.Deák..Publicações..Publications

.1 What is in a word? .2 Where have all the classics gone? .3 The dialectic of the commodity form .4 Primacy: late capitalism vs existing socialism .5 Crises, stages and State intervention .6 The nation-State .7 Is capitalism a commodity economy? .8 By way of conclusion

Abstract
 
 

'Globalization' as a major contemporary trend enjoys general recognition but does not command a precise and generally recognized meaning. With this in mind, we start with an exploration of possible interpretations of the word 'globalization', such as deepening of the generalization of the commodity form, or formation of a (unified) world market, or yet supra-nationalization of the State apparatus (formation of World State?) or else yet that the frontiers of the extension of commodity production have been reached.

Whatever 'globalization' is supposed to mean, however, the former trends are some of the major characteristics of the current stage of capitalist development. An assessment of the perspectives of further development of those processes demands a periodization of capitalism and an interpretation of the current historical stage of world capitalism. I propose that this stage is characterized by the coming to a close of the transition from predomi-nantly extensive to predominantly intensive accumulation all over the main world centres of development which puts a question mark to the further prospects of commodity production under capitalist regulation.

The paper concludes that if anything is global in the contemporary stage of capitalism, it is the crisis faced by intensive accumulation in commodity production both at the world scale where the effects of 'global' waste and destruction are going out of control and at the in-fra-national scale where nation-States look increasingly obsolete and helpless in facing the conflicts of capitalist production either at the former level or within their own boundaries.
 
 

Bartlett International Summer School

Glasgow, 11-17 September, 1995

TraNsformation and Resistance

Changing social relations in the production of the built environment
 
 

GLOBALIZATION OR GLOBAL CRISIS?

Csaba Deák

Globalization or global crisis?

Csaba Deák
 
 

A deepening of the generalization of the commodity form. One of the most deep-seated characteristics of capitalism is an all-encompassing trend towards the generalization of the commodity-form, in an attempt to produce as much use value as exchange value as possible. Such movement has materialized historically within the unified markets of nation-states and the history of capitalism so far is precisely the history of the development of the national markets and the conflicts between those markets. The world market, although frequently hinted at and dreamed of since the second half of the nineteenth century by the strongest nation-States, remained elusive and vanished in each major confrontation of the same nation-States fighting for it. The lack of World Wars (global wars?) since the Second (which doesn't exclude a number of major and a welter of small ones) which produced a relatively long period of relative peace may still have lured many to think of the coming of the world market –finally. National boundaries would have been transposed as nothing by a number of world commodities (world cars?) and this is only a beginning... The effect of the last (hard fought) 1993 GATT agreement was cheerfully estimated in 200 billion of more trade in the next decade. And so on, and so on...

Supra-nationalization of the State apparatus (world State?). A multiplication of international bodies: banks, agencies, associations, chambers, courts might suggest that at least in an embrionary way, parts of a would-be world State apparatus are taking shape.
 

Free trade (steps towards)

As a result of the ‘Uruguay round’ of negotiations, a new GATT is signed after eight years of haggling, 15 dec 1993. Its precise meaning depends, however, on who is looking at or speaking of it. In other words, the meaning of GATT is anything but global. Thus, the central countries' representative commemorated:

Indeed, in last minute agreements with the EC, the US was to keep subsidies on an additional 7,5mn tons of corn and 1,2mn tons of vegetable oil. (The French alone will compensate their agricultors with 1,7-2,25bnUS$ for each fall of 10 ECU (11,32 US$) in the price of corn.). 'Free trade' is, as always was, more words than facts. Nor was the afore quoted boost of US$200bn to world trade a consensus even among dominant nations, as the French were quick to point out:

The Monthly Review's view

A rare non-apolegetic view of globalization was expressed in a two-part editorial paper about two years ago (1992) by the Monthly Review. It summed up "the major facets of the globalization process" as being:

But what, actually, is new?

