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Time is elusive and difficult to keep in perspective. In an effort to see it clearly, I sometimes remind myself that the 1960s are as distant from the 1990s as the 1930s were from the 1960s. This is especially helpful, or rather especially necessary, when communicating with my students, whose formative experiences are so disjoined from my own. Recently, however, I've begun to believe that the comparison understates the disjunction.
We might think of it this way. Capitalist economies are structured by the relationship between capital and wage-labor. This structural relationship has been paralleled or mediated by the opposition of working class (leftist) and capitalist (rightist) political tendencies. Moreover, at least since the time of the industrial revolution, the Left has been pulled forward by the hope of progressing beyond the stage of capitalist development. One might even say that these three elements (the economic relationship of wage-labor and capital, the Left-Right political axis, and the project of going beyond capitalism) are constitutive of modernity.
If this view is accepted, then the 1930s and the 1960s were modern times. Hence the appropriateness of the designations, Old Left and New Left. The 1990s are no longer modern in this sense. At least in the United States, there no longer is an effective left opposition to capitalist domination, nor the hope of bringing the capitalist era to an end. “No longer” does not mean “never again.” But for the moment, we are living in postmodern times.1
We can date the advent of this postmodern period quite precisely. The fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 symbolized the end of the Cold War as we knew it, and of the Soviet Union as the political counterweight to the United States and its allies. The world abruptly became unipolar. To be sure, and as convergence theorists had long argued, the ideological opposition of East and West may have been more apparent than real. Nonetheless the bipoiarity of world powers created a