Human Progress and Capitalist Development

Abstract

A central theme of this book is the relationship between the national state and the global political economy. According to neo-Gramscian approaches, this relationship has undergone a fundamental change that necessitates analyses of current developments in terms of a transition to a new capitalist epoch. According to this view, ‘the nation-state phase of capitalism’ has been eroded and its Fordist mode of regulation is superseded by globalization— an ‘open-ended process of transition’ towards new capitalist structures (Robinson, 2004, pp. 42, 43). The crisis-ridden development of capitalism is thus not conceptualized as a crisis of capitalism but is understood as a crisis of a mode of regulation, and neoliberalism is seen by implication as a capitalist strategy appropriate to transition to the new capitalist epoch of globalization. Globalization thus means that ‘the power of capital attains a hegemonic status’ (Gill, 2003, p. 105). However, although neo-liberalism is conceived as a means of transition from one mode of regulation to another, the precise result of transition is contested by human agency (cf. Rupert, 2000) at the national and global level. Politically, the demand is either for the ‘democratisation of global society’ (Robinson, 2004, p. 178) or the ‘transformation of the state’ in favour of labour (Panich, 1994, p. 87).