The last several decades have been witness to major restructurings in international
arena. As people have noted, a general acceleration in the "globalization" have been
accompanied by equally strong countermovements in which "localization" have asse...
The last several decades have been witness to major restructurings in international
arena. As people have noted, a general acceleration in the "globalization" have been
accompanied by equally strong countermovements in which "localization" have asserted themselves with great force. These tendency have made us attempt to understand the development of capitalism in "time and space".
This study is to considers work that has attempted to understand capitalism
historically, structurally, and spatially. The literatures here to be examined are (1) those on "long waves" of capitalist development, originated by Kondratieff and developed by others, including Gordon, Mandel, Wallerstein, and Wolf; (2) those of the "Regulation" School in France (Aglietta, Boyer, and Lipietz), and a group of radical political economists in the U.S. on "social structures of ccumulation"(Bowles, Edward, Gordon, and Reich); (3) those of geographers like Harvey and Watts.
These works allow us to approach a less static and essentialized, and a more historical and structured understanding of capitalism, and make possible the posing of more specific problems concerning the relation of particular processes of capital accumulation with the constitution of particular social fields.
In examining these literatures, it is expected to be shown that an organization of
capitalist time in terms of long waves serves as a framework for the analysis of social structures of accumulation specific to particular long waves, but an adequate
understanding of such structures requires that they be placed in unevenly developing social spaces, and that the organization of space be seen as an integral part of the institution of a particular structure of accumulation.