Many of such phenomena are not new at all. The idea itself of globality is not hat new either: long before the global village was discovered by Mac Luhan, there was, for one thing, a League of the Nations set up by the victors after the First World War, even if it was not very successful in orchestrating the conflicting interests of the nation-States of the globe, neither, for that matter, in containing the socialist revolutions (except in destroying the fledgling Hungarian Soviet Republic, 1919). But the last great news in matters of globalization was much earlier yet: namely, the discovery of the telegraph in the early 1850s which reduced the time for news from London to reach say, Hong Kong, from 40-45 days on a sailing ship or the first streamers to a split second through a wire. Then the globe became small and rapid improvement in transportation techniques followed suit in substantially reducing the time for moving commodities around the world as well.

Telegraph was certainly not the first step to ‘globality’, though, and I would go with Samir Amin in holding that globalization started in earnest by 1492 and became rapidly dominated and later associated for good with capitalism as such – although I would not imply as he seems to do, that either of the two gave birth to the other:

... Whatever exactly is understood by globalization, the above 'facets' and the earlier possible interpretations are all pointers to some of the major characteristics of the current stage of capitalist development. A correct setting of them into perspective or an assessment of future prospects demands a periodization of capitalism and an interpretation of the current historical stage of world capitalism. I propose that this stage is characterized by the coming to a close of the transition from predominantly extensive to predominantly intensive accumulation all over the main world centres of development, or in other words, an exhaustion of the stage of intensive accumulation itself. Since there is no guarantee as to a coming of some third stage capitalist development (post-intensive accumulation could only be a joke), this puts a question mark to the further prospects of commodity production under capitalist regulation.

Before outlining further below such a view of contemporary capitalism however, let us take a brief look at some earlier, ‘classical’ formulations which are have been deeply buried under a mass of liberal ideologic produce.
 
 
 

2 Where have all the classics gone?

Modes of production, periodization, historical stages [of development], crises etc. became forgotten categories, their place occupied by pseudo-concepts. None the less, most questions which touch us today were put forward and discussed in the most clear-cut terms –of dialectical materialism– long ago, as is the case of the debate on ultra-imperialism or inter-imperialist rivalry originated at the beginning of the century.
 
 

Ultra-imperialism or inter-imperialist rivalry

The gist of the controversy was whether there could be a ‘peaceful capitalism’, as sustained by Kaustky and his social democrats. Lenin summed it up in his "Introduction"to Bukharin's Imperialism and world economy with his usual verve:

World market or imperialism: 

It is easy to realize nevertheless also worth recalling that the world market is not some ‘tendency’ or a place towards which all nations simply feel themselves attracted. Some do; the others will have to be pushed into it, and pushed they will be. Thus while Germany proved herself to be a more careful listener, in Japan the existence of a world market had to make itself manifest by such un-market means as guns of war ships. When the 'world market' (meaning hegemonic British industry) made itself felt in Germany, it provoked an internal answer in the form of social transformation towards bourgeois society – the revolution of 1848. When the same world market failed to raise a similar answer in Japan, it started to speak louder through the mouths of US warships' cannon, when it did bring about social changes comparable in depth to those in Germany a decade earlier: the demise of an old and the beginning of a new era (the Meiji Restoration). It also spoke loud to Paraguay, which committed the deadly sin of standing out in Latin America as a country which preferred making rather than buying from England everything from food to cloth to machines and even armament and fancied eradicating illiteracy. Whereupon the world market descended upon Paraguay in the form of ‘The Triplice Alliance’ (Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) and virtually annihilated the odd country.⁴

To mention only an outstanding case (Japan) and a lesser known one (Paraguay), but of course half of Asia and the whole of Africa knew much the same fate. The point is that the 'world market' is in fact imperialism; that it does not use armed force only when it can impose itself (it being the dominant nation-State of the day) without.

In the next Sections we outline a non-apologetical view of late capitalism in order to, coming back to globalization in the end, assess finally the scope and the meaning of that ‘concept’.
 
