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Capitalism at the Turn of the Century: Regulation Theory and the Challenge of Social Change
“My book, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, was written more than twenty years ago. The new edition perhaps testifies to the longevity of the ideas it sought to communicate. These two decades, however, have not been kind to anyone trying to make sense of the erratic and sometimes . . .” read more
Questioning Eurocentricism: A Reply to Gregor McLennan
“Gregor McLennan says he is replying to my article on ‘Eurocentrism and its Avatars’. It seems to me what he is doing is taking off from my article to criticize ‘post-colonial theorists’, who are also characterized as ‘maximal anti-Eurocentrics’. The justification seems to be that ‘in places Wallerstein . . .” read more
The Question of Eurocentricism: A Comment on Immanuel Wallerstein
“In his critique of Eurocentrism, Immanuel Wallerstein has provided a useful discussion of a major issue for contemporary left politics and critical social science. By contrast with the higher-profile subject of ‘multi-culturalism’, to which it is of course related, the Eurocentrism question has received less considered debate. Wallerstein’s . . .” read more
The Korean Crisis and the End of 'Late' Development
“The Asian economic crisis has created a watershed in contemporary history, where questions long buried by the demise of Western communism and a militant Left in the democratic countries amid an appallingly self-congratulatory liberal triumphalism, now come sharply to the fore. A systematic failure of capitalism has struck . . .” read more
The New World of Debt
“The debtors and how best to deal with them is surely one of the continuing but unresolved issues for the international financial system. Here I will argue that the evolution of that system has changed the nature of the debt problem, but that neither governments nor markets are . . .” read more
Power in the Global Arena
“I would like to talk primarily about the United States, its place in the evolving world order, and the prospects for the future. The record of prediction in human affairs is not exactly inspiring, but the task is hopeless without at least a fair grasp of what has . . .” read more
The Economic Bondage of Debt - and the Birth of a New Movement
“On 16 May 1998, the Jubilee 2000 Coalition drew a crowd of more than 70,000 people in Birmingham, meeting place of this year’s g8 summit, to form Britain’s first-ever mass protest in the form of a Human Chain. The crowd came together to demand that the leaders . . .” read more
The Asian Crisis: The High Debt Model Versus the Wall Street-Treasury-IMF Complex
“How could the widely acknowledged real estate problems of Thailand’s banks in 1996 and 1997 have triggered such a far-reaching debt-and-development crisis? The devaluation of the Thai baht in July 1997 was followed by currency crises or financial instability in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, . . .” read more
Eurocentricism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science
“Social science has been Eurocentric throughout its institutional history, which means since there have been departments teaching social science within university systems. This is not in the least surprising. Social science is a product of the modern world-system, and Eurocentrism is constitutive of the geoculture of the modern . . .” read more
At the Limits of Political Possibility: The Cosmopolitan Democratic Project
“Liberal democracy, at its apparent moment of world historical triumph, is besieged. The ineffectiveness and timidity of economic policy in advanced capitalist states suggests a scission between the de jure sovereignty of those states (the legitimate right to rule in a demarcated territory) and their de facto autonomy . . .” read more
Globalization and the Myth of the Powerless State
“The new globalist orthodoxy posits the steady disintegration of national economies and the demise of the state’s domestic power. This article, instead, seeks to show why the modern notion of the powerless state, with its accompanying reports about the demise of national diversity, is fundamentally misleading. It is . . .” read more
Towards an International Social Movement Unionism
“In the late 1990s, the structure of world capitalism has become clear. Capitalism is now global, but the world economy remains fragmented and highly uneven. The old North-South divide has widened in terms of the incomes of the majority. The South is locked into the role of low-wage . . .” read more
Response to Giovanni Arrighi
“The Long Twentieth Century is a volume of great historical sweep and originality. I don’t think my review could have been clearer in recognizing the many strengths of Giovanni Arrighi’s work. However, I did also find that much of the book’s core theoretical framework was in disarray. . . .” read more
Financial Expansions in World Historical Perspective: A Reply to Robert Pollin
“In his review of The Long Twentieth Century, Robert Pollin advances three surprising criticisms. All three criticisms concern what I have called ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’. These cycles consist of two phases: a phase of material expansion, in which profits come primarily from investments in the purchase, transformation, . . .” read more
Information as Gift and Commodity
