Reinterpreting the Geography of Accumulation: The Global Shift and Local Restructuring

Abstract

The authors argue that the nation is not the natural space for the circulation and reproduction of capital, and that this is vitally important in understanding the restructuring of economic activity since the mid-1970s. Rapidly increasing global integration of production, realisation of profit, and the circulation of financial capital have been recognised widely. Yet little consensus has developed about cither the theoretical or empirical impacts of globalisation on changing spatial divisions of labour within developed capitalist countries. The authors outline a model of globalisation in which an increasingly internationalised process of accumulation is expressed in, and reproduced through, the changing social relations of production which remain bounded territorially by nation-states. The model is built up from a synthesis of some apparently disparate theoretical positions on capitalist restructuring crises taken by researchers during the 1980s. These include theories of the internationalisation of capital and those dealing with restructuring within nation-states after the now much-debated transition out of the regime of accumulation which produced the long boom after 1950. Some of these theories have focused too narrowly on the circuit of production to the exclusion of the increasingly complex world trading links and with a severe underestimation of the importance of global financial capital during the 1980s. Methodological implications of the model are investigated and the role of the state in a globally integrated economy is illuminated.