 

3 The dialectic of the commodity form

One of the innermost driving forces of capitalism remains the very process that brought it into being, through the transition from feudalism, namely, the generalization of the commodity form. While under feudalism the latter was restricted to the surplus, produced by the serf, appropriated by the feudal lord –in the form of rent– and taken to the market in the towns, the means of reproducing the labour force being provided through production for subsistence, under capitalism both the means of production and the means of subsistence become commodities, along with labour power itself.⁵
This is what is called 'generalization of the commodity form'. Use values are produced qua commodities, that is to say, as exchange values, and the primacy of exchange value over use value is extended to all production. Workers, separated from their means of production and of subsistence, must sell their labour power on the market for wages, and with this wage buy on the market the means of their reproduction.

Not everything can be produced as exchange value, though. The market can organize a portion of social production, but it cannot organize social production as a whole. Precisely what can and what can not be produced as a commodity varies according to historically specific stages of capitalism, but the latter necessarily includes the spatial (or urban) infrastructure –frequently referred to as the built environment– on the one hand and the institutional conditions for the continued re-imposition of the capital/wage relation on the other; and also it generally includes a number of products of both nascent and old industries. The part of the produce which can not be commodified is produced directly as use value under the direct intervention of the State.

In this way generalization of the commodity form can be stated only as a dialectic, rather than a linear or 'evolutionary' process. Thus capitalism is characterized by the tendency towards the generalization of the commodity form, which entails the need for State intervention and the direct production of use values. If State intervention is indeed necessary to preserve the commodity form (by ensuring the conditions for the functioning of the market), it is also antagonistic with the latter since it imposes a limitation to the expansion of the commodity form even while preserving it. Therefore, the tendency towards the generalization of the commodity form gives rise to a counter-tendency which negates it, namely, to widening State intervention and the direct production of use values. This is called the dialectic of the commodity form.

For globalization, this means that if by it the generalization of the commodity form is meant, then it is an antagonistic process even within the confines of nation-States, and as such, subject to the counter-tendency it itself arises.
 
 

4 Primacy: late capitalism vs existing socialism

If the development of the antagonism within the dialectic of the commodity form, that is to say, the measure of the extent of commodity production within social (re-)production as a whole, does characterize different stages in capitalism, it does not characterize capitalism itself. The primacy of the commodity form, rather than the particular extent of it, is the peculiar feature of capitalism.

A comparison between capitalism and socialism (both in their respective 'existing', or concrete forms) illustrates this point. Socialism may be seen, from the point of view taken here, as a society in which the polarity of the dialectic of the commodity form is inverted: where the primacy of use values over exchange values prevails (which is not to say that socialism is somehow the opposite of capitalism). Whereas the concept of the primacy provides a clear contradistinction between the two forms of society, very little can be said about the extent to which the commodity form is generalized in both. There may be a socialist society with wider room for market regulation (q.v. Lenin's New Economic Policy, and the New Economic Mechanism in Hungary 1968 onwards), than in some particular capitalist society with highly centralized planning (such as Brazil of the 1970s, to take an unusual example). This does not mean that the former would exhibit capitalist or the latter, socialist features; much less that the former 'is becoming' capitalist, or the latter, socialist (as has been at times said of, for instance, China and Sweden, respectively). In no society can production be either completely commodified or conversely, wholly planned for, so that whether it is capitalist or socialist, it will call for some extent of market regulation and some extent of planning. But under capitalism planning will be performed in order to support the working of the market and only to the extent that it is necessary to this purpose; whereas under socialism market regulation is called for only to make up for the limitations of planning.

It is of course the case that the more organization of the economy is achieved through state intervention, the less is left for the market (therefore, prices) to organize –and prices be lower– and conversely, the less direct intervention there is in economic regulation, the more responsibility falls on prices –which must then show greater differentials and thus cover a greater range. In other words, they must go up. In the case of spatial organization, a most striking example of this was provided by the introduction of the 'New Economic Mechanism' in Hungary back in 1968. In Budapest land prices had been stationary and low, almost nominal, for about two decades after World War II. The location of activities (state-owned entreprises, but residential settlements as well) was regulated by strongly centralized planning, virtually by decree. Then, in a few years after NEM had been introduced in 1968, land prices in the capital increased tenfold, the cause whereof in the case of Budapest cannot be attributed to rapid growth, either demographic or of production (which would indeed impose increased need for spatial regulation). A clear-cut explanation of the increase is provided, however, by a simple description of the nature of the change brought about by NEM:

