William K Tabb
Biographic Data
| ID | 253446 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William K Tabb |
| GIVEN NAMES | William K |
| FAMILY NAME | Tabb |
| SIGNATURE | TABB W K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queens College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 62 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Present in History, 2021
The job of socialists is to engage with public policy from a class perspective, informed by a Marxist understanding of contemporary capitalism—not to reform it, but to abolish it
The Ambitions of China’s Market-Leninism
Marx at 200
A Window into the European Left
Reply to Responses
If Detroit Is Dead, Some Things Need to Be Said at the Funeral
A growing literature has long proclaimed the city of Detroit to be “dead.” Of course cities, unlike sentient beings, do not actually die even if they dramatically lose industry and population and the local government its ability to meet basic needs. How their continuing crisis is addressed depends on how competing interests are able to tell their story. This essay evaluates the most significant of these competing and complementary stories and eva…
The wider context of austerity urbanism
Austerity urbanism is part of a larger neoliberal project in which the debt relation is both an important tool of redistributive growth and central to understanding the contemporary social structure of accumulation that generates financial bubbles and collapse. The financialization that is central to the contemporary period in Western capitalism impacts cities as part of larger phenomena that encompass not only mortgage debt but consumer and stud…
The Criminality of Wall Street
The current stage of capitalism is characterized by the increased power of finance capital. How to understand the economics of this shift and its political implications is now central for both the left and the larger society. There can be little doubt that a signature development of our time is the growth of finance and monopoly power.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Cl…
Debt Dependence, Surplus Extraction and the Need for Change
What if? Politics and Post-Capitalism
A variety of pessimistic economic forecasts predicts a long period of poor growth and continued high levels of unemployment even as the stock market has reached new highs. Trend extrapolation suggests we can expect continued rising inequality in income, wealth and political influence. Because these developments are so visible there was widespread positive reaction to Occupy Wall Street and its analysis of the causal factors at work shaping the po…
Extending Occupy Wall Street's message and critique
The Occupy Wall Street movement and the related manifestations of popular outrage at actually existing capitalism invites a dialogue. In this essay I develop themes stressed by Occupy while extending its critique. Three related subject areas are discussed. The first discusses inequality found in its various dimensions and significances in the United States. Second, the paper expands on understanding inequality, seeing it as the root of the contem…
The Crisis
The theme of the 2012 Left Forum, "Occupy the System—Confronting Global Capitalism," calls for a historical imagination informed by a realistic sense of where we are. To occupy the system is first to be aware of the system as a system—a system of unequal privilege and control. It requires that we occupy the narrative of public debate, which is something the Occupy movement, to a remarkable degree, has been able to achieve. Even President Obama, w…
Marxism, Crisis Theory and the Crisis of the Early 21st Century
Three Ways to Understand the Current Crisis
Globalization Today
Much of the literature to date suggests simple rejection or blanket acceptance of strong versions of the constructs transnational capitalist class (TCC) and transnational capitalist state (TCS). A more nuanced middle ground suggests that much of the problematic uses of these concepts stems from failure to distinguish the multiple ways Marx employed the term class and the centrality of internal relations and distinction among levels of analysis ce…
Four Crises of the Contemporary World Capitalist System
This essay examines aspects of the global political economy that I hope will inform progressive governments and movements for social change. It evaluates the constraints and opportunities presented in the current conjuncture of world capitalist development by analyzing four areas of crisis in the contemporary world capitalist system. These are not the only contradictory elements in the contemporary conjuncture, but they are, in my view, the most …
Wage Stagnation, Growing Insecurity, and the Future of the U.S. Working Class
The most important promises used to justify capitalism are that your children will have a better life than you do, and in President Kennedy's famous words, "a rising tide lifts all boats," meaning everyone benefits from the accumulation of capital. These promises ring hollow in a period in which the relative position of the working people of the United States is declining and its ruling class is able to appropriate an increasing share of the nati…
The Centrality of Finance
In the contemporary conjuncture financialization is driving a fundamentalreorganization of American capitalism and increasingly that of other economiessignificantly impacting the trajectory of the world-system. This paper interrogates the nature and extent of financialization, the ways it is adding to systemic risk with attention to the future of the dollar, and implications for the relationship between US based finance and new emerging centers o…
