In this collection authors from eight different countries, representing a wide variety of academic disciplines and theoretical perspectives, investigate the differing phases of capitalist development. They offer diverse and powerful analyses of the postwar boom, economic crises and globalization within this context.

A reconsideration of socialism in the post-Soviet era based on the theoretical achievements of Japanese Marxist political economy. The origins and the various components of the broad current of socialist thought, as well as the implications of Marx's economic theories for socialism, are explored afresh. The Western debate on the rationality of a socialist economy, starting in the 1920s and continuing to the present, is reviewed and reassessed. The book further inquires into the nature, the achievements, and the character of the systemic change in the socialist economies of the Soviet Union,...

The current world economic crisis and its impact on Japanese capitalism contains many paradoxes. After the historical conditions of continuous growth under US economic hegemony broke down, generating a global economic crisis from the beginning of the 1970s, the restructuring of capitalism through the 'information revolution' seems paradoxically to be causing a historical reverse in social conditions of over a century. Although the Japanese economy is often regarded as an exceptionally successful economy it is not immune from the crisis. The process of restrengthening Japanese competitive...

The Japanese economy has shown paradoxical changes. Its successes in forming a company-centred society generated the long downturn toward zero-growth capitalism. Successful spread of information technologies resulted in deterioration of economic life among working people and a wide fall in birth rate. At the zenith of the Japanese model of company system, a huge bubble swelled, so as to prepare a prolonged depression throughout the 1990s. Neoliberalism with spiral reversal of capitalist development toward more competitive markets rather promoted difficulties among people. A lucid...

To explain the pronounced instability of the world economy since the 1970s, the book offers an important and systematic theoretical examination of money and finance. It re-examines the classical foundations of political economy and the creator of money. It assesses all of the important theoretical schools since then, including Marxist, Keynesian, post-Keynesian and monetarist thinkers. By presenting important insights from Japanese political economy previously ignored in Anglo-Saxon economics, the authors make a significant contribution to radical political economy based on a thorough...

The current world economic crisis and its impact on Japanese capitalism contains many paradoxes. After the historical conditions of continuous growth under US economic hegemony broke down, generating a global economic crisis from the beginning of the 1970s, the restructuring of capitalism through the 'information revolution' seems paradoxically to be causing a historical reverse in social conditions of over a century. Although the Japanese economy is often regarded as an exceptionally successful economy it is not immune from the crisis. The process of restrengthening Japanese competitive...