Global Neoliberalism and the Contemporary （全球新自由主义和当代）.pdf

Global Neoliberalism and the Contemporary Social Structure of Accumulation by David M. Kotz and Terrence McDonough Version 7 December, 2008 This paper was written for Terrence McDonough, Michael Reich, and David M. Kotz (eds), Contemporary Capitalism and its Crises: Social Structure of Accumulation Theory for the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge University Press, 2010. Research assistance was provided by James Miehls and Ann Werboff. Global Neoliberalism and the Contemporary SSA, Version 7, by Kotz and McDonough 1 1. Introduction There is broad agreement among social analysts that capitalism changed in significant ways starting around 1980. However, there is disagreement about how to characterize those changes, what the key features of capitalism have been in recent decades, and what name to apply to the contemporary form of capitalism. In our view, the concept of global neoliberalism best captures the contemporary social reality. In Europe liberalism has long referred to a stance that advocates limited government intervention in the economy. States were generally less active in seeking to manage capitalist economies before the Great Depression of the 1930s than they were after World War II. This does not mean that capitalist states followed a consistently Laissez Faire approach in the past. Chang (2002) has shown that states actively promoted industrialization in every major developed capitalist country during its period of early development. In late developers such as Germany and Japan the state was even more active than in the earliest cases. However, once industrialization was completed, in most developed capitalist countries the state played a relativel