Where does the new inter­est in the “his­tory of cap­i­tal­ism” come from? I’d sug­gest the fol­low­ing rudi­ments of an answer. The finan­cial cri­sis of 2008-09 has clearly placed cer­tain issues of his­tori­ciza­tion on the agenda. If the accel­er­ated and seem­ingly unstop­pable drive for the “flat­ten­ing” of the world through a process of neolib­eral glob­al­iza­tion since the early 1990s has not actu­ally brought us to a per­ma­nently unfold­ing and self-reproducing neolib­eral present, but has rather encoun­tered severe struc­tural prob­lems, then how do we his­tori­cize this cur­rent time? That is, how do we under­stand the con­tem­po­rary cri­sis of cap­i­tal­ism, in all its polit­i­cal and social ram­i­fi­ca­tions, in rela­tion to longer-run processes of cap­i­tal­ist restruc­tur­ing and their log­ics of devel­op­ment and dif­fi­culty; and how do we locate the his­tory of the present inside a larger-scale frame­work of peri­ods and conjunctures?



posted 3586 days ago