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Returning to an article published twenty- ve years ago is like exhuming a deceased relative; there is considerable dread as to how badly the
body will have decomposed. With an article, the passage of time can
be destructive in several distinct ways. First, the authors subsequent
intellectual and political development can make earlier writings appear
hopelessly naive. Second, historical change can reveal ones arguments
and analysis to have been simply wrong or utterly irrelevant. Finally,
changes in intellectual fashion or scholarly concern can enormously
accelerate the process of decay by invalidating the basic premises of
earlier scholarship.
It is only relative to this last process, that Contradictions of Capitalism
as a World System can be said to have aged well.1 At this moment
( January 2000), the question of globalization and debates over the
organization of the global economy have more currency in academia
and actual politics than ever before in the U.S. In the aftermath of the
Battle for Seattle, both the U.S. labor movement and a newly revived
student movement are increasingly focusing their attention on the organization of the world economy. Hence, the core question that the article askshow will global capitalism organize itself ?is a more urgent
question than ever. Yet the essay assumes that the answer to the question will be determined by global political and economic elites; it does
not even imagine the extraordinary possibility that has recently emerged
that the global economy could be reorganized by self-conscious actions
of transnational social movements.
The article has stood up less well against subsequent historical developments. The article provides a useful account of the critical period
of transition in the 1970s when the old Bretton Woods system was giving way to a new era of more disorganized global capitalism, but it
failed to anticipate three key patterns. The rst has been the extraordinary expansion of global nancial ows, currency trading, and speculation in derivatives and other complex instruments that has occurred
over the past twenty years. As of 1998, oYcial studies estimated daily
Critical Sociology 25,2/3
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Not only has in ation been brought under control, but what has
occurred in recent years is the almost alchemical shift of in ationary
pressures from the real economy to asset markets. We still have the old
problem of too much money chasing too few goods, but the dynamic
has eVectively been isolated to one particular category of goodsinvestment assets such as equities and real estate. So while prices for most commodities remain relatively stable, prices in asset markets have been rising
at an extraordinary pace. The result has been a sustained stock market boom that has created the illusion of almost universal prosperity.
Several aspects of my own subsequent intellectual development also
make it unsettling to reopen this particular coYn. For one thing, I nd
the prose of the piece overly wordy and marked by too many passive
constructions, so I am glad that the editors have cut the paper to its
intellectual essentials. For another, the article was written with certain
New Left Marxist assumptions that I have since discarded. Foremost
among these is the idea that capitalism is a form of social organization
characterized by a set of xed internal contradictions that can be managed but never fully overcome. Hence, the fundamental economic contradiction at the heart of capitalism means that either it will be marked
by periodic and deep economic downturns or it will face ongoing and
intensifying in ationary pressures. Moreover, as this contradiction is displaced into the global arena, it will make global capitalism extremely
vulnerable to either inter-imperialist con icts or economic collapse. In
short, those parts of the article that have aged the worst can be traced
to these particular Marxist underpinnings.
My own thinking has evolved in a more Polanyian direction that
seeks to build on Marxist and World-System insights without theorizing capitalism as an economic order with a xed essence. In a recent
essay, for example, I have suggested that rather than seeing global capitalism as a coherent and uni ed whole, it is useful to think of it as a
constructed order that is constantly under construction to resolve tensions and strains.2 In short, even without a highly developed system of
global governance, there is a continuous need for international agreements and coordination and active intervention by international organizations such as the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO. If transnational
movements can succeed in showing that global capitalism is not operating according to some natural set of laws, but is actually a politically
managed and constructed entity, then they have a real opportunity to
gain some leverage over that process of construction and reconstruction.
Yet even this revised understanding of capitalism faces diYculties in
evaluating global capitalisms crisis tendencies. On the one side, it is
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fred block