Globalization made possible a major extensive and intensive expansion of the system and unleashed a frenzied new round of accumulation worldwide that offset the r 97os crisis of declining profits and investment opportunities. Global elites giddily declared "the end of History" in the heyday of global capitalism's hegemony in the early r 9 90s, following the end of the Cold War and the consolidation of the so-called Washington consensus around the neo-liberal model. But by the end of that decade the limits to expansion became clear as global markets became saturated. As privatization programs ran their course, the well of assets to privatize dried up. The initial boom in investment opportunities in the former socialist and revolutionary countries began to taper after they were brought into global markets. Once plants and infrastructure made the switch to computer and information technology, the remarkable rate of fixed capital turnover that the initial systemwide introduction of these technologies generated could not be sustained. Investment in high tech slowed greatly in the twenty-first century, and in 2008 telecommunication and computer orders were down 50 percent from their late 1990s high.' By the turn of the century it had become apparent that we were headed toward a structural crisis. The system was generating ever-more massive surpluses, yet the globalization generated ever-more acute inequality and pauperization worldwide. Opportunities for the profitable absorption of those surpluses diminished after the boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Global economic expansion and global market contraction reflect perhaps the fundamental contradiction of capitalism: overaccumlation. The capitalist system, in sum, again faced the recurrent challenge of how to profitably unload surpluses. The system had been stumbling from one lesser crisis to another since the mid- 1990s. The first was the Mexican peso crisis of 1995 and its "tequila effect" elsewhere. This was followed by the Asian financial meltdown of 1997-98 that also spread to Russia, Brazil, and other parts of the world. Then there came the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the recession of 2001. Between the Asian meltdown of 1997-98 and the recession of 2001 global elites began to sound alarm bells. The billionaire financier George Soros warned of the need to save the system from itself.' These elites came to be wracked by divisions and infighting as the more politically astute among them clamored for a "post-Washing ton consensus" project of reform - a so-called globalization with a human face. The neo-liberal monolith began to crack, although it would be several more years before its downfall. By the new century two major mechanisms for unloading surplus capital would provide a perverse lifeline to the system: financial speculation and militarized accumulation.
New Age Developments, Global Mobility and Accumulation