“‘The current phase of capitalist development’, says Gareth Locksley, ‘is one characterized by the elevation of information and its associated technology into the first division of key resources and commodities. Information is a new form of capital’, and as such it undergoes a change of form: rather than . . .” read more
Contemporary Economic Stagnation in World Historical Perspective
“There is little dispute now that the history of Western capitalism since the end of World War ii can be partitioned into two distinct periods. Its ‘Golden Age’, lasting roughly through the end of the 1960s, was characterized by rapid economic growth, low unemployment, mild business cycles . . .” read more
Japan, the World Bank, and the Art of Paradigm Maintenance: The East Asian Miracle in Political Perspective
“To what extent is the World Bank an actor, an ‘autonomous variable’ in the international system? Or to what extent are its objectives and approaches the mere manifestations of competition and compromise among its member states? Several writers have argued that the Bank has a relatively large amount . . .” read more
Eastern Reformers and Neo-Marxist Reviewers
“Peter Gowan has written an ambitious article. In it, he aims to show that the Group of Seven major industrial states (g7) and the international financial institutions (ifis) have, with a good deal of success, sought to impose at least an economic imperialism over the post-communist . . .” read more
Eastern Europe, Western Power and Neo-Liberalism
“John Lloyd’s article is helpful, above all, in revealing more fully his forms of thought. He appears to think my article was a piece of Marxist economics. Unfortunately it was entirely pre-theoretical: an attempt to introduce the claims of neo-liberals like Lloyd to some pertinent facts, with the . . .” read more
Neo-Liberal Theory and Practice for Eastern Europe
“Eastern Europe’s market for policy ideas, suddenly opened in 1989, was swiftly captured by an Anglo-American product with a liberal brand name. This policy equivalent of fast food erected barriers to other new entrants and established a virtual monopoly on advice in most target states in the region. . . .” read more
China in the Russian Mirror
“When people all over the world think about the collapse of the Soviet Union they draw a certain picture in their minds. According to this picture, modern societies developed along two different paths: the market economy and the command economy. Countries that took the path of the command . . .” read more
European Cities, the Informational Society, and the Global Economy
“An old axiom in urban sociology considers space as a reflection of society. Yet life, and cities, are always too complex to be captured in axioms. Thus the close relationship between space and society, between cities and history, is more a matter of expression than of reflection. The . . .” read more
Western Europe’s Economic Stagnation
“At the beginning of the 1990s, Western Europe is clearly facing more acute economic problems than are the other major countries of the oecd area. Both the United States and Japan seem to be hesitantly recovering in 1993 from their earlier, and relatively modest, slowdowns. Europe, on . . .” read more
The Political Economy of Food: A Global Crisis
“International conflict over agricultural regulation continues after more than six years to threaten to destroy the whole Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt), and with it an agreement that greatly extends corporate power relative to national (and public) power. Paradoxically, the deadlock . . .” read more
The Costs of Stability: The Advanced Capitalist Countries in the 1980s
“It is widely recognized that economic policy in the advanced capitalist countries shifted profoundly in the 1980s. Employment levels were abandoned to market processes, government deficits would be eliminated to squeeze inflation and release resources for private initiative, profitability had to be restored to improve the climate for . . .” read more
World Income Inequalities and the Future of Socialism
“The thesis of this article is that the great political upheavals of our days—from Eastern Europe and the ussr to the Middle East—originate in a radical transformation of the social structure of the world-economy combined with a persistent, indeed deepening, income inequality among the regions and political . . .” read more
The Regulation Approach: Theory and History
“In the past two decades the French (or Paris) School of Economic Regulation has developed an ambitious historical-economic theory which has already had a major impact on efforts to understand the current malaise of the capitalist system and the accompanying economic transformations. On the face of it, the . . .” read more
Economies Out of Control
“At the end of the 1980s a word was pronounced in London and New York which had virtually dropped out of economic vocabulary at the start of the decade—stagflation. The Reagan and Thatcher booms are over and their successors have been left to grapple with a legacy of . . .” read more
Exception or Symptom? The British Crisis and the World System
“Perry Anderson is too modest in his claims for New Left Review’s interpretation of English history, recently restated in ‘The Figures of Descent’. He suggests (p. 27) that ‘the consensus of at any rate the local left’ upheld the criticisms of that interpretation in Edward Thompson’s famous essay . . .” read more
The Global Economy: New Edifice or Crumbling Foundations?
