Introduction: The New International Division of Labour and the Critique of Political Economy Today

Abstract

In a recent anthology of his essays on Global Capitalism (2015) Hugo Radice recounts how in the 1960s and early 1970s progressive, broadly Marxist, scholarship fell short of providing a satisfactory means of understanding what was by then a rapidly changing world. The debates back then, he summarises, ‘had little to say directly about the transformations of production and work within firms, or about the political relations between organised economic interests and the state, while international economic relations between states were understood firmly in nineteenth century terms of autonomous and mutually antagonistic powers, great or small’ (Radice 2015: 9). Yet profound and lightning-paced transformations in worldwide production and trade were indeed palpable to any observer back then, and by the mid-1970s Marxist scholars in the UK and beyond were beginning to engage in highly productive—and still influential—debates on the labour process, state theory, and alternative political strategies in the context of deep world recession and heightened social and political tensions across much of the West. Radice recalls, in particular, his participation in a 1974 workshop in Starnberg, Germany, ‘at which Otto Kreye and his colleagues presented the first results of their project on the new international division of labour’. This work, he confirms, was to become ‘very influential for progressive scholarship on global capitalism’.