The nationally embedded and relatively broad-based economies characteristic of developed industrial countries are usually seen as the incarnation of a modern economy. These economies are largely internally oriented and are based, to a relatively great extent, on production and services based on local and national needs. Their provenance is generally assumed to have been processes of development that began in the sixteenth century and that, in the nineteenth century, accelerated with the expansion of industrial production and the growth of global (...) trade. This article challenges that assumption. It argues that today’s modern economies represent, not the culmination of long-term processes, but a recurring phenomenon within capitalism. It argues that, in the history of capitalism, there have been phases of nationally embedded and global free market capitalism – periods when capital is relatively more, and relatively less, free from the regulation of nation state. Today’s nationally embedded economies represent, not a further point along a unilinear developmental trajectory, but a return to features of the moral economies that characterized both European and non-European societies before the nineteenth century. (shrink)

A historical assessment of the Leninist conception of imperialism is the necessary foundation for a theoretical periodization of capitalism, in which the current developments and rising globalization have led to a dialectical supersession of imperialism. The emerging new stage of capitalism is characterized as transnational or totalitarian capitalism. The structural characteristics and basic trends of this new stage of capitalism stand in interesting contrast to the theoretical conception of Empire, proposed by Hardt and Negri. The former approach offers a more (...) adequate framework for understanding the current restructuring of capitalism and a safer political guide for the emancipating working-class struggle towards a socialist supersession of capitalism. (shrink)