Resource Wars
The close relation between war and natural resources is of long standing. What else was colonial conquest about? Vast estates held by the Dutch East India Company came under direct control of the Crown as did the lands conquered by the British East India Company. What was in demand in Europe dictated the commodities produced and the natural resources that were ripped from the earth. European violence set the terms on which resource extraction occ…
Imperialism
Imperialism is the system by which a dominant power is able to control the trade, investment, labor, and natural resources of other peoples. It takes different forms in different stages of capitalist development and has elements in common with the imperium of ancient empires. I want to lay out these structural elements, contrast them with the mainstream economists' view of exchange regulated by free market principles, and then discuss the specifi…
Let the Dialectic Continue
Harry Magdoff died on New Year's Day 2006 at the age of ninety-two. He will be remembered in the hearts of those who knew him, those who were profoundly influenced when they heard him speak, and those who have read Monthly Review and his great books on imperialism, which helped mature the thinking of the generation of leftists who came of age during the Vietnam War. It is the warmth of his person, the clarity and incisiveness of his thinking, and…
The Power of the Rich
Two trends dominate today's world political economy. The first is growing inequality. The second is slower economic growth. Both trends have important consequences, which flow from the increased power of capital in a globalized world. The hegemony of the capitalist class is not new, but in any specific conjuncture, how its power is exercised depends on how technological possibilities are deployed, the degree of ideological clarity of the working …
Trouble, Trouble, Debt, and Bubble
The questions regarding U.S. macroeconomic policy these days come down to whether the country can keep borrowing. Can consumers keep spending by increasing their debt level? Can the federal government keep running a large budget deficit without serious problems developing? Can the U.S. current account deficit keep growing? Will foreigners keep buying government bonds to cover this growing debt? If the answer is no to such questions, we can expect…
Capital, class and the state in the global political economy
The tension between state logic and capital logic plays out in the contemporary world in terms of coerced appropriation mediated through global state economic governance institutions. These include the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund which are under the guidance of liberal institutionalist regime builders following an expansionist capital logic. At the same time as they take a leading role in such rule setting, the Am…
Sweated Labor Then and Now
From the first usage in nineteenth-century America of the term “sweatshop,” the definition of this emotive term has “reflected social anxiety about global flows and exchange of people, goods, culture, and capital,” Bender and Greenwald write in their useful edited volume, Sweatshops USA. And if the term sweatshop today connotes a race to the bottom in which a market structure of intense competition reflects the absence, or lack of the enforcement…
The wider context of austerity urbanism
Austerity urbanism is part of a larger neoliberal project in which the debt relation is both an important tool of redistributive growth and central to understanding the contemporary social structure of accumulation that generates financial bubbles and collapse. The financialization that is central to the contemporary period in Western capitalism impacts cities as part of larger phenomena that encompass not only mortgage debt but consumer and stud…
If Detroit Is Dead, Some Things Need to Be Said at the Funeral
A growing literature has long proclaimed the city of Detroit to be “dead.” Of course cities, unlike sentient beings, do not actually die even if they dramatically lose industry and population and the local government its ability to meet basic needs. How their continuing crisis is addressed depends on how competing interests are able to tell their story. This essay evaluates the most significant of these competing and complementary stories and eva…
Globalization Today
Much of the literature to date suggests simple rejection or blanket acceptance of strong versions of the constructs transnational capitalist class (TCC) and transnational capitalist state (TCS). A more nuanced middle ground suggests that much of the problematic uses of these concepts stems from failure to distinguish the multiple ways Marx employed the term class and the centrality of internal relations and distinction among levels of analysis ce…
Globalization is an Issue, The Power of Capital is the Issue
The globalization hypothesis is that there has been a rapid and recent change in the nature of economic relations among national economies which have lost much of their distinct claim to separate internally driven development, and that domestic economic management strategies have become ineffective to the point of irrelevance. Internationalization is, in this view, seen as a tide sweeping over borders in which technology and irresistible market f…
Marxism, Crisis Theory and the Crisis of the Early 21st Century
The East Asian Financial Crisis
The Asian financial meltdown, when it reached front-page proportions in late 1997, was rightly called the most serious of any we have had since the 1930s. A mountain of paper assets—estimated at more than a trillion dollars—was swept aside. Subsequently there was substantial recovery in some of the region's markets and investors sorted out specific strengths and weaknesses, differentiating among national economies . There have also been new frigh…
