3 results
6 - Financialization in the Contemporary Social Structure of Accumulation
-
- By William K. Tabb, Emeritus, Department of Economics, Queens College, and Departments of Economics, Political Science, and Sociology, Graduate Center of the City University of New York
- Edited by Terrence McDonough, National University of Ireland, Galway, Michael Reich, University of California, Berkeley, David M. Kotz, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
-
- Book:
- Contemporary Capitalism and its Crises
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 11 January 2010, pp 145-167
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
Social structures of accumulation (SSA) have life cycles. They are born in an antagonistic relation to the exhaustion of the previous SSA. Conceptually, they may be seen to start in the negative moment of undoing the already weakened institutional accommodations, norms and expectations that had prevailed before and whose internal contradictions can no longer be contained. The institutional solutions of the new SSA allow for renewed accumulation under stable conditions. This does not mean that SSAs should be defined by rapid economic growth (a perspective endorsed by Kotz and Wolfson in Chapter 3), but rather by stability over a period of decades and by the manner in which the institutions that define it form a coherent overdetermining totality (see Chapter 2).
Reacting to the financial excesses and crises of the 1920s, the SSA that was built in the 1930s and that was consolidated in the postwar period constrained the role of finance in the economy. This SSA decayed in the great stagflation of the 1970. The SSA that replaced it, beginning in the early to mid-1980s, soon generated a much greater and ultimately unsustainable role for finance. I concur with the general agreement that a national Keynesian SSA was consolidated in the postwar period and came to an end in the great stagflation of the 1970s.
A global neoliberal SSA can be dated from Ronald Reagan's 1980 electoral victory (of course, not all SSA dating correspond as cleanly with turning point elections).
Sweated Labor Then and Now
- William K. Tabb
-
- Journal:
- International Labor and Working-Class History / Volume 67 / April 2005
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 July 2005, pp. 164-173
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
From the first usage in nineteenth-century America of the term “sweatshop,” the definition of this emotive term has “reflected social anxiety about global flows and exchange of people, goods, culture, and capital,” Bender and Greenwald write in their useful edited volume, Sweatshops USA. And if the term sweatshop today connotes a race to the bottom in which a market structure of intense competition reflects the absence, or lack of the enforcement of, effective protective legislation across the relevant market, then there is little basically new in the organization of garment production and the unrelenting pressures on its workers. Essential characteristics of sweated labor in the industry result from structural characteristics which have remained and are only ameliorated by strong unions, public concern for the conditions of labor, and enforced social regulation. While it has often seemed to be an outlier in its exploitative norms, the idea that garment work is totally unique in the flexibility it demands, the excesses and abuses inherent in the contracting system with its pressures to respond to unpredictable and rapidly changing fashion, its production of a labor-intensive product not easily mechanized, and its ability to seek out and control a vulnerable labor force is a misjudgment. It is rather an industry which represents an extreme but not a different form of the way labor markets operate. It is not a vanishing past but a worrisome globalized future of just-in-time production and multisourced internationalized commodity chain organization of production which should be worrying.
6 - Industrial Development and Technological Change
- Richard H. Day, University of Southern California
-
- Book:
- The Divergent Dynamics of Economic Growth
- Published online:
- 08 August 2009
- Print publication:
- 13 November 2003, pp 97-114
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
This study summarizes four models that track production, investment, technological change, and resource utilization in the U.S. coal industry and the steel industries of the United States and Japan. The post–World War II history of these industries is one of rapid technological change accompanied by large investments and capacity accumulation. Consequently, we focus on the technological structure of each industry and on the economic rules determining production and investment plans. Although the behavioral and technological structures of the three industries vary in many significant details, they share several common features that make possible the application of logically similar modeling techniques. Our goal has been to derive a positive understanding of the development process in particular industries based on microeconomic realities, in a manner that might guide government agencies whose concern is not so much with the internal performance of the industries in question as with the external macroeconomic effects of their production, investment, and resource utilization behavior.
After a brief description of the industries, we present a nontechnical description of our work. Important properties of the models are summarized, and their implications for explaining chronic excess capacity are outlined. We then review our estimation and testing methods, describe a few preliminary empirical results, and comment on their policy implications.
In all three cases under consideration, rapid changes in technology have occurred. In coal mining three basic types of production are practiced: underground, strip, and auger mining.