What was globalization? Sweatshops, the cancellation of Third World debt, unequal exchange in world trade, labor organizing at the global level: these were some of the concerns that mobilized the protesters who came together in Seattle against the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999. As a new era of trade agreements reconstituted networks of production and exchange, the relationships between geographically distant people and places were, too, rearticulated. The anti-globalization movement brought together many skeins, from Ralph Nader’s various anti-trade coalitions to campaigns against the World Bank, from student organizers to Mexican farmers and Canadian wheat growers. While the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect in 1994, generated much controversy — and push back — it was the “Battle of Seattle” that squarely put the international economic order on the political agenda: the World Bank and the IMF sought to realign themselves with human rights campaigns, and transnational corporations like Nike were forced to respond to critiques of labor exploitation across the Global South.

If 1999 seemed to mark the emergence of a new social movement, the concerns of the anti-globalization movement nonetheless came as a response to seismic shifts that began decades earlier.1 Following the oil shocks of 1973 and the dismantling of Bretton Woods, globalization became the defining feature of the capitalist world economy. The signing of NAFTA and the establishment of the WTO may have allowed an incipient regime of free trade to come to fruition, but all the hallmarks of globalization — transformations in the global division of labor, the integration of cross-border networks of production, the growth of finance — were fashioned in the seventies. And yet, even as it refers to processes that began in the seventies, “globalization” as a term remained relatively obscure until the nineties, when it became thekeyword for talking about the economic interdependence. Globalization may not have named an entirely new world order, but it did name a new way of seeing — and describing — the world, one that, in the nineties, brought the transformations of the seventies together under a common sign.

By many accounts, the seventies marked a definitive moment of transition. The decade has been named “pivotal,” not only for its economic transformations, but for its social, political, and cultural realignments.2 For Robert Brenner, 1973 in particular marked a turning point in the history of the world economy, one in which capitalism encountered a crisis of accumulation that it could not — and still cannot — overcome. Brenner’s study, first published in 1998 in the New Left Review as a book-length essay, “Uneven Development and the Long Downturn: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Boom to Stagnation, 1950-1998,” stands as one of the earliest attempts to outline the economics of globalization. As Brenner turned to the seventies to think about globalized production, he did so, significantly, from the standpoint of the nineties, from his position within a broader US print and public culture grappling with the US’s economic ties to the rest of the world and a left whose interest in Marxism was shifting from the cultural to the economic.

Brenner’s conceptualization of the long downturn may have outlived globalization as both an account of totality and an organizing principle of critique, but as an analytic the long downturn remains discursively and conceptually tethered to nineties-era globalization. Foregrounding increasingly interdependent networks of production and exchange, Brenner’s analysis represents a turn to global supply chains as the basis for theorizing exploitation and immiseration. And yet, as much as globalization newly politicized the relationship between production and consumption, it was, more often than not, a synonym for Americanization or commodification. Globalization was, after all, a heuristic that developed in the US. Like Brenner’s account of the long downturn, it emerged after the suppression of nearly all left-wing liberation movements, during a time when interdependence overshadowed solidarity. In restoring this political and discursive context, we can not only see how the strengths and limitations of the long downturn align with the uses and abuses of globalization, but also find in these entwined histories a usable past. Though the anti-globalization movement’s most enduring legacy is ethical consumption, we might see in the debates around nineties-era globalization an attempt to rearticulate the lexicon of the economic — and, in doing so, an attempt to reckon with the terms around which the left might be organized.

