2. The Vulnerability of the American Empire-State

Apart from the aforementioned edited volume by Marglin and Schor, see also, Eric Hobsbawm (1994), The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Abacus).

In this respect, we consider the contribution of the monthly journal, Monthly Review, and its authors as very important. See, among others, John Bellamy Fosters and Fred Magdoff (2009), The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (New York: Monthly Review Press).

See Vassilis K. Fouskas and Bülent Gökay (2012), The Fall of the US Empire: Global Fault-Lines and the Shifting Imperial Order (London: Pluto Press), where we present a summary of these debates reviewing key works written by those authors. For a recent contribution to this discussion, see Richard Lachmann (2020), First-Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers (London: Verso).

See, Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble, op. cit., pp. 187–248, and his various contributions to New Left Review and Labour Focus on Eastern Europe.

For the rise of consumer debt in the UK in a comparative perspective, see Seun Alele (2020), Financialisation and the Rise of Consumer Debt in the UK, 1971–2008, PhD dissertation, University of East London.

The literature among heterodox and Marxist economists, as well as sociologists, on the topic of financialisation is vast. We would like, however, to single out the work of Costas Lapavitsas on the issue of financialised capitalism. Essentially, he outlined financialisation of core capitalisms alongside three characteristics: financialisation of financial enterprises; financialisation of non-financial enterprises; and financialisation of everyday life, especially speculation on the housing market. See especially his Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (2013) (London: Verso). In the periphery, Lapavitsas argues, financialisation assumes a “subordinate form”; see also the review of this work by Vassilis K. Fouskas (2015), The Political Quarterly, v.86, n.1, January–March 2015.

The key work here is that by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2012), The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (London: Verso). Ray Kiely and other scholars around the Socialist Register have espoused similar positions.

Lachmann (2020), op. cit., p. 359.

Prominent proponents of the “USA decline thesis” since the late 1960s and 1970s have been such political economists, among many others, as Ernest Mandel and Robert Gilpin. See, for instance, Ernest Mandel (1969), “Where Is America Going?”, New Left Review, v.54, March–April, as well as subsequent work; Robert Gilpin (1987), The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton: P.U.P.). Note that Nicos Poulantzas in the 1970s opposed Mandel and the “USA decline thesis” (Panitch still uses Poulantzas’ insights approvingly in his work). For further discussion, see Fouskas and Gökay (2012) and Fouskas and Dimoulas (2013), Greece, Financialisation and the EU: The Political Economy of Debt and Destruction (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan). In general, if we want to have an intellectual yardstick grouping authors and currents of thought, the following might be a “rule of thumb”: The “USA supremacy thesis” is supported by Marxisants, such as Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, Ray Kiely and most authors writing for the Socialist Register; and authors of the Right, such as those writing for the RAND corporation and various IR realist experts, such as Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth (2008) in their World out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton: P.U.P.)—but not John Mearsheimer (an offensive realist), or Christopher Layne (a neo-classical realist), who accept the rise of China and the protracted decline of the USA. Further, the “USA decline thesis” is supported by most “world systems theorists”, such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Giovanni Arrighi, the Monthly Review journal, Alex Callinicos and David Harvey; and the French “regulation school” (Michel Aglietta Gerald Dumenil et al.). They all have a leftist/Marxisant orientation as does Andre Gunder Frank in his last macro-historical-sociological statement of 1998, ReOrient. Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press); on the liberal-democratic-realist front, authors such as John Mearsheimer, Charles Kupchan, Stephen Walt and Joseph Nye, among others, accept, in one way or another, that America’s economy has been declining for some time now, seeing China as the most probable successor to American primacy.

For a post-Keynesian critique, see Philip Arestis, “New Consensus Macroeconomics: A Critical Appraisal”, Working Paper No. 564, The Levy Institute of Bard College and University of Cambridge, May 2009; for a Marxist critique, see Stavros Mauroudeas, “Economic Crisis and the Crisis of Economics”, in https://​stavrosmavroudea​s.​wordpress.​com/​tag/​new-macroeconomic-consensus/​ (accessed 15 February 2020).

See Emre Tiftik and Khadija Mahmood, “High and Rising Debt Levels: Should We Worry?”, Institute of International Finance, https://​www.​iif.​com/​Portals/​0/​Files/​content/​GDM_​July2019_​vf3.​pdf (accessed 21 February 2020).

See, Mike Roberts in Brave New Europe, https://​braveneweurope.​com/​michael-roberts-it-was-the-virus-that-did-it (accessed 1 July 2020).