Conversely, lesser profits in the intensive stage beg greater State intervention to make up for a weakening of this basic regulating tool of the market, namely, the rate of profit commanding the ‘flows’of capital –investment– between branches of industry. Thus slower growth and therefore lower rates of profit and wider State intervention are either sides of a same coin in the intensive stage of accumulation, or by an other name, in late capitalism.

In this connection it might come to the mind that in ('existing') socialism a similar antagonism is at work between the production of use values and the production of exchange values as in capitalism itself, with the obvious difference that whereas capitalism is the primacy of the commodity form over direct production of use values, in socialism the polarity is inverted, with the positing of the primacy of the latter over the former, of planning over the market and above all, of social relations over their own reification. – Such an analogy should not be pushed too far without further exploration, for the dialectic of (let us say) planning may not be, and most likely is not, simply the 'opposite' of the dialectic of the commodity form. The point reached this far should already make clear however, that the dialectic of capitalism (or of socialism) is not a question of balance, or mix, between market and State regulations, and thus a widening of the welfare State, for example, is not a tendency towards socialism, nor, for another example, is China 'becoming capitalist' because of its 'opening to the market' after 1984 – and this is not altered in the least by the collapse of the Eastern European soviet experiments after 1990.

Failure to see the above distinction led Kurz (Kurz, 1991) to confuse both capitalism and socialism under a common 'category' –blind to the dialectic of the commodity form– of 'commodity-producing systems', as commented again further below.
 
 
 

5 Crises, stages and State intervention

Crises of capitalism may ultimately be seen as being, in the last instance, periods in which the development of the antagonism within the dialectic of the commodity form reaches stages in which the very primacy of the commodity form is threatened. In these crises, the counter-tendency itself raises its opposite, leading to often desperate efforts to re-impose the primacy of the commodity form. The negation of the negation, however, is not the tendency itself (which is why privatization is not the same as commodification). It is also why crises of capitalism do not mark repetitive cycles: after each crisis, transformations occur which, far from leading back to the previous period (stage, 'cycle'), develop the antagonism of the commodity form further. It has been said that the history of capitalism is the history of its crises. More specifically, it may be said that the history of capitalism is the history of the re-imposition of the primacy of the commodity form.

In particular, crises sharpen in the 'intensive' stage of accumulation and bring ever more attention to the widening role of the State. While the State was of course always 'necessary' to capitalism (performing such fundamental tasks as enforcing private property and wage labour or making wars), in the extensive stage of accumulation the rapid growth of commodity production in a combination of accumulation proper and of its extension to previously non-capitalist production (independent producers, slave labour, production for subsistence etc.) helped to avoid any serious challenge to the primacy of the commodity form. By contrast, in the intensive stage the growth of commodity production is limited to the increase in the productivity of labour and the counter-tendency to the generalization of the commodity form poses an effective challenge.

This is the contemporary context of widening State intervention, one of the key areas of which being intervention in space, that is to say, production/ transformation of spatial structures or in other words, the built environment. If urban planning as such was born with the intensive stage of capitalism in the second half of the last century, interest in the built environment heightened with the onset of the crisis in the 1970s which is still to be overcome and which followed the exhaustion of the post-war boom. Such questions as housing (recall that the 'housing question' first emerged as a major concern over hundred years ago during the Great Depression, generating public debate in which Engels himself became involved with his The housing question, 1872) and its commodification –or otherwise–, land prices and the very status of property in land in the urban agglomeration, and in this connection rent theory itself became major concerns of urbanism. More generally and ultimately, attention focussed on the relationship between the transformation of space and the accumulation process itself.

