ABSTRACT
In the US and Europe, the heady years of globalization, when seemingly inexhaustible credit allowed the middle classes access to an unimaginable range of goods, are fast fading from the popular memory. With the economies of the US and Europe barely registering growth, the great engine of capitalism appears palpably to have downshifted. This chapter explains the dynamics of capitalism's crisis of overproduction and the unravelling of finance. Being the world's second largest economy, China's downshifting is particularly alarming. In 2008, in response to the crisis, China launched a US$585 billion stimulus programme to enable the domestic market to make up for the loss of export demand. The current crisis of the global economy has spawned problems for both the infrastructure and superstructure of global capitalism, to use these terms in a broad, not mechanical, sense. Radical environmentalists have located the crisis in the much broader context of a growth-oriented, fossil-fuel-addicted mode of production.