The Centrality of Finance
In the contemporary conjuncture financialization is driving a fundamentalreorganization of American capitalism and increasingly that of other economiessignificantly impacting the trajectory of the world-system. This paper interrogates the nature and extent of financialization, the ways it is adding to systemic risk with attention to the future of the dollar, and implications for the relationship between US based finance and new emerging centers o…
The Two Wings of the Eagle
Peter Marcuse has written (Monthly Review, July-August 2000) that globalization "is a nonconcept in most usages: a simple catalogue of everything that seems different since, say, 1970, whether advances in information technology, widespread use of air freight, speculation in currencies, increased capital flows across borders, Disneyfication of culture, mass marketing, global warming, genetic engineering, multinational corporate power, new internat…
A Critique of Tabb on Globalization
In "Globalization Is An Issue. The Power of Capital Is The Issue" (MR, June 1997), William Tabb rejects what he calls "the strong version of the globalization thesis" as based on the "myth" that "technology and irresistible market forces [are transforming] the global system in ways beyond the power of anyone to do much to change." He prefers "a more nuanced view," which would give "a major role to national-level policies and actors, and the centr…
What Happened to Black Economic Development
What lessons do we learn from this history, the intertwined development of black capitalism and community economic development, the lack of success of both, and now the abandonment of the minority poor because of more pressing concerns over cutting the inflation rate by reducing government spending and promoting growth by giving incentives to big capital
Debt Dependence, Surplus Extraction and the Need for Change
Four Crises of the Contemporary World Capitalist System
This essay examines aspects of the global political economy that I hope will inform progressive governments and movements for social change. It evaluates the constraints and opportunities presented in the current conjuncture of world capitalist development by analyzing four areas of crisis in the contemporary world capitalist system. These are not the only contradictory elements in the contemporary conjuncture, but they are, in my view, the most …
Resource Wars
The close relation between war and natural resources is of long standing. What else was colonial conquest about? Vast estates held by the Dutch East India Company came under direct control of the Crown as did the lands conquered by the British East India Company. What was in demand in Europe dictated the commodities produced and the natural resources that were ripped from the earth. European violence set the terms on which resource extraction occ…
Sweated Labor Then and Now
From the first usage in nineteenth-century America of the term “sweatshop,” the definition of this emotive term has “reflected social anxiety about global flows and exchange of people, goods, culture, and capital,” Bender and Greenwald write in their useful edited volume, Sweatshops USA. And if the term sweatshop today connotes a race to the bottom in which a market structure of intense competition reflects the absence, or lack of the enforcement…
After Neoliberalism
What comes after neoliberalism? To answer that question we must ask a more fundamental question: What do neoliberalism and neoconservatism have in common with the antiglobalization and antiwar movements? The answer is that all ostensibly share a focus on redefining democracy in the contemporary world system. "Spreading democracy" is the rallying cry of both the Washington Consensus and the Bush Doctrine. The "Washington Consensus" is the claim th…
After Seattle
The "Seattle Shock"—as Business Week called it in an editorial that warned of a popular backlash against "our very economic system"—reflects heartfelt indignation by the financial press at the intrusion of mass democracy into an elite discourse. In the New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman raged at anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) protesters, whom he presents as "flat-earth advocates" duped by knaves like Pat Buchanan. Friedman, perhaps th…
The World Trade Organization? Stop World Take Over
On November 30,1999, when the World Trade Organization (WTO) opened its third round of ministerial meetings, the three thousand official delegates, two thousand journalists, and other registered observers were greatly outnumbered by the tens of thousands of protesters who came from all over the world to denounce the organization. Estimates of protester numbers ranged to forty thousand, according to the Seattle Times, which told its readers that t…
Progressive Globalism
I will address some aspects of globalization in our time and what they mean for working people. I will start with some general definitions and suggest that the most significant features of what is called globalization have always been part of capitalist development, even if the forms are different in different periods (including our own). I will then discuss the arrogance of capital as it tries to remake our world in its preferred image. In this …
Labor and the Imperialism of Finance
