ABSTRACT
This chapter develops the notion of 'variegated capitalism' and related concepts to analyze differential accumulation on a world scale and, in particular, the dynamics of the 'global financial crisis'. It considers how so-called varieties are integrated into the world market and how this shapes crisis-tendencies and efforts at crisis-management. The chapter examines how the diversity of accumulation regimes is reproduced and transformed in a changing world market. This patterned diversity, or variegation, involves a self-organizing ecology of self-organizing economic and political spaces shaped by the interaction of territorialization, place-making, scale, and networks. The chapter explores the interaction between a world market organized in the shadow of neoliberal, finance-dominated accumulation and Eurozone organized in the shadow of neo-mercantilism. Efforts to impose austerity are an expected and recurrent response to crises in relatively open economies because both the individual wage and social wage are costs of production as well as sources of dema.