In such a perspective it should be clear that how much market regulation/ State intervention there is in any given society, is not a technicality (of efficiency etc.) or even a question of will of any social group. The example of the Hungarian reform itself referred to earlier illustrates precisely the point that the reform was not the result of some design (of a new organization) but rather an ‘answer’ to the crisis of a centrally planned society or yet, if there was such a ‘design’, it was itself born as a response to the crisis of centralized planning, an historical necessity. By the same token, if the intensive stage of capitalism is characterized by widening State intervention, any endeavour at ‘redressing the balance’ in favour of market regulation can hardly be anything but a vain attempt at going back to the ‘good old times’ of the birth of capitalism. 
 
 
 

6 The nation State

Among the most recent trends in contemporary capitalism, apart from the increasing role of State intervention, whereby so far we implicitly meant intervention of the nation-State, another far-reaching transformation currently at work concerns precisely the role of the nation-State within 'world capitalism'. Although accumulation of capital was nowhere such a relatively autonomous process as in the early stage of capitalism in England, for the introduction of capitalist production in newer centres of accumulation such as Germany, France or Japan was very much spurred by pressure from England and later the US, the most fundamental processes of capitalism such as the imposition of the wage relation and the unification of the market have so far been restricted essentially to within the institutional framework of the nation-State. In an answer to the current crisis, that is, of the reproduction and restructuring of capital in relative isolation at national levels in which –notwithstanding the many attempts at supra-national regulation since the turn of the century– it remained to this day, there is a multiplication of those self same attempts. The ‘thesis’of globalization is precisely that conditions of capitalist accumulation can be restored on the basis of greatly increased transnational planning and control which would require of course a correspondingly supra-national framework of institutional infrastructure.

It might be that –contrary to what this writer believes– such transformations come some day to pass and that organization of capitalism will then have to be analysed under new premisses, where an international level will be superimposed on regional or local levels of organization. Such transformations are, at best, now still in the making and no account of them can be produced by anticipation. Meanwhile the national economic space –where free flow of capital and labour is allowed and a specific wage relation prevails– remains the main object of social organization that provides, in turn, a framework for analysis of the urban process or of contemporary capitalism.

Further, and quite apart from the ‘probability’ of its materialization, the very conception of globalization begs of course the question whether the outcome of an eventual success of such moves towards supra-national regional associations would be anything more than bigger nation-States, as was the case, for instance, with the gradual agglutination of US states in North America, German unification or the birth of modern Italy. It is one thing to have bigger nation-States, quite another is to have one unique State, which would have to contain in itself all the tendencies to concentration/ differentiation and all the antagonisms present in the process of generalization of the commodity form, and which in turn, would hardly fail in creating such contradictions or ‘centripetal forces’ as to break the unity and the unicity of the global State. For less than that, the Roman Empire fell apart and the Tower of Babel fell to the ground...
 
 

7 Is capitalism a commodity economy?

The primacy of the commodity form and the process of reification of social relations require that the regulation of capitalist production is achieved in the first instance by the market and in the second instance by State intervention, the specific combination being determined by the conditions of commoditization of production according to the stage of development of the forces and relations of production. Political Economy was able to isolate, and to restrict itself to the analysis of, the commodity sector of the 'economy' at the price of gradually excluding the account of both the State and of spatial organization pari passu with the very development of both.

The ultimate consequences of a reduction of capitalism to a 'commodity economy' as is implied in Marx's assumptions are illustrated by Uno (1964, and also Sekine,1977), who reaches the conclusion that "a purely capitalist society" will never develop for it "can only be approximated by reality" (because of the limits to the commoditization of the economy). That is to say, to identifycapitalism with commodity production is to define it in such a way that actual societies escape of it. It is only a further logical step then to hold that "the bourgeois state is an institution alien to capital" (Sekine,1977, p.154).

A similar misreading by Kurz – this time of both capitalism and socialism, commented earlier – as being simply 'commodity producing systems' took him at a different but no less equivocal conclusion than Uno's own: namely, that capitalism and socialism are in fact the same. Actually, both would also be one also with feudalism, since the artisans of the latter produced commodities to be sold at the market, even if restricted to an amount equivalent to the excess produce of society (this being – feudal! – rent).

