Developed Capitalist Countries Research Articles

The Health Care Crisis in the United States

Michael Moore's film, Sicko , dramatically illustrated how problems in access to health care in the United States have escalated to the point of a crisis for all but the richest Americans. The problems include the fact that many citizens are uninsured, health care costs are increasing faster than inflation and wages, and more of those costs are being passed on from employers to employees. Many indices of health care effectiveness show that the United States fares very poorly in comparison to other developed capitalist countries. Almost all the other developed capitalist countries have universal health care. All their citizens are insured and their per capita costs are much lower. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Worldwide Class Struggle

A trademark of our times is the dominance of neoliberalism in the major economic, political, and social forums of the developed capitalist countries and in the international agencies they influence-including the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and the technical agencies of the United Nations such as the World Health Organization, Food and Agricultural Organization, and UNICEF. Starting in the United States during the Carter administration, neoliberalism expanded its influence through the Reagan administration and, in the United Kingdom, the Thatcher administration, to become an international ideology. Neoliberalism holds to a theory (though not necessarily a practice) that posits the followingThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Neoliberalism: Myths and Reality

Agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have enhanced transnational capitalist power and profits at the cost of growing economic instability and deteriorating working and living conditions. Despite this reality, neoliberal claims that liberalization, deregulation, and privatization produce unrivaled benefits have been repeated so often that many working people accept them as unchallengeable truths. Thus, business and political leaders in the United States and other developed capitalist countries routinely defend their efforts to expand the WTO and secure new agreements like the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) as necessary to ensure a brighter future for the world's people, especially those living in povertyThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Explaining different FDI inflows in Eastern European countries with reference to economic history

The aim of the paper is to provide an alternative explanation of current flows of FDI to the various Eastern European Countries. The aim is to enrich the current literature on economics of transition with a different perspective. Thus, the author argues that the current situation is a reflection of the past. The countries of Central Eastern Europe which nowadays have attracted vast amounts of FDI from western countries had historically close economic ties with the developed capitalist economies. On the other hand, the geographical region of Eastern Europe/Black Sea which did not have strong economic links with the developed capitalist countries in the past failed to establish them in the current era as well. Interestingly the isolated regions of Eastern Europe had extensive ties with the Greek and Turkish capital in the past and these ties have been once again reestablished.

Marx's Vision of Sustainable Human Development

In developed capitalist countries, debates over economics of socialism have mostly concentrated on questions of information, incentives, and efficiency in resource allocation. This focus on calculation reflects mainly academic context of these discussions. By contrast, for anti-capitalist movements and post-revolutionary regimes on capitalist periphery, socialism as a form of human development has been a prime concern. A notable example is Ernesto Che Guevara's work on Man and Socialism in Cuba, which rebutted argument that the period of building socialism...is characterized by extinction of individual for sake of state. For Che, socialist revolution is a process in which large numbers of people are developing themselves, and the material possibilities of integral development of each and every one of its members make task ever more fruitful.This article can also be found at Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at Monthly Review website.

Capitalism, Development, and Democracy

ABSTRACT Capitalism is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for democracy. This relation is historically contingent. It is true that democracy tends to prevail in the most developed capitalist countries. But this is not because capitalist development breeds democracy. The reason is that once democracy is present in wealthy societies, everyone has too much at stake to risk a struggle for dictatorship.

Is globalization undermining the welfare state? The evolution of the welfare state in developed capitalist countries during the 1990s.

The authors analyze the evolution of macro-indicators of social and economic well-being during the 1990s in the majority of developed capitalist countries, grouped according to their dominant political traditions since the end of World War II. Their analysis shows that, despite the economic globalization of commerce and finance, "politics still matters" in explaining the evolution of the welfare states and labor markets in these countries; the impact of the globalization of financial capital in forcing reductions in the financial resources available for welfare state purposes has been exaggerated.

Is there a third way? A response to Giddens's the Third Way.

