Agency, however, raises the issue of the other unit of my title, "late capitalism," about which something further needs to be said. In particular, people have begun to notice that it functions as a sign of some kind and seems to carry a burden of intent and consequences not clear to the noninitiate. It is not my favorite slogan, and I try to vary it with the appropriate synonyms ("multinational capitalism," "spectacle or image society," "media capitalism," "the world system," even"Postmodernism" itself); but as the Right has also spotted what evidently seems to them a dangerous new concept and way of speaking (even though some of the economic diagnoses overlap their own, and a term like postindustrial society certainly has a family likeness), this particular terrain of ideological struggle, which unfortunately one rarely chooses oneself, seems a solid one and worth defending.

As far as I can see, the general use of the term late capitalism originated with the Frankfurt School; 7 it is everywhere in Adorno and Horkheimer, sometimes varied with their own synonyms (for example, "administered society"), which make it clear that a very different conception was involved, of a more Weberian type, which, derived essentially from Grossman and Pollock, stressed two essential features: (1) a tendential web of bureaucratic control (in its more nightmarish forms, a Foucault-like grid avant la lettre), and (2) the interpenetration of government and big business ("state capitalism") such that Nazism and the New Deal are related systems (and some form of socialism, benign or Stalinist, also seems on the agenda).

As widely used today, the term late capitalism has very different overtones from these. No one particularly notices the expansion of the state sector and bureaucratization any longer: it seems a simple, "natural" fact of life. What marks the development of the new concept over the older one (which was still roughly consistent with Lenin's notion of a "monopoly stage" of capitalism) is not merely an emphasis on the emergence of new forms of business organization (multinationals, transnationals) beyond the monopoly stage but, above all, the vision of a world capitalist system fundamentally distinct from the older imperialism, which was little more than a rivalry between the various colonial powers. The scholastic, I am tempted to say theological, debates on whether the various notions of "late capitalism" are really consistent with Marx ism itself (despite Marx's own repeated evocation, in the Grundrisse, of the "world market" as the ultimate horizon of capitalism) turn on this matter of internationalization and how it is to be described (and in particular whether the component of "dependency theory" or of Wallerstein's "world system" theory is a production model, based on social classes). In spite of these theoretical uncertainties, it seems fair to say that today we have some rough idea of this new system (called "late capitalism" in order to mark its continuity with what preceded it rather than the break, rupture, and mutation that concepts like "postindustrial society" wished to underscore). Besides the forms of transnational business mentioned above, its features include the new international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third World debt), new forms of media interrelationship (very much including transportation systems such as containerization), computers and automation, the flight of production to advanced Third World areas, along with all the more familiar social consequences, including the crisis of traditional labor, the emergence of yuppies, and gentrification on a now-global scale.