The restructuring of the global economy and the anatomy of the emergent global production and financial system are well-researched topics. The globalization of production has involved the fragmentation and decentralization of complex production processes, the worldwide dispersal of the different segments and phases in these processes, and their functional integration into vast chains of production and distribution that span the globe. There has been a shift from international market integration to global productive integration. Global capitalism is not reducible to a collection of discrete national economies, national capitals, and national circuits of accumulation connected through an international market. Such national economies have been dismantled and then reconstituted as component elements of this new globally integrated production and financial system, a world economic structure qualitatively distinct from that of previous epochs, when each country had a distinct national economy linked to others through trade and financial flows. The global decentralization of production and services has been going on for several decades and is one of the key empirical processes that led researchers to develop the concept of globalization. The process continued to accelerate in the first decade of the twenty-first century and took new turns that underscored the open-ended nature of world economic structuring and the development of new forms in the face of changing conditions. If General Electric (GE) was already a global corporation by the 1970s in terms of its globalized direct and subcontracting production networks and its service and financial operations, for instance, the company seemed to undergo a new burst of transnationalization in the face of the imperative of integrating production and market circuits in new ways. In 2004, GE had 1 65,000 employees in the United States and 142.000 elsewhere. By the end of 2008 the preponderance had been reversed, with l 52,000 in the United States and 171,000 elsewhere.9 The multibillion-dollar bailout provided to the U.S.-based branch of General Motors (GM) by the U.S. government in the wake of the 2008 collapse led to media and academic portrayals of the company in nation-state-centric terms as a sick corporate giant symbolizing the decline of the United States as the dominant economic power. Yet GM had divisions in dozens of countries around the world and was healthy and vibrant in many of these divisions, including the one in China, where its car sales, produced in a partnership with Chinese firms, and investment in China were booming. This accelerated transnationalization of both production and marketing involved not only giant corporations but also small manufacturing firms. The network structure of the global economy and the globalized nature of production and service chains mean that even small firms are able to globalize and, moreover, need to do so in order to remain competitive. Global corporations organizing production of globally marketed goods and services are able to integrate production and marketing circuits in new ways as the whole world comes to resemble a flexible and open field for organizing accumulation.
Expanding Crisis in the World and Its Outward Manifestations
