ABSTRACT
Periodization of capitalism is an analytical tool that allows us to grasp changes in the system over time. In my view, globalization represents an epochal shift, the fourth in the history of world capitalism. The first, mercantilism and primitive accumulation, was ushered in with the birth of capitalism out of its feudal cocoon in Europe and outward expansion. The second, competitive, or classical capitalism, marked the industrial revolution, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the forging of the nation-state. The third was the rise of corporate (monopoly) capitalism, the consolidation of a single world market and the nation-state system into which world capitalism became organized. The first epoch ran from the symbolic dates of 1492 through to 1789, the second to the late nineteenth century, and the third into the early 1970s. Globalization as the fourth (the current) epoch began with the world economic crisis of the 1970s and the profound restructuring of the system that has been taking place since. It features the rise of transnational capital and the supersession of the nation-state system as the organizing principle of capitalist development. As an epochal period globalization constitutes not a new process but the near culmination of the centuries-long process of the spread of capitalist production relations around the world and its displacement of all precapitalist relations. The system is undergoing a dramatic intensive expansion. The era of the
primitive accumulation of capital is coming to an end. In this process, those cultural and political institutions that fettered capitalism are swept aside, paving the way for the total commodification or ‘marketization’ of social life world-wide.