Globalization, Keyword of the Late 20th Century

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Zapatista rebellion, from Francis Fukuyama’s celebrations of the “end of history” to Naomi Klein’s investigation into the unbranded origins of brand name consumer goods, globalization was defined as much by a series of events as it was by a set of commentators. Signifying the integration of markets in its narrowest sense and the expansion of social and economic processes to the planetary scale in its broadest sense, the economic processes indexed by globalization as a process may have begun in the seventies, but it was in the nineties that globalization as a keyword “skyrocketed to terminological stardom.”3 By 2000, the Library of Congress recorded 284 publications with the term or one of its derivatives in the title, none of which were published before 1987.4 Theodor Levitt is sometimes credited with coining the term — though he did not do so, he did help popularize it, bringing it into the mainstream in a 1983 Harvard Business Review article. If the term itself has no necessary theory attached to it — denoting nothing more nor less than the process of becoming worldwide—the subject of Levitt’s article is suggestive: Levitt writes about the emergence of standardized, low-priced consumer products, discussing changes that allowed companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s to sell the same products worldwide. Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” might stand as the moment in which nineties-era globalization began intellectually. Published in 1989 in The National Interest, Fukuyama’s triumphant celebration of post-Cold War Western liberal democratic capitalism concluded that over time, nations that hadn’t yet become liberal capitalist democracies would inevitably do so.

In both popular journalism and academic scholarship, globalization stirred much controversy and debate. Was globalization leading to the demise of the nation-state? Would it lead to greater cultural homogeneity or cultural heterogeneity? Arjun Appadurai, whose Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization(1996) stands as a major text of globalization theory, proposed difference and disjuncture as the defining features of globalization. At the same time, mainstream economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman and political commentators like Thomas Friedman tried to come to grips with the new regime of international trade. Major anthologies like Culture, Globalization, and the World-System edited by Anthony King (1991), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital edited by Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (1997), and Cultures of Globalization edited by Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (1998) tried to grapple with globalization from the vantage of culture. Brenner might not be among the thinkers we most readily associate with globalization, but the publication of “Uneven Development and the Long Downturn” was one of the most ambitious attempts to outline the economics of globalization at a time when globalization as a system, a process, a condition, and an age captured national attention.

Globalization may not have named wholly new processes — or, as Brenner’s survey suggests, any entirely new order — but it did mark a new way of looking at and describing the world. After the formal end of the Cold War, as the geographical divides between the First, Second, and Third Worlds began to lose traction, globalization sought to produce a new map of the world. As the Thomas Friedmans of the world underwrote globalization as the dominant descriptor of our increasing and irreversible interconnectedness, the anti-globalization movement took the dividing line between the Global North and Global South — between consumption and production — as its organizing principle. Though much of what once went under the name of globalization now travels under different names, it was the lexicon of globalization that, in the nineties, sought to come to terms with the transformations of the seventies.5 Free trade zones and offshoring, global supply chains and the international division of labor, the transfer of commodities and resources: these were the great themes of globalization and its antinomies.

Though neoliberalism is often considered a more precise term for what once went under the name of globalization, the two terms have different emphases and different orientations.6 First, globalization is fundamentally about relationality. If the reference of neoliberalism is the individual — or, in Melinda Cooper’s analysis, the family — globalization involves the relativization of individual and national reference points to global networks of relationship. Organizing attention around interconnections, it emphasizes the systematic interrelationship of individual ties—no relationship is either isolated or entirely bound. In this sense, we might trace its intellectual genealogy through theories of dependency and of world-systems, which sought to theorize increasing interdependence between national systems. As a point of view, globalization sees linkages at multiple scales, from the individual and the nation to the international system and the planetary. Likewise organizing its analysis around networks of production and exchange, Brenner’s essay is part of this way of seeing. At its best, globalization theory offered a way to avoid false dichotomies between the global and the local, between global capitalism and cultural and economic nationalism.

Second, globalization is intellectually and discursively organized around the relationship between the Global North and the Global South. This is not to occlude the deep history of the Global South as a laboratory for neoliberalism, but to suggest that the map of the world drawn by globalization — and contested by the anti-globalization movement — is one that is oriented around, and seeks to reckon with, the division between Global North and South as its key organizing principle. It is this division that organizes globalization’s account of totality and lexicon of critique, and it is this division that produces globalization’s cast of characters. In part, this is because globalization is closely connected with modernization theory, which was both its predecessor and contemporary. Roland Roberston, one of the earliest theorists of globalization, began his academic career interested in modernization and stumbled into the term globalization as a way to explain “the modernization of the whole world.”7 We might understand critiques of globalization, then, as sharing much in common with critiques of modernization — both appear to justify the spread of Western culture and society. As Paul James and Manfred B. Steger note in their genealogy of the concept of globalization, it is telling that the use of “modernization” began its decline just as the term “globalization” began to take hold.8 Globalization theory sought to define — and critique —the relationship between Global North and Global South. In this sense, we might see g lobalization as a theory that is particularly tethered to the Global South — not only because many of its most prominent cultural theorists were also scholars of the postcolonial, but also because globalization’s close relationship with modernization and focus on interdependence uniquely positioned it as a theory that attempted to come to grips with the rise of what Mike Davis named a “planet of slums.”9

