This volume is the first in nearly forty years in which Leo Panitch didn’t play a direct role. Though last year’s volume was produced following his tragic death…
The Unmaking of Global Capitalism?
internationalization of production and the
national firmament of states. The other is that though the American state has been indispensable to overriding, or at least containing, that contradiction, its declining economic and administrative capacity to do so poses a threat to the viability of the globalization project.
Against this, in
The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Panitch and Gindin 2012), the late Leo Panitch and I argued, almost a decade ago, that prevailing notions of an inevitable inconsistency between the national place of states and the international space of production were too mechanical. And alongside that, we argued that the staying power of U.S. leadership, repeatedly underestimated in the past vis-à-vis challenges from Japan, Europe, and Asia, was now being misjudged again.
“Completed ‘under the difficult conditions created by the pandemic’ (xiii) the 2020 edition of the
Socialist Register seeks to ‘analyze the nature of digital capitalism and its contradictions’ (ix), doing so ‘within the history of technological change’ (x). In selecting this topic, the late Leo Panitch and Greg Albo’s goal was to highlight the extent to which ‘digital technology has become integral to capitalist market dystopia’ (ix), a necessary task given the prevalence of ‘cyber-utopian’ (ix) and ‘techno determinist’ (x) thought in the public and private realms. This kind of ‘celebrant’ ideology, which Robert McChesney (2013) outlined so well recently, provides a social license for centi-billionaires like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos to continue to have a disproportionate say in directing investments, allocating resources and setting the terms of production. In laying out this agenda, Panitch and Albo rightly place greater emphasis on ‘c