ABSTRACT
Mexican government and civil society face enormous challenges brought about by neoliberal economic restructuring at a time when democratic political transition is simultaneously at the forefront of national and international agendas. In this chapter, the author takes a slightly different tack and proposes a "bottom-up linkages" approach that focuses on both global and national-level processes and their interrelationships. His argument is that a bottom-up linkages approach can help us both in better understanding the process of development and in providing clues as to how the process may be affected by social action and public policy toward a more desirable form of development. The central proposition of the crisis of postwar capitalism in the United States is that current trends toward the globalization of world capitalism result from the crisis of "Fordism" in the United States. Now that East-West confrontation has subsided, new cleavages in world capitalism—differences among its US, German, and Japanese variants—have emerged.