Since the early 1990s, there has been in the United Kingdom and the United States a new political position referred to as the Third Way that claims to be intermediate between neoliberalism and social democracy, transcending both. This new position represented by the Clinton administration in the United States and the Blair Government in the United Kingdom, assumes that both social democracy and neoliberalism are obsolete and calls instead for a new set of public policies that are defined as the Third Way. This article analyzes the most detailed account of the Third Way in the English-speaking world, written by Professor Giddens. It shows that Giddens stereotypes both the neoliberal and the social democratic positions to an unrecognizable degree, failing to portray the varieties of social democratic policies in existence today in developed capitalist countries. The author shows how the Third Way is merely a recycling of liberal positions in some social policy areas and Christian democratic positions in others. Where the Third Way intends to be innovative--as in the U.K. New Deal program--the programs are pale copies of successful labor market policies carried out by northern European social democratic parties. The author concludes that the Third Way, with its questioning of the universalistic welfare state and its preference for assistential and means-tested programs, signifies a break with the social democratic tradition, transforming it into a hybrid between Christian democracy and neoliberalism.

Jobs for Whom? Employment Policy in the United States and Western Europe

Policies to reduce unemployment have been an integral component of government programs in most developed capitalist countries since the end of World War II. Yet this sounds like an oxymoron of sorts in the United States. While the United States has pursued full employment policy only in fits and starts, the national governments of most Western European countries have elaborated explicit commitments to employment policies designed to decrease joblessness. These policies have encompassed the following range of programs: fiscal and monetary policy to stimulate aggregate demand; direct payments to the unemployed; job placement services; policies to reduce the labor force, including increasing job flexibility, reducing the workweek, and promoting early retirement; policies aimed at industrial mobility, primarily getting industries to locate in areas of high unemployment; and active labor market policy (ALMP), which includes programs to increase labor market mobility, training and retraining, sheltered training workshops and employer subsidies for harder-to-employ populations such as the disabled and older workers, and direct job creation in the public and nonprofit sectors. In this paper, I compare employment policy in the United States and Western Europe since World War II. This history shows that the European policies were successful through the mid-1970s, as unemployment rates of 2-3 percent prevailed, but that since then there has been increased unemployment and a retreat from this commitment. Yet participation by labor in policy formulation and a basic level of policies designed to provide a safety net for workers are still taken for granted.

Globalism and the Left

If imperialism is the latest stage of capitalism, globalism is the latest stage of imperialism – and, yet, nowhere in the whole literature of the Left is there any evidence of a systematic attempt to understand, let alone combat, the havoc being wreaked on Third World countries by capital in its latest avatar. Instead, the Left has either sought refuge from the storms of change in the Orthodox Marxist Church, intoning capitalism is capitalism is capitalism and rubbishing the disbelievers, or, while accepting the epochal shift in capitalism, continued to resort to the particular (Marxist) analysis of a particular (industrial) period to envisage capitalism’s early demise, hopefully at its own hands. The first lot and the more important maintain that the universalisation of capitalism is no new thing – that it was always global (in intent, presumably, if not in deed), only now it is more so. And the opposition to capitalism is still in place. The nation state has not been overrun by global capital, there’s still room for manoeuvre there; the polity still allows of enough democracy for us to take advantage of it in our fight against capital; the working class (in the developed capitalist countries) is still the agent of change and working-class organisation the vehicle of change. To depart from any of these eternal verities and assert that there is an epochal change in capitalism – at least as significant as the transition from mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism – which requires us to rethink our strategies and realign our forces, is to succumb to the disease of ‘the post-modern Left’ and all those others who declare, with Thatcher, that there is no alternative (TINA) to capitalism. Merely to utter the word globalisation, which, according to this ‘school’, is a right-wing shibboleth deriving from neo-liberal ideology, is to sing hosannas to capitalism while laying premature wreaths on a living, breathing socialism. Hence, its followers reject the term Globalism and the Left

The political economy of the welfare state in developed capitalist countries.