Organized labor has always privileged collective struggle at the point of production, judging it to be capital's most vulnerable point. Denying employers the labor power needed for the production of surplus value strikes at the reproduction and expansion of capital, the accumulation process which is the core of the system.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to p…
Data Retrieval Systems, the University, and State Decision Making
N EITHER THE DEVELOPMENT OF LARGE-SCALE, quantitative social science research nor the use of the computer in governmental decision making (especially on the state and local levels) has proceeded at the pace which many systems people thought possible a decade ago. To accelerate progress in the adoption of computer technology, some suggest greater university-government collaboration. It has been argued that a joint data center operated by governmen…
Race Relations Models and Social Change
Journal Article Race Relations Models and Social Change Get access William K. Tabb William K. Tabb University of Connecticut and Queens College, C.U.N.Y. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 18, Issue 4, Spring 1971, Pages 431–444, https://doi.org/10.2307/799719 Published: 06 August 2014
The political economy and education
The Challenge of Radical Political Economics
following headline appeared in the 11 February 1972 issue of the Wall Street Journal: The Unorthodox Ideas of Radical Economists Win A Wider Hearing. On 18 March 1972 the following appeared in Business Week: Radicals gain professional chic. Their academic status rises as their critique of capitalism gains depth and new listeners. Whether radical economists are gaining professional chic or acquiring more status is less important than the fact that…
Marxian Exploitation and Domestic Colonialism
Dynamic Change and the Urban Ghetto
Marxism and the metropolis
Financial Institutions
What Happened to Black Economic Development
What lessons do we learn from this history, the intertwined development of black capitalism and community economic development, the lack of success of both, and now the abandonment of the minority poor because of more pressing concerns over cutting the inflation rate by reducing government spending and promoting growth by giving incentives to big capital
Capital and Land
Poverty and Public Policy
Sunbelt/Snowbelt
Churches in Struggle
Pacific Rim Cities in the World Economy
Power, Culture, and Place
One Hundred Years of Servitude
Review of A Century of Debt Crises in Latin America: From Independence to the Great Depression by Carlos Marichal.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Billy Bragg's Powerful Commitment; Remembering the Spanish Civil War
I was overjoyed to see MR run an interview with Billy Bragg (MR, February 1991). When one returns from a hard day, say of frustrating political work, there is nothing better than his rendition of The Internationale at as high a volume as possible subject to the constraints of shared social space.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of th…
Racism and Inequality in Urban America and the Restructuring of Global Capital
Review of Separate Societies: Poverty and Inequality in U.S. Cities by William W. Goldsmith and Edward J. Blakely.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Professor Tsuru and Japanese Capitalism
Review of Japan's Capitalism: Creative Defeat and Beyond by Shigeto Tsuru.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
Japanese Capitalism and the Asian Geese
Asian efficiency must seem like rate breaking to workers in the rest of the world who work long hours under intense conditions to stay in a race that most are losing. Globally competitive capital is mobile and the regional integration of the Asian Pacific currently offers an attractive venue for production. While the cultures of the region are ancient, the forms of Confucian capitalism which now challenge the world and the working peoples of Asia…
The Postwar Japanese System
A broad, intelligent overview of the Japanese political economy, The Social Construction of Japan is one of the best books available to tell us what we can learn from Japan, and what price the Japanese are paying for their success. While other countries are looking to Japan as an economic model, William Tabb shows how the political and social arrangements that have allowed Japan to succeed are placing a great strain on their society. He distingui…
Urban Innovation
Introduction: Turbulence and Innovation in Urban America - Terry Nichols Clark PART ONE: OLD CLEAVAGES AND NEW LEADERS Race and Class versus the New Political Culture - Terry Nichols Clark Containing Cleavages - Rowan A Miranda Parties and Other Hierarchies PART TWO: MAKING FUNDAMENTAL POLICY CHOICES The Antigrowth Machine - Terry Nichols Clark and Edward G Goetz Can City Government Control, Limit or Manage Growth Growth and Decline of City Gover…
Japan
Makoto Itoh's Socialism
Review of Political Economy for Socialism by Makoto Itoh.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website
The Postwar Japanese System
A broad, intelligent overview of the Japanese political economy, The Postwar Japanese System is one of the best books available to tell us what we can learn from Japan, and what price the Japanese are paying for their success. While other countries are looking to Japan as an economic model, William Tabb shows how the political and social arrangements that have allowed Japan to succeed are placing a great strain on their society. He distinguishes …
Political science (61 works) · Economics (47 works) · Law (45 works) · Political economy (40 works) · Sociology (40 works) · History (35 works) · Politics (28 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (21 works) · Capitalism (18 works) · Economic history (16 works)