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/269/ Three Articles: The 90s (Patreon)

Published:
2022-06-21 06:01:00
Imported:
2026-06
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[Patreon Exclusive]

On the whatever decade.

People are turning back to reinterpret the 1990s. Clearly, they were peak End of History years. But does that mean that no politics actually happened? If it's the period of the cultural turn, does that mean we should seek to understand that decade culturally?

And what are the political consequences of how we interpret the 1990s?

Readings:

The 1990s: An age without qualities, Gavin Jacobson, New Statesman (attached)

Were the 1990s Really Devoid of Politics?, Ryan Zickgraf, Jacobin

The ‘90s: The decade that never ended, Jason Farago, BBC

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Comments

Richard R

I think a look at Colombia and Mexico in the 1990s helps illuminate the real political contestation of the 1990s. That it was a disagreement between state actors over whether to co-opt resistance movements (as Mexico ultimately did with the Zapatistas), vs outright crushing them (like Colombia against the FARC). On the popular level, however, what emerged in the 1990s is a concept of the 4th world--an alliance between Palestine and Irish nationalists and Latin American communist and indigenous groups, for example. While politically ineffective, and possibly an extension of 1960s anticolonialism, 4th Worldism seems to have shaped populist nationalism, as well as the broad realm of rightwing reaction against globalism, as well as climate politics broadly. You can't look at things like rivers or trees being made legal persons without talking about identitarian resistance to neoliberalism in the 1990sz

Konrad

For what it's worth, I knew a number of anarcho anti-globalization activists in the 90s who read both Z Magazine and Behold a Pale Horse and who had a thing for the Rothschild family.

Paul Brewer

I was growing increasingly unhappy with the takes in this episode when Alex dropped the brilliant comment – ‘It’s the tail end and the very end of the 1960s.’ This is spot on, as the left politics that I encountered in that era was dominated by people who had been active in the 1966-71 period or people like me, their little brothers and sisters, who took up politics later in the 1970s. We were actually heartened by the electoral outcomes in 1992 and 1997, although we were later to be de-bagged. We had a sense that these could have been the first steps on the road to turning back the Reagan/Thatcher policy regime. Of course, it didn't turn out that way, because history had ended, but we didn't know that at the time.