EQUINOX Reading Tools

In this chapter I describe postmodernity—the current interconnected, global, neoliberal system of political and economic instruments, institu- tions and alliances—as the logical outcome of a chain of events in Western civilization: (1) the Western imperial drive from 1492 on to exploit foreign territories resulting in the dispossession of native populations; (2) the rise of capitalism, and especially its insistence on the commodification of public goods, which started, arguably, with the acquisition of land belonging to native peoples by Anglo-American settlers in the early eighteenth century; (3) and, much more recently, the post-Fordist, postindustrial and consumerist era arose out of the ashes of the post-World War II Bretton Woods arrangements that collapsed around 1970.