For Gray, though, the supposed economic failings of American-style
capitalism are only the beginning.
An early variation was Fukuyama's argument about the "end of history," which was never literally a claim that history had ended but rather an assertion about the range of alternatives to liberal capitalism. [13] Socialism, Fukuyama quite insightfully argued, had by 1989 if not before lost its ability to compete intellectually with liberalism: its arguments could no longer compel assent; its vision had ceased to inspire action or even acquiescence; and its application had proved disastrous.
Perhaps even more important, research on the differences between varieties of capitalism has clear implications for policy.
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. But antipathy to the market in these settings is largely traditional, hence residual, and thus potentially more easily altered by experience.
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. [50]
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.
Trotsky's notion of combined and uneven development, with its corollary notion of permanent revolution, probably implies that the universalization of the capitalist system will be short-circuited by capitalism's own demise.
What I'm saying, then, is that non- or pre-capitalism permeates all these theories of capitalism. Now all of these Marxist theories are profoundly illuminating in various ways.
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." Yet Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars, work provides a refreshing perspective on the capitalist monolith in the post-Cold War world.