On the left, globalization was a way of seeing and describing how the wealth of the few depends on the misery of the many. For some, the energies that culminated in the anti-globalization movement seemed to mark a distinct break from the campus politics of the culture wars, or, further back, the politics of 1968 — the shift, in this account, being from identity politics to class politics, and the whole set of dichotomies through which that division is perpetually recoded.10 The Battle of Seattle in particular seemed to mark the resurgence of a left long understood to have been defeated, either by state repression or internal conflict. And yet, the concerns animating the anti-globalization movement did not just appear suddenly, without any precedent; as Michael Denning suggests, we might see the Battle of Seattle in line with the tradition of IMF riots protesting austerity measures.11 In doing so, we can see how the movement’s critique of consumption is part of a long history of anti-capitalist critique that takes place beyond the factory gate. Seen within this tradition, the Battle of Seattle represents not the reappearance of a previously disappearing economic critique, but a rearticulation of the very terms of the economic. Particularly in the wake of Francis Fukuyama’s celebrations of the “end of history” — the inevitable spread of “liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic” — critiques of consumption came to stand in for broader critiques of capitalism.12 In politicizing consumption, the anti-globalization movement provided us with a vocabulary for thinking about the economic beyond the point of production.

It is from this position that Brenner sets out to document and theorize the world economy after World War II, from a print and public culture that is widely concerned with the US’s economic ties to the rest of the world as a new round of agreements and institutions sought to secure the conditions of free trade. By looking back to the seventies from the standpoint of the nineties, Brenner’s account of the long downturn is part of a shared vocabulary for talking about historical change. This is the vocabulary of globalization: the vocabulary of Coca-Colonization, of offshoring, of cheap factory labor, of maquilas and free trade zones, of networks of production and capital flows. On the one hand, these keywords point to real historical processes. And yet, bringing these processes together under a common sign, to turn to offshoring and production networks to stage a critique of capitalism, represents an attempt to think globally about issues of exploitation and immiseration. This was the decade’s response to the seventies.

The Long Downturn: Paratext and Context

Amidst an ascendent regime of globalization, what stood out to the editors who first published Brenner’s essay in a special issue of the New Left Review was, first, Brenner’s theorization of intra-capitalist competition, and second, his explication of the patterns of uneven development that began in fifties. Though we often take the long downturn to be portable, for Brenner there is no way to understand the seventies without the fifties — the long downturn may be the manifestation of the crisis, but the origins of the crisis, its causes, date back to the postwar order. The problems Brenner identifies arise, in the first instance, from globalization; in this sense, the seventies are less a shift to globalization than a re-emphasis of globalization as the defining feature of the American economy.

To make this argument, Brenner makes the case that the postwar era is best understood as two distinct eras: a period of prosperity from the late 1940s to 1973, characterized by rapid growth, and the long downturn, a period of increasing economic turbulence from 1973 onwards, characterized by slowed growth, investment, productivity, and employment. While historians and social scientists have developed theories of stagnation that accord with Brenner’s periodization, where Brenner’s model departs is in the fundamental cause of what he calls the long downturn: the falling rate of profit throughout advanced capitalist economies, itself the result of a persistent tendency toward overcapacity in the global manufacturing industries. Looking at the postwar era, Brenner identifies a pattern: one after another, a new economic power has been able to make use of advanced technology in combination with low wages to manufacture goods that were already being produced on the world market, but to do so at a lower price. The result has been a profound intensification of competition, growing overcapacity, and a downward squeeze on profits in manufacturing.

