Großbritannien in der Weltwirtschaft: Niedergang der Nation, Erfolg des Kapitalismus?

The »decline« of the British economy has been stated by many people ancl has been describccl since the Seventies as de-industrialization. The left oflen sees the main culprits in lhe financial enterprises in London's city centre. But a closer investigation shows a more differentiatecl picture: many British enterprises use the City's international network for their own global expansion. As a result UK-located industry has declined, UK-based capital has been comparatively successful in global compeliton. An alternative concept of the left ean therefore not just consist of a nation-state-centered industrial poliey and a regulation of the City. Moreover, the task is lo reject the logic of international eompetition and the attempt to subordinate the market to social needs

Class Theory And Class Politics Today

The starting point of this essay is the proposition that the question of class is central. This is not because I want in any way to suggest that it must take precedence over other issues; on the contrary, it seems obvious that the counterposing of ‘class politics’ against ‘social movements’ has been one of the main obstacles to left renewal now for forty years or more. Instead, in what follows I want to argue that the painful experiences of this whole period can only be resolved through a thorough critique of the ways class has been understood. In order to do this, I propose first to revisit Marx’s original relational understanding of class, and how that understanding was taken up by later generations in the Marxist tradition, especially in the revival of debate about class from the 1960s to the 1980s. In the following sections, I look first at the analyses of the middle classes in relation to Marx’s two-class model, in which the New Left sought to respond to claims that their growth had confounded Marx’s expectations of social polarization. I then examine the related question of whether in any case the working class was (or still is) a revolutionary subject capable of overthrowing the capitalist order. This, then, sets up the problem of how far class relations can really be understood in relation to labour within capitalist production alone, rather than embracing also labour and other activities taking place elsewhere in society, or what has come to be called the sphere of social reproduction. Here I suggest an alternative understanding of production and labour that can effectively integrate the sphere of reproduction, and provide a better way of deploying class as a critical concept. This approach is then applied in the last section to political practice in the contemporary world, the aim being to shed light on the changes that have taken place in the neoliberal era and the political consequences that now confront us

Taking Globalisation Seriously

A decade of debate around the idea of globalisation is at last giving rise to a promising response which can challenge the swaggering triumph of neoliberalism. This essay reviews the debates within the framework of conventional international political economy, in which the central issue is the relationship between the global economy and the nation-state; suggests a critique of this framework, based on a less state-centred analysis of global capitalism; and, finally, briefly points to the political conclusions that flow from this critique

Confronting the Crisis: A Class Analysis

Evidently, this has been a massive and global crisis, and the main aim of this essay is to set out a framework for understanding its causes and consequences. Beginning with a preliminary sketch of the various ways in which the term ‘crisis’ has been understood this time, and the central importance they all attach to ‘financialization’, we turn to examining the nature of the extraordinary expansion of the financial services sector in recent decades, and argue that it is inseparable from important changes in the institutions and practices of capitalist production. These changes in turn need to be placed in the context of the simultaneous intensification of global integration, affecting not only material production but also the nature of the state and the states-system. Taken together, financialization and globalization are central elements in neoliberalism – the left’s critique of which, the essay concludes, needs to be centred on a class analysis, rather than on the conventional ‘states versus markets’ approach, if we are to develop a socialist alternative based on equality, democracy and sustainable livelihoods