ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the evolution of capitalist processes within the industrialized countries in order to delineate how these processes have impacted, and shaped the parameters of global capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The period from the end of World War II to the early 1970s was the high point of US capitalism and the high point of its global economic strength. A corollary of the combined impact of the falling rates of profit endemic to overall capitalist dynamics and the growing power of transformation towards finance capital was the need to expand overseas economic activity. The United States was able to build up its industrial base and ease its economic problems by selling goods to the weakened countries of Europe. The Soviet Union, with a planned economy that was less susceptible to the instabilities of corporate capitalism, avoided the acute effects of this capitalist instability, although in the Soviet Union there were other serious economic and social problems.