Basing his study on the US, Germany, and Japan, Brenner identifies 1973 as the year when the global manufacturing industry reaches its saturation point and plunges the global economy into extended decline. As German and Japanese manufacturing caught up with the US, American firms found that their investments in fixed capital prevented them from abandoning increasingly unprofitable lines or scaling back production. Existing corporations not only refused to cede ground to their newer rivals, but also did their best to counterattack, cutting back on equipment and workers and leading to slower growth of investment and employment. With the help of governments around the world, corporations released a relentless assault on the working class; the increasing austerity since the 1970s has been an attempt to recover profitability. In the US, corporations adopted further distinct strategies. First, they stepped up production overseas; in what is often called “offshoring,” they combined advanced capitalist techniques with lower wage labor. Second, they turned to financial services.

This argument about the long downturn was first published as “Uneven Development and the Long Downturn” in a special issue of New Left Review 229, May-June 1998. Verso published it as a book under the title The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn 1945-2005 in 2006, with a new preface and afterword. Following the Great Recession of 2008, Brenner revised his argument again, publishing yet another sequel, a paper titled “What’s Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America.” Though the 2006 reissue of The Economics of Global Turbulence contains just one direct mention of “globalization” (listed alongside cost reduction and neoliberalism as a response to the crisis of the 1970s), Brenner’s argument is, fundamentally, an argument about what came to be known as globalization. In all these iterations, the starting point of the long downturn remains the same — 1973. What changes is the end date — from 1998 to 2005 to 2008, the long downturn continues to extend into the present.

The editorial preface to the special issue of the New Left Reviewin which Brenner’s essay first appeared helps illustrate how the long downturn is both discursively and conceptually tethered to nineties-era debates about globalization. Making the case for the significance — and timeliness — of Brenner’s subject, the editors begin by invoking the formal end of the Cold War: “Since the end of the 1960s, the course of the global economy has constituted the hidden force field of all politics. With the victory of the West in the Cold War, removing the Soviet bloc from the scene, the distance between the world market and international affairs has closed dramatically.”13 As the editorial goes on to reference Alan Greenspan’s speculating whether the US economy has “moved beyond history,” its authors position Brenner’s text in relation to a set of then-urgent questions:

In the United States, has the spread of new technologies outdated all traditional cycles, as New Age economists contend; or is Wall Street blowing into just another balloon at bursting-point? In East Asia, is the IMF imposing necessary disciplines on corrupt and jerry-built dirigiste systems, or is it recklessly driving even sound economies into the abyss—as such unlikely critics as Jeffrey Sachs now charge? Finally, and most pregnantly, what is likely to be the outcome of the divergence between Asian and American sectors of the world economy as they interact at the threshold of the new century?14

Francis Fukuyama, Alan Greenspan, Jeffrey Sachs; the end of the Cold War, the East Asian financial crisis, the New Economy: together, this set of referents is one that orients us toward globalization as a discursive field and context. In actively drawing connections between Brenner’s essay, a set of political commentators, and a series of historical events, the Review editors situate Brenner as part of this conjuncture. In his preface to the 2006 reissue of The Economics of Global Turbulence published by Verso, Brenner likewise locates his analysis within these histories. Taken in their context, Brenner’s essay offers a corrective, insisting that “beneath the glossy surface of the ‘Fabulous Decade,’ the foundations on which the global system was developing remained rickety.”15

In addition to understanding Brenner’s essay in relation to globalization’s events and commentators, the opening editorial of the Review also understands it as part of an approach to history that moves beyond the scale of the nation. The opening statement of the editorial explains its decision to publish Brenner’s work in its entirety by stating, “NLR has published special numbers before, consisting of a single text on major political questions of the day — European integration or Britain’s last imperial war. Robert Brenner’s survey is on another scale.”16 Pointing to the rarity of special issues here, the Reviewsuggests that the kind of topic that might call for a special issue is one that is something along the lines of the dissolution of the British empire or the integration of Europe — both of which constitute not only “major political questions of the day,” but are also, significantly, on a scale that exceeds that of the nation-state. The suggestion that Brenner’s analysis is “on another scale” — presumably one ever larger than that of the European Union or the British Empire — offers an understanding of the kind of historical narrative that Brenner’s long downturn claims to make. Though Brenner’s methodology is certainly not a new historical framework — world-systems theory rose to prominence in the 1970s, with the publication of the first of Immanuel Wallerstein’s multi-volume work — we might, in light of these opening remarks, understand it as one that emerged under the same conditions that produced the “transnational turn.” In the same way that the transnational turn often reinforced the very provincialism it attempted to displace, and globalization all too often became a code word for Americanization, Brenner’s framework is inescapably and perhaps unavoidably, like globalization, US-centric. The 1973 Recession was, after all, primarily (though not exclusively) a crisis in the US and UK.