The article analyzes the social, economic, and political changes taking place in developed capitalist countries that are affecting their welfare states, in particular the changes in the family, in people's life cycles, in economic and social structures, and, most importantly, in the political contexts. The author shows how these changes take place and how the ways in which various countries respond to them depend mainly on the correlation of forces (of which class forces continue to be of great importance) and their expression in the political space. The dominant theoretical frame (promoted by international agencies and many governments) assumes that all governments, regardless of their political coloration, are forced to follow the same policies because of the need to be competitive in the globalized economy, where international markets (whether financial or commercial) determine what governments can and must do. Questioning this economic determinism, the article recovers the importance of politics, putting politics at the center of the explanation of what is happening in the welfare states of the developed capitalist countries, including the neoliberal aggression against them.

Neoliberalism, "globalization," unemployment, inequalities, and the welfare state.

This analysis of "neoliberalism" and its economic and social consequences is presented in six sections. Section I begins by describing the impact of neoliberal public policies on economic growth and inflation, on business profits and business investments, on productivity, on business credit, on unemployment and social inequalities, on social expenditures, and on poverty and family debt. The author shows that, except in the area of business profits and control of inflation, neoliberal policies have not proved superior to those they replaced. Section II deals with unemployment and social polarization in the developed capitalist countries. The author criticizes some of the theories put forward to explain these social problems, such as the introduction of new technologies and globalization of the economy, and suggests that a primary reason for these problems is the implementation of neoliberal policies. Section III challenges the widely held neoliberal perception that the U.S. economy is highly efficient and the E.U. economies are "sclerotic" due to their "excessive" welfare states and "rigid" labor markets. The author shows that the U.S. economy is not so dynamic, nor the E.U. economies so sclerotic. Some developed countries with greater social protection and more regulated labor markets are shown to be more successful than the United States in producing jobs and lowering unemployment. The reasons for the growing polarization in developed capitalist countries, rooted in political rather than economic causes, are discussed in section IV--especially the enormous power of the financial markets and their influence on international agencies and national governments, and the weakness of the labor movements, both nationally and internationally. Section V questions the major theses of globalization. The author shows that rather than globalization of commerce and investments, we are witnessing a regionalization of economic relations stimulated by political considerations. He also analyzes the globalization of capital finance, criticizing the thesis that capital markets are determining public policies. The economic determinism that underlies the globalization position is questioned, uncovering the importance of political explanations for understanding major social problems such as unemployment. Finally, section VI shows that neoliberal public policies on the deregulation of labor markets are creating enormous instability in the labor force, worsening the living conditions of the majority of the populations.

A Critique of Neo-Malthusian Marxism: Society, Nature, and Population

AbstractRecent decades have seen a rethinking and renewal of Marxism on various levels, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s when New-Left movements in the developed capitalist countries combined with Maoist, Guevarist, and other Third-World liberation struggles to challenge the ossified theory and practice of Soviet-style communism and traditional social democracy. More recently, the rethinking of Marxism has been driven largely by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its official Marxist ideology, and by the movement toward neoliberal ‘free market’ policies on a global scale, which together have brought forth a tidal wave of frankly pro-capitalist as well as ‘postmodern’ left varieties of ‘end of history'-type thinking. The contemporary challenge to Marxism, however, also has a positive side in the form of popular revolts against the neoliberalisation of the global economy – the Chiapas rebellion in Mexico, the December 1995 public sector upheavals in France, and many others, not to mention the heroic struggle of the Cuban people against the threat of recolonisation by US and global capital. Here the challenge is to incorporate the changing forms of working-class movement, and their new prefigurations of post-capitalist society, into the theory and practice of Marxian communism.

The contradictions of neo‐Keynesian local economic strategy

Abstract The last twenty years have seen the rise of local economic initiatives in the developed capitalist countries. Despite the dominance of neo‐liberalism at the national level, most of these local programmes are neo‐Keynesian, seeking to use non‐market coordination pragmatically to address market failures and to use localism to develop active cooperation, between the state, capital and sometimes labour and residents. This article argues that, despite their promise, neo‐Keynesian local strategies suffer from major problems and unintended consequences. These originate in the attempt to privilege the productive, coordinated, socialized and territorially defined aspects of capitalism over private ownership, value discipline and geographical mobility; these two sets of traits in reality are both mutually dependent and inevitably in conflict. The limits of neo‐Keynesian localism are ultimately set by struggle within and between classes, structured in important ways by geographical scale.

‘Caudine Forks’: Can Capitalism Be Leapt Over?

