"If it is, in reality, capitalism that is the motor force behind the destructive forms of globalization, then it must be in their capacity to neutralize or transform this particular mode of exploitation that one can best test these various forms of resistance to the West"
About this Quote
Jameson writes like someone trying to keep activism honest by forcing it through an unglamorous checkpoint: follow the money, or at least the mode of production. The sentence is built as a conditional trap. If capitalism is the engine of “destructive forms of globalization,” then any resistance worth the name has to be measured by whether it can jam that engine - not merely protest the smoke it produces. “Motor force” is deliberately mechanical, stripping globalization of its airy inevitability and recasting it as a system with moving parts, owners, and maintenance crews.
The sharpest move is his use of “test.” Jameson isn’t asking whether resistance is rhetorically anti-Western; he’s asking whether it can “neutralize or transform” exploitation as a mode, not a mood. That phrasing quietly demotes cultural antagonism - flags, identity, civilizational grievance - to the status of performance unless it alters the underlying extraction. It’s a warning about how easily critique gets absorbed: capitalism is famous for metabolizing its enemies, turning dissent into branding, lifestyle, or manageable policy tweaks.
Context matters: Jameson is a Marxist critic shaped by late Cold War and post-1989 triumphalism, when “globalization” was sold as destiny and “the West” as both villain and benchmark. His subtext: many movements framed as resistance to Western dominance may, in practice, reproduce the same exploitative logic under new management. The West becomes a decoy target unless the struggle reaches the deeper, more portable adversary: the capitalist social relation itself.
The sharpest move is his use of “test.” Jameson isn’t asking whether resistance is rhetorically anti-Western; he’s asking whether it can “neutralize or transform” exploitation as a mode, not a mood. That phrasing quietly demotes cultural antagonism - flags, identity, civilizational grievance - to the status of performance unless it alters the underlying extraction. It’s a warning about how easily critique gets absorbed: capitalism is famous for metabolizing its enemies, turning dissent into branding, lifestyle, or manageable policy tweaks.
Context matters: Jameson is a Marxist critic shaped by late Cold War and post-1989 triumphalism, when “globalization” was sold as destiny and “the West” as both villain and benchmark. His subtext: many movements framed as resistance to Western dominance may, in practice, reproduce the same exploitative logic under new management. The West becomes a decoy target unless the struggle reaches the deeper, more portable adversary: the capitalist social relation itself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|
More Quotes by Fredric
Add to List
