food to feed their populous.

The postcolonial nations had no say in this new “unequal” development paradigm as “decisions about postcolonial political arrangements were made in London and Paris where the colonial powers, looking to sustain spheres of influence, insisted on the nation-state as the only appropriate political outcome of decolonization” (McMichael, 2008, pg. 47). Be that as it may, “[t]his new paradigm inscribed First World power and privilege in the new institutional structure of the postwar international economy. In the context of the Cold War between First and Second Worlds (for the hearts and resources of the ex-colonial world), “development” was simultaneously the restoration of a capitalist world market to sustain First World wealth, through access to strategic natural resources, and the opportunity for Third World countries to emulate First World civilization and living standards” (McMichael, 2008, pg. 45). The “development project,” in this way, as McMichael further observed, continued the hegemony of capitalism, which started with colonialism, through the universalization of a global market system driven by the nation-state and economic growth through agricultural and industrial productions (2008, pg. 46). Globalization (1970s-2000s) is a continuation of this hegemonic capitalist process in a post-communist world.

Globalization under American capitalist hegemony seeks to dismantle the state-centered exploitation of colonial and development capitalism via the invisible hand of economic (neo) liberalism, education, class division, and social relations of global production. “The globalization project (1970s-2000s),” as McMichael observes, “liberalizing trade and investment rules, and privatizing public goods and services, has privileged corporate rights over the social contract and redefined development as a private undertaking” (2008, pg. 21). That is to say, in reestablishing a global capitalist economy through the development project that followed colonialism, the First World was able to indebt Third World countries through an export-oriented industrialization that fueled the wealth of First World agribusinesses, transnational corporations, and their citizens who became consumers of inexpensive manufactured goods from the Third World. Hence, “[e]xport-oriented industrialization fueled rapid economic growth, legitimizing a new ‘free market’ model of development, and in the 1980s this was represented as the solution to the debt crisis [of Third World countries]. Development, which had been defined as nationally managed economic growth, was redefined in the World Bank’s World Development Report 1980 as ‘participation in the world market’” (McMichael, 2008, pg. 117). This global market is controlled and directed by multinational and transnational corporations operating in First World postindustrial cities where high finance banking jobs and low-end service jobs predominate over manufacturing and industrial jobs that have been outsourced to semi-periphery or developing nations. What has developed in turn is a continuation of the tripartite system of the development phase. In the globalization phase, however, what has developed is a tripartite system in which the global economic system parallels Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems conception: a periphery group of poor nations whose comparative advantage are raw materials, agricultural production, and tourism; a semi-periphery group of industrial based nations, i.e., India, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, and China; and a postindustrial group of core or developed nations led by the United States of America who generate profit by servicing the cultural consumptive needs of a multicultural and multiethnic transnational capitalist class who control and monitor their (US and other core countries) investments in periphery and semi-periphery nations.

In other words, the contemporary (1970 to the present) post-industrial mode of production in developed (core) states like the US is no longer characterized or driven by the industrial means for accumulating capital, which dominated the social relations of production of the last one hundred years in core or developed nations. Instead, the present globalization condition is driven-by, post-industrialism (consumerism)—the new means for accumulating capital—, and in such “developed” societies like the U.S., is characterized not by the industrial organization of labor, which have been outsourced overseas, but rather by capitalist finance and service occupations catering to the consumerist demands of a dwindling (transnational, transcultural, transracial, etc.) middle class the world over. In short, the rate of economic gain for its own sake or profit has fallen in industrial production due to labor laws (products of the welfare state) and ecological cost in developed countries like the US; hence the practice now among investors operating out of the US and other developed nations is on financial expansion “in which ‘over-accumulated’ capital switches from investments in production and trade, to investments in finance, property titles, and other claims on future income” (Trichur, 2005, pg. 165).

On a global scale, the bifurcation defining this current conjuncture is characterized on the one hand by an expansion of industrial production into some (others remain agricultural producers) developing or periphery countries, i.e., the semi-periphery, where the rate of labor exploitation has risen given their lack of environmental and labor laws, devalued labor, and the dismantling of the welfare state; and on the other hand, consumerism of cheaply produced goods and high-end service occupations has come to dominate developed and developing societies as capital in the developed world seeks to allow and incorporate, through the commodification of their cultural identities, the transnational class of elite “others” who administer the assets of capital into their consumption patterns. Archer et al (2007) sum up the nature of this position brilliantly,

“Globalization-as-culture” theorists out rightly reject this socioeconomic position or interpretation underlying the processes of globalization. They believe “that globalization is marked by the hollowing out of national cultural spaces either consequent upon the retrenchment of the nation state or because culture continues to be a relatively autonomous sphere” (Archer et al, 2007, pg. 2). That is, “[f]or the “globalization-as-culture” group. . . culture is not that easily enjoined due to its inherent counter-hegemonic properties vis-à-vis neo-liberal globalization. Rather, for this group. . . , contemporary globalization is not merely economic, but a system of multiple cultural articulations which are shaped by disjunctive space-time coordinates. In other words, globalization is as much if not more the product of inexorable and accelerated migratory cultural flows and electronic mass mediations beyond the space-time envelopes of the nation-state system and the successive socio-spatial fixes of global capitalism” (Archer et al, 2007, pg. 4). In fact, culture, in many instances, serves as a counter-hegemonic movement to (neo) liberal capitalism as a governing “rational” system. This line of thinking is best exemplified in the works of Stuart Hall (1992), John Tomlinson (1999), Homi Bhabha (1994), and Edward Said (1993) among many (postcolonial) others. For these theorists cultural exchanges are never one-dimensional, and hybridization of culture in many instances serves as a counter-hegemonic force to the homogenization processes of global capital.

