Title: The capitalist conjuncture: over-accumulation, financial crises, and the retreat from globalisation
Abstract: Abstract This article argues that the key crisis that has overtaken today's global economy is the classical capitalist crisis of over-accumulation. Reaganism and structural adjustment were efforts to overcome this crisis in the 1980s, with little success, followed by globalisation in the 1990s. The Clinton administration embraced globalisation as the ‘Grand Strategy’ of the USA, its two key prongs being the accelerated integration of markets and production by transnational corporations and the creation of a multilateral system of global governance, the pillars of which were the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The goal of creating a functionally integrated global economy, however, stalled, and the multilateral system began to unravel, thanks among other things to the multiple crises created by the globalisation of finance, which was the main trend of the period. In response partly to these crises, partly to increasing competition with traditionally subservient centre economies, and partly to political resistance in the South, Washington under the Bush administration has retreated from the globalist project, adopting a nationalist strategy consisting of disciplining the South through unilateralist military adventures, reverting to methods of primitive accumulation in exploiting the developing world, and making other centre economies bear the brunt of global adjustments necessitated by the crisis of over-accumulation. Notes This article will be appearing in Achin Vanaik (ed), Banners of Empire, Northampton: Interlink Publishing, forthcoming. 1 Sebastian Mallaby, ‘Why globalization has stalled’, Washington Post, 24 April 2006. 2 Ibid. 3 Walden Bello, Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005. 4 Immanuel Wallerstein, After Liberalism, New York: New Press, 1996, p 28. 5 Quoted in Jose Antonio Ocampo, ‘Latin America and the world economy in the long twentieth century’, in KS Jomo (ed), The Great Divergence: Hegemony, Uneven Development, and Global Inequality, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, p 79. 6 Ibid. 7 Angus Maddison, cited in James Crotty, ‘Why there is chronic excess capacity’, Challenge, November – December 2002, p 25. 8 Ibid. 9 Philip Anthony O'Hara, ‘The contradictory dynamics of globalization’, in BN Ghosh & Halil M Guven (eds), Globalization and the Third World, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, p 27. 10 Ibid, p 26. 11 Ibid, p 145. 12 See Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble, New York: Verso, 2002, pp 127 – 133. 13 Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p 120. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid, pp 131 – 135. 16 Alex Berenson, ‘The other legacy of Enron’, New York Times, 29 May 2006, p 4.4. 17 Raghuram Rajan, ‘Global imbalances: an assessment’, International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC, October 2005, at http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2005/102505. 18 Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble, p 192. 19 Robert Brenner, ‘Towards the precipice’, London Review of Books, 6 February 2003, p 20. 20 Jacques Chai Chomthongdi, ‘The imf's Asian legacy’, in Prague 2000: Why We Need to Decommission the imf and the World Bank, Bangkok: Focus on the Global South, 2000, pp 18, 22. 21 Barry Rubin & Jacob Weisberg, In an Uncertain World, New York: Random House, 2003, p 296. 22 See Paul Hirst & Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. 23 David Held & Anthony McGrew, Globalization and Anti-Globalization, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002, p 40. 24 Dennis De Tray, Comments at luncheon sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, 21 April 2006. 25 Ngaire Woods, ‘The globalizers in search of a future: four reasons why the imf and World Bank must change and four ways they can’, cgd (Center for Global Development) Brief, April 2006, p 2. 26 AH Meltzer, ‘International financial institutions reform: report of the International Financial Institutions Advisory Commission’, Report to US Congress, Washington, DC, March 2000. 27 The description is that of Mike Moore. 28 Mallaby, ‘Why globalization has stalled’. 29 Ho-fung Hung, ‘Rise of China and the global overaccumulation crisis’, paper presented at the Global Division of the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, 10 – 12 August 2006, Montreal. 30 Rajan, ‘Global imbalances’. 31 ‘Chief named for troubled gm unit’, New York Times, 31 May 2006, C1. 32 Crotty, ‘Why there is chronic excess capacity’, p 24. 33 US Mission to the European Union, ‘oecd nations pledge reduction in global steel capacity’, 8 February 2002, at http://www.useu.be/Categories/Trade/Feb0802Steel ReductionsOECD.html. 34 A Gary Shilling, Deflation, Short Hills, NJ: Lakeview, 1998, p 177. 35 The Economist, 20 February 1999, p 15. 36 Brenner, ‘Towards the precipice’, p 20. 37 Ibid, p 21. 38 ‘Riding China's coattails’, Business Week, p 50. 39 ‘China the locomotive’, Straits Times, 23 February 2004, p 12. 40 Rajan, ‘Global imbalances’. 41 United Nations, World Investment Report 2003, New York: United Nations, 2003, p 45. 42 ‘Burying the competition’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 17 October 2002, p 30. 43 Ho-fung Hung, ‘Rise of China and the global overaccumulation crisis’. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Rajan, ‘Global imbalances’. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Philip Anthony O'Hara, ‘Recent changes to the imf, wto, and spd: emerging global mode of regulation in social structures of accumulation for long wave upswing?’, Review of International Political Economy, 10 (3), 2003, p 496. 54 See David Harvey, ‘The new imperialism: accumulation by dispossession’, in Leo Panitch & Colin Leys, The New Imperial Challenge (Socialist Register, 2003), New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003, pp 1 – 42. 55 Ibid. 56 One of the best analyses of the hard capitalist interests that are the ‘mass base’ of the Bush regime is Antonias Juhasz, The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time, New York: HarperCollins, 2006. 57 See Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Empire of Capital, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2003, p 145. 58 ‘Zoellick says fta candidates must support US foreign policy’, Inside US Trade, 16 May 2003. This article summarizes an 8 May 2003 speech by Zoellick. 59 For the sharpening conflicts between the US Treasury Department and imf officials over US unilateralist moves, see Nicola Bullard, ‘The puppet master shows his hand’, Focus on Trade, April 2002, at http://focusweb.prg/popups/articleswindow.php?id=41. 60 Nancy Alexander, ‘The US on the world stage: reshaping development, finance, and trade initiatives’, Citizens' Network on Essential Services, Washington, DC, October 2002. 61 See, among other accounts, Bello, Dilemmas of Domination, pp 170 – 173. 62 Susanne Soederberg, ‘American empire and “excluded states”: the Millenium Challenge Account and the shift to pre-emptive development’, Third World Quarterly, 25 (2), 2004, p 295. 63 Quoted in ibid. 64 Ibid.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-11-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 59
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