“It is now virtually a commonplace among left observers and activists that we have recently witnessed the emergence of a New International Division of Labour and the Globalization of Production. For many, these twin tendencies manifest such deep structural transformations in the world economy that group or government . . .” read more
Capitalism in the Computer Age
“Norbert Wiener, in the early 1960s, foresaw a parallel between the process of automation and the nature of magic as it has been depicted in countless fantasies, from Goethe’s tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice to W.W. Jacob’s Monkey’s Paw. The characteristic of magic in these stories is its . . .” read more
The Dollar Weapon: From Nixon to Reagan
“us international economic policy since the beginning of the seventies can only be explained as a reaction to the relative decline of the American economy vis-à-vis Western Europe and Japan. There is already an ample literature on the decline in us economic power, which is . . .” read more
Capital Flight and Exchange Controls
“The difficulties faced by a Labour Government in carrying out socialist policies in the UK assume their most dramatic form in the threat of capital flight. If free movement of financial capital is allowed, domestic UK interest rates are bound by a golden chain, via Euromarkets, . . .” read more
Robots and Capitalism (Comment)
“Tessa Morris-Suzuki has opened up an interesting and necessary discussion of the consequences of automation in manufacturing and of the associated rapid growth of the software industries. As she shows, using Japanese data, the use of robots, etc., is now developing at a speed which makes it important . . .” read more
Robots and Capitalism
“‘The key to innovation is not to be found in chemistry electronics, automatic machinery, aeronautics, atomic physics, or any of the products of these science-technologies, but rather in the transformation of science itself into capital’. Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital.” read more
How Monetarism Has Choked Third World Industrialization
“The thirteenth of August 1982. The default of a major Third World debtor, long expected to be the overture to a world financial collapse, burst like a thunderbolt in a sky heavy with clouds. Mexico announced that it was suspending payments, and all the other major borrowers, and . . .” read more
Reflections on Williamsburg
“It has been clear for some years that an economic struggle is going on between the usa and the rest of the industrialized world, particularly Western Europe. Any remaining pretences to the contrary were finally exposed at the Williamsburg summit, not least on account of the confused . . .” read more
The World Economic Crisis
“As the unemployment figures continue to increase implacably upwards, it is sobering to reflect that the underlying structural crisis of the world capitalist system is now in its tenth year. The recent article by Michel Aglietta (‘World Capitalism in the Eighties’) in nlr 136 (November–December 1982) is . . .” read more
Capital and the Nation-State: A Reply to Frieden
“Few writers have the good fortune to encounter such a scrupulous reviewer as Jeff Frieden. He has fairly and accurately represented the key ideas in The Dollar and Its Rivals, demonstrating their relevance to the debate on imperialism; and he has brought out those weak areas in my . . .” read more
World Capitalism in the Eighties
“The main currents of thought on world economic problems can be distinguished from one another, amongst other things, by the precise importance they attach to the national dimension. For neo-classicists, as well as for supporters of the ‘globalist’ ideology propagated by the multinationals and transmitted by the communications . . .” read more
'The Dollar and Its Rivals'
“The 1980s will be a decade of escalating conflict between Western Europe, the United States and Japan over trade, financial and monetary policies. This heightened economic competition has already revived one of the most long-standing debates in Marxism—the polemic between Lenin and Kautsky on ‘ultra-imperialism’. It will be . . .” read more
Towards Global Fordism?
“Is the ‘industrialization of the Third World’ the spectre which now haunts old Europe? Certainly in the apologetic discourse of governments, as well as in the obsessional thinking of trade-union leaders, the resulting ‘unfair competition’ is at the root of the jobs crisis in the old industries. But . . .” read more
Marx or Rostow?
“Reading John Sender’s glowing introduction to Bill Warren’s ‘Imperialism, Pioneer of Capitalism’, I thought I could recognize several of the themes broached in my article on ‘Towards Global Fordism?’. But unfortunately, although Warren’s book has the great merit of identifying many weighty issues for Marxists in the dominated . . .” read more