Theoretically, this debate between the advocates of the “globalization-as-culture” and the “culture-of-globalization” hypotheses is a fruitless debate grounded in a false ontological and epistemological understanding regarding the origins and nature of the (neo) liberal capitalist system that gives rise to the processes of globalization. Both groups ontologically and epistemologically assume that the origins of capitalism and its discursive practice is grounded in reason and rationality, thus drawing on the liberal distinction between capitalism as a public and neutral system of rationality that stands apart from the understanding of it as a private sphere or lifeworld cultural form grounded in the ontology of the Protestant ethic as argued by Max Weber. The latter position, if assumed by both schools, is a point of convergence that resolves their opposition, and gives a better understanding of the origins and nature of the processes of globalization and counter movements to what are in fact metaphysical cultural forces/social class language games.

Both schools of thought are putting forth the same convergence argument, the culture of globalization position from a Marxian systems integration perspective and the globalization as culture position from a Weberian social integration perspective. For the culture of globalization position cultural practices are homogenized to be integrated within the rational rules or systemicity/social class language game of capitalist relations of production and consumption at the world-system level so as to generate surplus-value from the consumption of cultural products as commodities in core postindustrial nations, industrial production in semi-periphery nations, and agricultural production in periphery nations.

The globalization as cultural group suggests that in the process of acculturating social actors to the organization of work within the capitalist world-system, homogenization does not take place. Instead, in the process of integration within the world-system, cultural groups, present-at-hand, intersubjectively defer meaning in ego-centered communicative discourse to hybridize the lexicons of significations coming out the globalization process thereby maintaining their cultural forms not in a commodified form but as a class-for-itself seeking to partake in the global community as hybrid social actors governed by the liberal rational logic of the marketplace.

The two positions are not mutually exclusive, however. Within my phenomenological structural logic, globalization contemporarily represents the homogenization of social discourse and action via hybridization. That is globalization represents the discursive practice, “spirit of capitalism,” social class language game of agents of the Protestant Ethic seeking to allow for and homogenize “other” human behaviors, cultures, around the globe within the logic of their metaphysical discourse, “The Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism social class language game,” so as to accumulate profit, via agricultural, industrial, and post-industrial/consumerist production, for the predestined from the damned on a global scale. That is, via globalization social actors around the globe are interpellated and socialized or embourgeoised via ideological apparatuses, churches, education, prisons, class division, and social relations of production, to become agents of the Protestant ethic so as to fulfill their labor and consumption roles in the organization of work, agricultural, industrial, or postindustrial production, required by their states in the global capitalist world-system under American hegemony since World War II. Proper socialization in the contemporary capitalist American dominated world-system is tantamount to hybridization, i.e., a liberal bourgeois Protestant other working for those who own the means and forces of production so as they themselves can become bourgeois as profit trickles down from capital operating in the first world or developed countries to the rest of the world, in order to consume the cultural and individual products found in postindustrial world-cities throughout the globe. Hence, hybridization of other cultures, via the homogenization process of globalization, is a simulacrum of white agents of the Protestant ethic, which enables the latter (whites) to make social actors of other cultures known for two reasons, to socialize them to the work ethic of the globalizing process and to accumulate surplus-value as the former service the others of their community for what has become since the 1960s a multicultural, multisexual, multiracial, etc., global capitalist world-system dominated by whites and hybrid others, who unready-to-hand (because the discriminatory effects of the society prevented them from doing so under slavery, colonial, etc.) sought during colonization to partake in the Protestant capitalist social structure for equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with their white counterparts. As previously highlighted, the créolité, hybridity, ambivalence, etc., language of postmodern, post-structural, and postcolonial discourses represent the concepts, pathologies, etc., of the once-discriminated against “other” as they seek equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with their former slavemasters and colonizers by recursively reorganizing and reproducing their ideas and ideals as an “other.”

Haiti would become constituted as a republic between the hybrid mulatto elites and educated petit-bourgeois blacks (collectively known here as the Affranchis), dialectically, seeking, unready-to-hand, to be agents of the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism for equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with whites, and the Haitian masses who were and are not a structurally differentiated other, i.e., poor black underclass. On the contrary, they were and are, unlike other blacks in America and the diaspora, structuralized or interpellated and ounganified/manboified within the language, ideology, ideological apparatuses, and communicative discourse of oungan yo, manbo yo, gangan yo, and granmoun yo who recursively reorganized and reproduced a different form of system and social integration, the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism, on the island against the former, the Catholic/Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism social class language of the whites and Affranchis.

Notes

Here, once again, I am using the African/Taino/Haitian Kreyol language for priests, priestesses, healers, and elders.

The prosperity gospels of the Protestant churches in contemporary America go hand in hand with the conspicuous consumptive logic of its postindustrial mode of production. Whereas frugality and accumulative wealth once dominated the Protestant Ethic, today the emphasis is on hard work and material wealth as a sign of God’s grace and blessings, which feeds the consumptive logic of postindustrial finance capital.