Even as the Review’s editors suggest that Brenner’s study is on another scale than that of the disintegration of the British empire or the consolidation of Europe, by naming these special issues as precedents, they nonetheless position the long downturn in relation to these historical forebearers. These points of reference do nothing to temper the Anglo-American framework of Brenner’s analysis. The long downturn is comparable to the disintegration of the British empire and the consolidation of Europe because it is about the decline of US empire, what Giovanni Arrighi, with the contemporaneous publication of The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Time (1994), would identify as the terminal crisis of US hegemony. Significantly, Arrighi and Brenner disagree about the role of labor militancy in bringing about the long downturn: Brenner explicitly rejects the wage-squeeze thesis, while Arrighi’s account of 1973 as a turning point emphasizes the wave of labor actions between 1968-73 and the subsequent pay explosion that followed. For Arrighi, the crisis is specifically a crisis in US hegemony, one that follows longer historical patterns of expansion and decline he locates in previous Genoese, Dutch, and British regimes of accumulation: like the 1975 Fall of Saigon, the 1973 oil shocks and dismantling of Bretton Woods point to the unraveling of the American century. Though Brenner does not, as Arrighi does, identify longer historical precedents to the prolonged period of decline that begins in the 1970s, the editors’ invocation of previous events that deserved special issues sets up a comparison between American and British empires.17

In pointing to what is particularly and distinctly unique about Brenner’s argument, the Review singles out two key theoretical interventions. Looking closely at these helps draw attention to how Brenner’s analysis is tethered to globalization conceptually, and how the Review both understood and emphasized that connection. First, the editors point to Brenner’s conclusion that “it is not the vertical relationship between capital and labour that in the last resort decides the fate of modern economies, but the horizontal relationship between capital and capital. It is the logic of competition, not class struggle, that rules the deeper rhythms of growth or recession.”18 Here it is, I think, especially helpful to acknowledge that the long downturn emerged in the wake of the historical suppression of nearly all left-wing liberation movements both in the United States and globally, the breakdown of organized labor, and the dissolution of actually existing alternatives to capitalist development. To remember the long downturn’s connection to nineties-era globalization is also to recognize its blind spots, and to see its emphasis on multinational firms as shaped by its own historical moment.

The Review puts forth Brenner’s “second theme” as the “specific pattern of uneven development between specific blocs of capital,” a pattern that precedes the 1973 crisis.19 For Brenner, the seeds of the 1970s are to be found in the 1950s. From 1945, the US commanded a position of dominance, resulting from an unprecedented combination of economic and military power. As the US’s continued dominance came at the expense of its partners and rivals, it threatened to be too destructive; had it continued, it would have forced the US’s partners to back out of the postwar order. In pursuing its own interests, the US thus had to take into account the economic interests of its partners and rivals, and in the 1950s, it opened the way for export-oriented growth for its leading competitors. Moving forward, the US ruled by hegemony instead of dominance. Along with the European and Japanese turn to exports, the US turned to foreign direct investment, scouring the world for cheap factories to combine with advanced technology. This two-pronged settlement — export-oriented growth for the US’s partners and rivals, foreign direct investment for the US — made for rapid growth, but it also sowed the seeds of the long downturn: the same trends that allowed for rapid economic growth also undermined that growth. The problems in the economy, in the first instance, arise from globalization — export-oriented growth and foreign direct investment that becomes the fundamental feature of the postwar liberal order in the 1950s as a means of supporting continued growth.

