Four crises of modern capitalism
In the article, four crises of the contemporary World Capitalist System, William K. Tabb examines the four areas of crisis in modern capitalism: Financialization and financial meltdown, U.S. led Imperialism is losing its predominant influence, the rise of new centers of power, and resources and sustainability.
The first problem is the financial turbulence that has gripped the economy of the United States and has had widespread effects. It is a crisis that further discredits mainstream Anglo-American economics.
Some experts, including the authors, think that financialization has not only brought global crisis with the failure of financial markets but has also put the United States in a position like that of a poor nation in debt to foreign creditors.
A second crisis is that of U.S.-led imperialism, which has been discredited both in terms of its regime-change-wars-of-choice and the increasingly effective resistance to the international financial and trade regime we know as the Washington Consensus.
Neoliberalism may be on defense because of the harm it has done, and continues to do around the world through the mediation of “Washington’s arrogant militarism” and through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
A third point of crisis is the rise of new centers of power in what had been the peripheries of the capitalist system and the tensions this has unleashed, providing room to maneuver for countries wishing to break with the United States.
Emerging markets comprised over 50 percent of global output for the first in 2006. A 2006 study by PriceWatcherhouseCoopers projected that the “E-7” (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, and Turkey) will be about 25 percent larger than the current G-7, will be the driving global economic growth.
A fourth area of crisis has to do with resource usage, the uneven distribution of the necessities of life, and a growth paradigm that is no longer sustainable.
The availability and distribution of resources such as oil, food, and water may be the greatest crisis of all, yet “the sustainability of human life is simply not consistent with inherently wasteful capitalist growth.”
