Untitled - socium.ge

Informationalism and the network society 17underlying structural crisis in Western capitalism was the necessity to adapt toa knowledge-based economy, it seemed logical that a strategy of deepeningand reforming the welfare state, to provide the human capital necessary forthis economy, in terms of education, health, and modernization of the publicsector, would have been a better bet in the long term.Yet, the urgency of restoring profitability to business, and the outcome ofthe political process, led to the victory of Reaganomics, in Europe toThatcherism, and in developing countries to the model elaborated by theChicago boys, disciples of Milton Friedman, which was imposed by dictatorshipsand the IMF’s budgetary discipline. In other words, the crisis of industrialismwas also the crisis of the specific model of capitalist accumulation ofthe mature stage of industrialism, and it was this latter crisis that wasaddressed as a priority according to the interests and values of the politicalactors that seized power in the main economies. The political muscle of the USin the global economy, and ideological hegemony, linked to the bankruptcy ofstatism and to the short-sighted pragmatism of social democracy, did the rest.This is to say that the institutional conditions for globalization and businessflexibility were concomitant with a weakening of the power of labor and aretrenchment of the welfare state. However, they were not the necessaryoutcome of the crisis of industrialism and of Keynesian capitalism, but one ofthe options to restructure the system. It just happened to be the winning option.Its victory, on a global scale, created the conditions for the structural transformationsthat induced not only a new model of capitalism, but also contributedto the emergency of a new social structure.The shape of this transformation was also influenced by the collapse ofstatism, as a result of the failure of the restructuring policies that had tried toaddress its economic and technological crisis. Indeed, precisely in the 1970s,the Soviet economy reached the point of quasi-stagnation, reversing decadesof fast economic growth, and its technological development lost pace in relationto the West, particularly in the critical area of information and communicationtechnologies. Our study on the matter (Castells and Kiselyova, 2003)has documented the direct relationship between the features of Soviet statism,based on the control of information and of the capture of technology in themilitary complex, and the economic and technological crisis of the SovietUnion. Both crises decisively undermined Soviet military power, andprompted the need for reform, opening the way to Gorbachev’s perestroika.The depth of the crisis was such that Gorbachev had to go outside the channelsof the party to call for support for his perestroika from civil society. Theensuing process spiraled out of control and led to the unexpected demise of theSoviet empire, in one of the most extraordinary courses of events in history.Without the backbone provided by the Soviet Union, most statist countriesin the Third World gravitated toward Western influence and accepted the