ABSTRACT
When the leading living capitalist and the leading living Trotskyist agree on the best prescription for the survival of capitalism, albeit in somewhat different language, it is perhaps time for the rest of us to defer to their joint wisdom. Certainly, there is no doubt that the processes anticipated by Rockefeller and suggested by Mandel have become part of our contemporary world economy. The global shifts in the location of manufacturing enterprises have been recognised in a number of largely discrete academic debates which still require more synoptic vision to bring them together. Some of the threads of these debates, though by no means all, are woven together in the work of a number of German scholars who coined the expression ‘the new international division of labour’. The changing definitions and meanings of the phrase ‘division of labour’ impel different discussions and have different implications of a more practical and political nature.