The current crisis started after the exhaustion of the post-war boom derives its main features from the overt challenge to reified social relations and the primacy of the commodity form. The limits to the commoditization of production come into sharper relief under the highlight of the necessarily increasing role of collective production and regulation in social production. This should not be obscured by attempts made at preserving the (capitalist) relations of production, asserting and reasserting the commodity form and market regulation, nor by the disguising of the State behind 'general interest', or yet by the hiding of the flagrant violation of reified social relations by State intervention under the cloths of 'rationality'. Incidentally, such attempts explain the (liberal) planning rhetoric that accompanies State intervention which ostensibly submits itself to the principle of market regulation while –in order to preserve it– it is forced to circumscribe it to an ever increasing extent.

The policies pursued in the late 1970s and the 1980s by national governments of the imperialist countries amount precisely to an (increasingly desperate) attempt at the "re-commodification" of their economies. (The capitalist state has to try this, since to ensure the conditions of commodity production is its very raison d'être, even while it wholly misses the point that the negation of the negation of the commodity form can not restore the latter and indeed, that privatization is not the same as commoditization, as stated earlier.) Such policies have been epitomized as 'Reaganism' and 'Thatcherism', and dominated the political scene, economic debate and policy for over a decade but failed in the end to haul capitalism into a new era or new lease of life, as is now generally agreed about everywhere except the press releases of the yearly meetings of the G-7 (now plus Russia).

An illustration of both the extent of the current crisis and of the reactions it brings about is the state of the financial system, which attracts open concern of such bodies as the General Accounting Office of the American Congress. A recent study by the latter gives vent to never before uttered worries over the financial institutions of the US, as reported by the Financial Times: 

The implication or the ultimate consequence of the shrinking of the commodity form is not a limitation to the expansion of the productivity of labour, but rather, the demise of the primacy of the commodity form in production and the supersession of reification of social relations as the ruling principle of social organization. Meanwhile, the antagonism between the commodity form and State intervention remains the moving force behind intensive accumulation, or in other words, the urban process. Whether social democracy may be seen as the political form which corresponds to wider State intervention in the late capitalism of intensive accumulation remains to be seen, but it is certainly a more relevant and therefore interesting 'question' than those related to 'globalization' which is little more than a euphemism to call attention away from the current crisis or the relevant issues related to it.

In the very least, the current crisis signals the demise of the US hegemony and its impending transmission to another nation-State – candidates may still apply. In this connection it begs recalling that the last transmission of capitalist hegemony (from Britain to the US) took half a century and two (or both) World Wars.
 
 
 

8 By way of conclusion

So far as we remain in the realm of liberalism, wether old or new, we never break with circular reasoning, of which we have above a typical example.

Classical political economy new better: interest rate going above the profit rate means that there is a crisis, in which production slows down in need to be re-organized. There is no 'way out' of a crisis nor telling what its outcome would be. Conflicts will be fought out and the victors will be known only afterwards. Crises are the very means of social transformation or of history writing: the birth-place of the new. If we are in the middle of one such crisis, the crisis of contemporary capitalism in its intensive stage, that only makes our time more exciting both to live in or to interpret.
 
 

Notes

1   GATT:  General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, to be replaced later (1994) by World Trade Organization.

2   Gazeta Mercantil, 93.12.16:1 "Diminui o protecionismo"

3   “Un accord ne favoriserait pas une reprise de la croissance mondial”, signed Xavier Harel. In the same issue of Le Monde, another article under a rather more radical front page head--line stated bluntly: “Le GATT doit mourir”.

4   “Un accord ne favoriserait pas une reprise de la croissance mondial”, signed Xavier Harel. In the same issue of Le Monde, another article under a rather more radical front page head--line stated bluntly: “Le GATT doit mourir”.

5   After a 5-year extermination war nine out of ten of Paraguay’s male population were killed as well as half of its women.

