Millennial Dreams

Download or read book Millennial Dreams written by Paul Smith and published by Verso. This book was released on 1997 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.