As a result, the intellectual foundations for alternatives to capitalism were absent and so, over time, more and more of the world would come to embrace liberal capitalism and to adopt economic and political regimes that would resemble, more or less, those of liberal capitalism.
Developing economies, by contrast, tend to be more distinctive sociologically while also being marked by cultures and popular attitudes that are hostile or skeptical toward capitalism.
Nonetheless, the differences between the advanced societies on the one hand and the developing economies and the economies in transition on the other, are of such magnitude that they really must be bracketed for purposes of assessing the extent to which modern capitalism produces convergence among social and political systems.
For all sorts of reasons--some quite legitimate but some perhaps a bit self-serving--it never became fashionable to be a booster of the American, or now Anglo-American, style of capitalism.
Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999), 101-134 and also Peter Hall and David Soskice, eds.
For Gray, though, the supposed economic failings of American-style
capitalism are only the beginning.
For instance, the major theories of revolution were constructed in situations where capitalism scarcely existed or remained undeveloped and where there was no well developed proletariat, where the revolution had to depend on alliances between a minority of workers and, in particular, a mass of pre-capitalist peasants.
For all the profound disagreements among the classical Marxist theorists of imperialism, they shared one fundamental premise: that imperialism had to do with the location of capitalism in a world that wasn't - and never would be - fully, or even predominantly, capitalist.
It is meant to be precisely an alternative to Marx's analysis of capitalism as a self-enclosed system.
And this surely had a lot to do with the importance he attached to ideology and culture, and to intellectuals, because something was needed to push class struggle beyond its material limits, something was needed to make socialist revolution possible even in the absence of mature material conditions of a well developed capitalism and an advanced proletariat.
Well, to begin with, you could say that there's been a real paradox here: the more universal capitalism has become, the more people have moved away from classical Marxism and its main theoretical concerns.
Such a reformist formula will hardly result in the overthrow of
capitalism or the "withering away of the state.
