The Crisis of Fordism and the Crisis of Capitalism

The disintegration of the state socialist regimes in Eastern Europe cannot be seen as an isolated phenomenon, for it is only the final and most dramatic manifestation of a process which has been unfolding over the past two decades throughout the world. The popular rejection of centralist bureaucratic and authoritarian regimes has been a common feature of political developments in both East and West. Stripped of its political labels, the crisis of state socialism can be seen as a moment of a broader crisis of the state, a crisis which undermined not only the state socialist and social democratic projects, but which can equally be seen in the ‘crisis of the dictatorships’ in Southern Europe, Latin America, South Africa and East Asia.1 These developments cannot be seen simply as the results of a political movement, expressing the unquenchable democratic impulse of the human spirit which finds its necessary reflection in the freedom of the market and of the liberal democratic state. More fundamentally it has to be seen as an expression of the growing failure of the state to achieve the economic tasks which it set itself, a failure which has eroded the legitimacy of the interventionist economic strategies which supposedly necessitated the development of ‘corporatist’ state institutions. Correspondingly, the project which has been forced onto the political agenda by the crisis of the interventionist state has been that of constructing new political forms which can both articulate and legitimate alternative economic strategies. Although it was the New Right which rode the political wave of the 1980s, it should not be forgotten that the New Left had articulated an equally powerful, and far more radical, critique of the state in the 1960s and