Though Brenner identifies contradictions inherent in the postwar order as early as the 1950s, it is not until the 1970s when these contradictions become acute. While, for David Harvey, the 1970s represents a turn to neoliberalism, for Brenner, this is not so much a shift as it is a fundamental reemphasis on globalization as thedefining feature of the American political economy. And yet, for Brenner, 1973 inaugurates a distinct period. It marks the moment when the contradictions of globalization — contradictions that had thus far remained latent — rise to the surface and become manifest. Following the 1973 oil shock and the collapse of Bretton Woods, the 1973 recession marked the decisive moment when an already faltering economy lurched into full-scale restructuring. Rather than a retreat from globalization, this marks a full embrace of globalization; while the Great Depression of the 1930s brought capitalism’s tendencies toward globalization to an abrupt halt, the 1970s accelerated those tendencies. By turning to the 1970s to understand the origins of the present, Brenner’s account of the long downturn represents a way of understanding immiseration and exploitation through the increasing intensification of global production.

Insofar as Brenner makes an epochal claim about the 1970s, we might situate the long downturn within the great globalization debates of the 1990s. For all its multiple meanings, globalization — a geographical term, denotating a process of spatial change over time, the process of becoming world-wide — turned on a common referent: the rising volume of transnational flows and relations in the contemporary international system. To be sure, even at the time, scholars argued globalization was not a new phenomenon, pointing to longer histories of global connection from the empires and conquests of the ancient world to the travel and trade of medieval and early modern times. Only beginning with European colonial expansion in the sixteenth century did global contacts involve Western European and North American dominance. Yet globalization has come most prevalently to refer to a specific set of transformations that occurred late in the twentieth century following World War II. Describing economic, social, and political interdependence across cultures, societies, nations, and regions in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century, globalization claimed these interdependencies were precipitated by an unprecedented expansion of capitalism on the world scale.20 Like arguments that sought to claim globalization as a periodizing concept, for Brenner the intensification of networks of production and exchange produced an epochal transformation. In this way, too, we might see how the long downturn as an analytic is tethered to its particular historical moment.

While the idea of “globalization” no longer captures the spirit of the age, the long downturn has outlasted the “age of globalization.” To be sure, much of what once went under the name of globalization today travels under the history of neoliberalism; David Harvey, another theorist with ties to nineties-era globalization, has since turned his focus to the history and critique of neoliberalism. Brenner’s account, too, has largely been understood as an account of neoliberalism. And yet, it was globalization, not neoliberalism, that was thekeyword of the nineties. Insofar as Brenner seeks to understand exploitation and immiseration by recourse not only to the economic crisis of 1973 but to the global networks of production and exchange that entrenched themselves in its wake and intensified with the passage of NAFTA, we might more clearly position Brenner within the discourses of nineties-era globalization. By more closely examining the uses and abuses of globalization, we can both see its limitations and begin to account for some of the exhaustion of political energy associated with the term.

Idioms for a Critique of Everything Existing

In addition to seeing Brenner’s text as part of a broader shift in both academic scholarship and popular journalism that sought to make sense of the US’s economic ties to the rest of the world, we can see Brenner’s analysis of the long downturn as part of a broader shift in Marxist theory. In this sense, it is helpful to consider the publication of “Uneven Development and the Long Downturn” within the history of the New Left Review. Brenner’s book-length essay appeared during Robin Blackburn’s long tenure as official editor-in-chief, when Perry Anderson stepped away from the magazine (only to return in 2000 for three more years). Beginning when Anderson and Blackburn took over the journal in 1962, the Review dedicated itself to producing an account of English history that placed the emphasis on the transformative function of culture rather than economics or politics. Largely coterminous with the project of the New Left, the Review put aside praxis to supply what they saw as a missing of theory of revolution. They looked abroad to do so, making the writing of Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin, as well as more recent writings by Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse and French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, available to English readers.21

If the New Left as an intellectual project can at least be partially demarcated by Anderson and Blackburn’s reign from 1962 to 2000, Brenner’s long essay appears toward its very end. Whereas in the sixties, the revival of Marxism brought with it a focus on its cultural aspects — and a particular emphasis on ideology critique — the culmination of the New Left project under Anderson and Blackburn coincides with the return to the economic aspects of Marxism. This shift was, in part, the product of real historical crises in both politics and economics. In naming those crises, and in developing a historical and theoretical account of protracted economic crisis, Brenner’s model of the long downturn provided a heuristic for economic rather than cultural critiques of capitalism amidst a broader transition in critiques on the left, and the idioms in which those critiques were staged. At the same time, in situating Brenner within a broader set of commentators, we can see how this shift from culture to economy coincides with the widespread attempt to grapple with transformations in the global division of labor and the development of competitive networks of production, as they were felt in the US.