6    Because generalization of the commodity form inc-lu-des the wage re-lation, it is a broa-der cha-racteristi-c of capita-lism than the latter. It also includes of course the reification of social relations, and not only those of production.
7   This 'non-commodity production' includes, but is not res-tricted to, what Marx called 'ge-ne-ral conditions of pro-duction', where "produc-tion" is restricted to the pro-duc-tion of com-mo-di-ties. Marx restricted him-self mainly to the analysis of the pro-duc-tion of com-mo-dities (for the ulti-mate con-se-quences of this, see Uno,1964; Sekine, 1967; for a dis-cus-sion, Deák, 1985) on the grounds that the pro-duction of use va-lues does not pro-duce surplus value. For the same reason he went as far as to call labour expended in the production of the 'general con-ditions of pro-duc-tion' unpro-ductive labour (Grundrisse:531).

8  Many probably would not take this point as uncontrover-sial. Evidence in contem-po-rary capi-talism is not wanting, though: much of contempo-ra-ry economic policy is precisely about figh-ting this counter-ten-den-cy (see fur-ther below).

9  This example comes from a socialist country, but the means of regulation in socialism are very much the same as in capitalism, the (otherwise fundamental) difference being only that the pri-macy in the dialectic of the commodity form, viz, of the produc-tion of use-values as commodities over the production of use-va-lues as such, is inverted. I have no notice of any similarly dra-matic example in capitalism. In São Paulo in Brazil, there was a signifi-cant increase in planning activity and State inter-vention in the early seventies and in-deed, the-re was a fall in relative prices for central and pericentral areas within the me-tropoli-tan area. However, such a movement was not nearly as in-ten-se as in the case of Buda-pest and its impact was further dam-pened by an overall tendency of rising payments for locations as a result of rapid growth (at 7% p.a.) and the ensuing differen-ti-ation of space.

10   For an interpretation of Rea-ganism/ Thatche-rism, see further below.

11   The concepts of extensive/intensive sta-ges as used here re-semble only remotely those defi-ned in Aglietta (1976) with which they are wide-ly associated. They were dis-cus-sed at some length in Deák (1985) and again in my paper presented at BISS 10, Mexico City (Deák, 1988).

12   Such a short list of writers as David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Robin Murray, Alain Lipietz and A J Scott suffices to illustrate this point --and also how broad a spectrum is covered by the respective approaches.

13   There is a misleading idea in Marx's legacy regarding this point, namely, the notion that England is the 'model country' in the development of capitalism in the sense that as capi-ta-lism spread worldwide, other countries would follow the English pat-tern. Although this view has since been successfully challenged as regards 'peripheral' as opposed to those at the 'core' of worldwide accumulation, the same is by and large adhered to as re-gards the countries today at the core. In contradistinction to this view, a periodization of capi-ta-lism according to early and mature stages as outlined earlier, accompanied respectively by pre-do-minantly ex-ten-si-ve, and predominantly intensive accumulation, presents England as uni-que ra-ther than a model, a country to which the early stage was restricted and whose de-velop-ment would be followed nowhere else. When capitalism spread over the world through a number of centres of accumulation, it was already in its mature stage. France, Germany and Japan followed specific development paths, distinct notably from the one opened by England, in that when capitalism developed there, it was already in its inten-sive stage. In this way the questions of social democracy, notably, became proeminent in these countries from the outset of capitalist development as they still are today.

14  A good account of them (that is, of the cases of the US and the UK) are Tomasko-vic-Devey & Miller (1982) and Gough (1982), respec-tively. None-theless, both accounts follow the very widely held view according to which both the US and the UK governments were actu-ally do-ing what they we-re saying they were doing --namely, 'reducing the government'-- mainly be-cause of their policies of reduction of social wages and of 'pri-vatization'.

15   The essence of which being, as in Edwards' (1985, p.208) words, "that old public and private assets ... are being devalorized at collective expense ... to the point at which they can be bought so cheaply that private investors can run them".

16  “Introduction” to Marx (1950) The class struggles in France 1848-50 Progress, Moscow, 1979, p.8.

17  In Gazeta Mercantil, 28.06.94:1.
 
 
 
 
 
 

REFERENCES