ABSTRACT
With the demise of the Soviet Union and the command economies of the ‘Eastern bloc’ in the early 1990s, the world economy came to be dominated by a ‘New World Order’, marked by economic liberalisation, globalisation and privatisation. As smokestack industries toppled across the developed world, particularly in Britain and the United States, the power of organised labour seemed to wither in the face of an emerging ‘post-industrial society’. For many social scientists, the economic and political changes that marked this period fundamentally undermined the viability of the class narrative and the privileged position given to the working class in the making of history. This changing perspective was encouraged by the increasing influence of post-modernist and post-structuralist theories, particularly within the social science departments of universities in the United States and Britain. Some academics saw themselves as going beyond Marxism, seeing their previous support for it as a necessary but passing phase in the evolution of their intellectual and political thought.