The article shows that, according to Marx, capitalism is a necessary stage leading to communism, and the backward countries have to pass through capitalism, if they cannot get the material conditions to establish communist society from the developed capitalist countries.

Particular features of employment and unemployment in the present stage of transformation of the post‐socialist countries

IT IS NOW FIVE YEARS since the state-socialist system collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the countries there started on their 'long march' towards a developed market economy. In these few years the situation on the labour markets has radically changed in every country. The lasting and significant labour shortage characterising the earlier period1 has been replaced by massive and lasting unemployment. This article will present the particular features characterising the labour markets of the region in comparison with the developed market economies and some modifications of employment policy justified by these features. Employment policy has to be determined by the conditions of the labour market. Therapy is always a function of the diagnosis. In the previous era of labour shortage the activities of employment policy were primarily aimed at increasing labour supply, at the 'planned' allocation of labour and the central regulation of wages. The mechanism of directive planned economy developed full employment with an internationally outstandingly high level of economic activity of the population. In consequence of the lasting and significant labour shortage there was also little or no structural and frictional unemployment. When the state-socialist system collapsed and the first signs of unemployment appeared, a new employment policy concept, radically different from the earlier one, and a new institutional system became necessary. The predictions at that time first expected the appearance of the structural and frictional unemployment characteristic of developed market economies, but also assumed that in recession cyclical unemployment would appear too. Thus it seemed obvious to both the experts in the countries concerned and to Western consultants that the CEE countries had to adopt the employment policy paradigms and institutions of the developed capitalist countries.2 The experience of the past few years has mostly refuted the initial assumptions. Nobody-either in the West or in the East-reckoned with the fact that the first and gravest difficulties of the transformation of the socio-economic system would not be caused by the changes in ownership relations, by privatisation and modernisation of the economy, but preceding these, by a deep economic crisis emerging with dramatic

Reinterpreting the Geography of Accumulation: The Global Shift and Local Restructuring

The authors argue that the nation is not the natural space for the circulation and reproduction of capital, and that this is vitally important in understanding the restructuring of economic activity since the mid-1970s. Rapidly increasing global integration of production, realisation of profit, and the circulation of financial capital have been recognised widely. Yet little consensus has developed about cither the theoretical or empirical impacts of globalisation on changing spatial divisions of labour within developed capitalist countries. The authors outline a model of globalisation in which an increasingly internationalised process of accumulation is expressed in, and reproduced through, the changing social relations of production which remain bounded territorially by nation-states. The model is built up from a synthesis of some apparently disparate theoretical positions on capitalist restructuring crises taken by researchers during the 1980s. These include theories of the internationalisation of capital and those dealing with restructuring within nation-states after the now much-debated transition out of the regime of accumulation which produced the long boom after 1950. Some of these theories have focused too narrowly on the circuit of production to the exclusion of the increasingly complex world trading links and with a severe underestimation of the importance of global financial capital during the 1980s. Methodological implications of the model are investigated and the role of the state in a globally integrated economy is illuminated.

The rise and fall of agricultural policy cycles: from planned economy to green liberalism 1

The article presents a country case study (Norway) of changing agricultural policy in the triangular field of forces formed by state regulation, the markets and the social welfare of the farming population. The article starts with an outline of a three-dimensional model of agricultural policies in developed capitalist countries. The policy is torn between three poles: state regulation, the liberalist market economy, and welfare support for the farmers. Each historical epoch has its own compromise between these three dimensions, called a policy cycle. When the cycle of agricultural policy changes, we may expect a change in the farmers' survival strategies. The findings, however, show that there is more persistence than change, independent of policy cycle, and farmers adapt themselves to policy changes even before the actual changes are made, in anticipation of the future. As a consequence, farmers in Norway lowered their investments and used less fertilizer and pesticides even before the present policy of ‘green liberalism’ was implemented.