As a generalizing concept of social relations, globalization offered a way of theorizing the social whole at a moment when many were turning away from theories of totality. In the break between postcolonialism and Marxism signaled by Aijaz Ahmad’s response to Fredric Jameson in “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’” (1987), globalization, especially as it was articulated by Appadurai, offered an alternative vocabulary for thinking about the relationship between the Global North and Global South. Against claims that the extension of American capital led to Americanization — or commodification — Appadurai named disjuncture and difference as the defining features of the global economy. Significantly, Appadurai’s globalization theory was an effort to wrest culture from economy. Even as Appadurai’s theory of globalization was decidedly cultural, his definition of globalization became part of the rush to “see it whole” that named and theorized connections between the Global North and Global South as the organizing principles of totality.

In the wake of political and historical defeats that all but vanquished real opportunities for solidarity, globalization offered an opportunity to newly politicize the international division of labor. Particularly as globalization brought renewed attention to the world economy of physical goods, the commodity became an object of critique in a way that departed significantly from the anti-consumerist critiques of the sixties. Whereas earlier critiques of the commodity emphasized cultural degradation wrought by runaway consumption, those under globalization emphasized the entire web of social relations brought together by the commodity form. In particular, globalization drew a direct connection between consumption in the Global North and labor exploitation in the Global South. Anti-sweatshop activists brought significant attention to “labor warehouses” in special economic zones, patronized by brands like Kathie Lee Gifford’s clothing line. In 1996, the year that Gap was attacked for its labor practices in El Salvador, Life magazine published a photo essay of a Pakistani boy stitching Nike soccer balls for six cents an hour. In 1999, ABC’s 20/20 aired footage of young women locked inside sweatshops sewing clothes for Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, and Ralph Lauren. Naomi Klein’s No Logo, closely associated with the 1999 Seattle anti-globalization protests, exemplified this new investigative interest in the unbranded origins of brand name goods.

It was not new for consumer goods to be produced under oppressive conditions — Nike had been producing sneakers in Asian sweatshops since at least the early seventies and many companies had been exploiting cheap overseas labor for much longer. And yet, in the wake of Fukuyama’s fantasy that the “end of history” meant the spread of US-style capitalism, critiques of consumption stood in for critiques of capitalism. TVs and VCRs didn’t just make the world boring; they made it more unequal. Especially as the anti-globalization movement coincided with anti-sweatshop campaigns, critiques from the left focused on the exploitation required by current levels of consumption, on the sweatshop labor behind Wal-Mart’s low prices. To be sure, such critiques have their limits, particularly as they come to emphasize individual choice over collective politics. Nevertheless, in naming and politicizing the links between production and consumption — between Global North and Global South — leftist critiques of capitalist globalization sought to articulate the relationship between capitalism and imperialism.

Much of this theorization turned on the cultural rather than economic dimensions of empire — particularly as emblematized by the blockbuster publication of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), which, as scholars from Timothy Brennan to Walter Benn Michaels have made clear, celebrated the intrinsic and somehow spontaneous power of the dispossessed to, above all, resist, at the precise moment in which the infrastructure of US neocolonialism only proliferated the terms under which repression might occur. And yet, for how blind Empire was to actually existing, and enduring, imperialism, even Hardt and Negri’s “multitude” — like Zygmunt Bauman’s “wasted lives,” and, a decade later, Michael Denning’s “wageless life” — reoriented leftist critiques of capitalism around surplus populations, around those forcibly expelled from the industrial paradigm of the wage. If Hardt and Negri’s theorization of surplus populations was stubbornly — and myopically — cultural, we might find in their vision of the multitude as the subject of history an important precedent to contemporary theorizations of the structural necessity of the wretched of the earth to the accumulation of capital.

