Studying comparative capitalisms by going left and by going deeper

Abstract

The article charts the continuing attempt to breathe fresh life into the original Hall and Soskice distinction between liberal market economies (LMEs) and coordinated market economies (CMEs). It surveys the critique of that original formulation from within the dominant ‘varieties of capitalism’ paradigm, and the recent attempt by Wolfgang Streeck to replace the LME-CME focus with a new institutionalist understanding of capitalism and its varieties. That move ‘to bring capitalism back in’ is welcome but inadequate, acting only as a beachhead out of which we now need to break, armed with a revitalised sense of the importance of Marxism as a theoretical framework with which to understand capitalist dynamics, capitalist institutional variations and capitalist contradictions.