Eras of Power: An Exchange; Class Compacts, the Welfare State, and Epochal Shifts: An Exchange; Reply

Abstract

During the past few years a strong challenge has been mounted in the pages of Monthly Review to the argument—prevalent on the left as well as the right—that globalization and technological change have combined to bring us into a new era. Ellen Meiksins Wood captured the gist of the emerging MR position in an essay entitled "Modernity, Postmodernity, or Capitalism" in which she asserts that there has been no historic rupture, no epochal shift, to usher in globalization or postfordism or postmodernism. All these concepts have the effect of obscuring the historical specificity of capitalism" which "by definition means constant change and development..." What we are witnessing is the diversification and extension of the old logic of the mass production economy. "This is capitalism."

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