By turning to global supply chains — to the networks of production and exchange that bring populations together and tear them apart—as the basis for an understanding of exploitation and immiseration, nineties-era theorizations of globalization on the left put extraction, expropriation, and dispossession at the center of our analyses of global capital. The significance of this should not be overlooked. In a present increasingly defined by debt and dispossession, by informal and precarious labor, any understanding of global capitalism needs to account for how the traditional terms of economic exploitation have expanded beyond — even as they continue to rely upon — industrial wage labor, how capital accumulation systematically depends not only on economic exploitation, as it has been traditionally understood through the wage relation, but through a whole range of interrelated forms of oppression and exploitation. If the seventies have broadly been understood as a decade in which an organized left was alternately dismantled by the state or tore itself asunder, we might see in leftist theorizations of globalization an attempt to reckon with and redefine the very terms around which the left might be organized. The anti-globalization movement’s attention to the global supply chains undergirding US patterns of consumption, especially as fueled by neocolonial processes of extraction, signaled such an attempt. Foregrounding the systems of commodity consumption and circulation that connect the US to global frontiers of resource extraction, the anti-globalization movement sought to understand how the lexicon of the economic — how its vocabulary and its cast of characters — might take shape beyond the factory floor.

1. For anti-globalization as a new social movement, see Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, 5 Days that Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (New York: Verso, 2000); Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (New York: Verso, 2004); and Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies(Toronto: Vintage, 1999).
2. See in particular, Judith Stein, The Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class(New York: New Press, 2010); Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (New York: Verso, 2012); and Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). While for Jefferson Cowie the seventies mark the tragic fall of the working class, undone by internal conflict, for Judith Stein it is the moment when the US “traded factories for finance.” For some, as Daniel Sargent, it marks the moment in which the US ceded control of managing the world economy — not to another nation-state, but to integrating markets. For others, such as Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, the 1970s mark the moment when the US, in collaboration with less powerful nation-states, orchestrated market expansion, turning markets themselves into an export.
3. Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009) 1.
4. Malcolm Waters, Globalization, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001) 2.
5. For more on the keywords that grew out of globalization in relation to Appadurai’s Modernity at Large specifically, see Hadji Bakara, “On the Unfinished Business of Theory from the South: Arjun Appadurai’s Globalization Theory” in “1990 at 30,” ed. J. Daniel Elam and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, cluster, Post45: Contemporaries. https://post45.org/2020/05/on-the-unfinished-business-of-theory-from-the-south-arjun-appadurais-globalization-theory/
6. For more on the keywords that grew out of globalization in relation to Appadurai’s Modernity at Large specifically, see Hadji Bakara, “On the Unfinished Business of Theory from the South: Arjun Appadurai’s Globalization Theory” in “1990 at 30,” ed. J. Daniel Elam and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, cluster, Post45: Contemporaries. https://post45.org/2020/05/on-the-unfinished-business-of-theory-from-the-south-arjun-appadurais-globalization-theory/
7. Roland Robertson, “Interview: Roland Robertson,” Globalizations 11.4 (2014) 447.
8. Paul James and Manfred B. Steger, “A Genealogy of ‘Globalization’: The Career of a Concept,” Globalizations 11.4 (2014) 430.
9. See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso, 2006).
10. For Klein, anti-globalization marked a distinct break with the campus politics—the culture wars—of the first half of the nineties, though, St. Clair, and others have challenged this account. For Denning, the Battle of Seattle marks a break from the politics of 1968.
11. Denning, 11.
12. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest, no. 16 (1989): 3-18.
13. “Themes,” New Left Review 229(1998) i.
14. “Themes,” ii.
15. Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005 (New York: Verso, 2006) xxiii.
16. “Themes,” i.
17. See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Verso, 1994).
18. “Themes,” v.
19. “Themes,” vi.
20. See Lisa Lowe, “Globalization,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York: New York University Press, 2020) 126-129.
21. See Duncan Thompson, Pessimism of the Intellect? A History of the New Left Review (UK: Merlin Press, 2006).