Petroleum refining industry of developed capitalist countries in the 1990s

Crude oil is the principal source of energy today and in the immediate future. The increases in the consumption of crude oil (1.7% per year up to 2005) will be offset mainly by additional supplies from the countries of the Near East. Data on the imports of oil by the developed capitalists countries are presented in Table 2. In the United States, according to a projection made by Conoco, by the year 2000 the volume of imports will be twice the volume of domestic production; according to another prediction, the amount of Near East crude will increase from 34% in 1990 to 42% in 2000. Since the mid-1980s, the energy policy of the USA has been based on importing so-called cheap crude. Laws have been passed to mandate not only energy saving, but also cuts in the oil and gas production on U.S. territory. The volume of U.S. oil production will be 20% lower in 2000 than in 1990. Some 90% of the worldwide demand for oil is met by light and medium-density crudes, but such crudes account for only 25% of the oil resources. Projections indicate that the oil supplied to refiners in the future will be heavier andmore » will have higher sulfur contents. The U.S. production of low-sulfur crude will drop off sharply in the next 10-15 years. The drop in oil production of the CIS [former USSR] and the consequent drop in exports from these countries will have a destabilizing effect on the world market. The average price of the {open_quotes}market basket{close_quotes} of OPEC crudes in 1991 was $149/ton (in 1990 $178/ton), in comparison with a 1992 price of $148/ton. This report presents data on refining process capacities and the ratio of secondary capacity to primary distillation capacity.« less

"Anthropology and Imperialism" Revisited

An article by the author in the Economic and Political Weekly in the late 1960s noted that Western anthropologists had neglected the study of as a world system. The author suggests below that this has been remedied, as various social and political movememnts catalyzed a corpus of social science literature and debate. This article examines demographic and economic indicators to highlight the changing character of developed and less developed capitalist and socialist countries and its significance for social scientists. In 1967 I wrote a paper New Proposals for Anthropologists for the Southwestern States Anthropological Association meeting in San Francisco. I couldn't think of a journal in the United States that might be likely to publish it, and it was published in Economic and Political Weekly. Monthly Review republished it in 1968, as and Imperialism, after which it was translated into several languages and reprinted many times. I want first to briefly outline the problems that were bothering me when I wrote that paper and the historical background to it. I would then like to mention some of the kinds of work that have been done in North America since 1968 that are relevant to these problems. Finally, I want to talk about some of the major changes in the world which have an impact on our subject and our thinking. Anthropology and Imperialism was written at the height of the war in Vietnam. My husband, David Aberle, and I, along with a number of other anthropologists, had become deeply disturbed by the evidence of wholesale destruction of territory, villages and people by U.S. forces in Vietnam, especially by the use of anti - personnel weapons such as napalm, and the defoliation of forests and cultivated land. In 1967 David Aberle presented a resolution at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association which condemned those weapons. To our dismay, it was ruled out of order by the then chairperson, Frederica de Laguna, and vehemently opposed by Margaret Mead, who argued that political resolutions were in the professional interests of anthropologists. There was a commotion on the floor. David Aberle, Gerald Berreman and others argued against the chair, but the day was won when Michael Harner rose and stated: Genocide is not in the professional interests of anthropologists. Against the chair's ruling, the resolution was then passed by a large majority. It was one of the first published statements by a professional association against the war in Vietnam. There was of course an enormous outcry against the war by the U.S. public as well as by professionals in later years. The Vietnam war (or as the Vietnamese more properly call it, the U.S. imperialist war) came to an end in 1975, after about two million Vietnamese had been killed and perhaps another two million crippled. By imperialism I mean any social system in which the government and/or private property owners of one or more countries dominate the government and people of one or more other countries or regions politically, militarily, economically or socio - culturally (usually all four of those) to the detriment of most of the subordinated people's welfare. For the last 400 years, most has been capitalist. During this century, capitalist has wreaked the most harm and been responsible for the most deaths through two world wars and almost countless minor wars, as well as through starvation, malnutrition, destruction of traditional agriculture and industries and political repression by dependent, dictatorial governments. However, the Soviet Union and China have also practised forms of since their revolutions. In 1967 I tended to neglect this phenomenon because I am a Marxist and was somewhat biased in my outlook, and partly because I did not have evidence that the U.S.S.R. and China had extracted economic surplus from their dependencies, and so I tended to underestimate the political and cultural repression that they had practised. …