GLOBAL CAPITALISM IN DECLINE: FOREIGN POLICY CONSEQUENCES

The dissertation delineates relations between the political economy perspective of the development of the capitalist world economy (employing perspectives developed by such scholars as Wallerstein and Mandel) and foreign policy postures of states in North and South. It situates and relates differing concepts of scientific and technological progress, and of ecological degradation and resource scarcity to the structural conditions of the global capitalist economy. These concepts are assembled in a framework which acknowledges their liberal and Marxist heritage and treats them as conjunctural crises facing the world capitalist system. Kondratieff's long waves' analysis, Lenin's conception of uneven development, the rise of socialism, and the changing nature of imperialism in the modern world are analyzed as elements giving rise to the current contradictions that beset global capitalism. Current global economic conditions seem to indicate that capitalism is facing extreme crises of continued reproduction and accumulation. They are a reflection of conjunctures that may foretell the end of capitalism as we know it. As the current scientific-technological revolution plays out, capitalist growth suffers, because research and technical innovation have been integrated into capitalist means and relations of production. The means available for a new scientific revolution also diminish. Because socialist science tends to operate on the basis of capitalist technical rationality, it contributes to the progressive incorporation of socialist economies into global capitalism. The problems of ecological limits and resource scarcity are also implicated in the crisis of the world economy. Widely varying degrees of congruence in foreign policy behavior, based on international corporatism as an organizing principle, and reflective of dominant class interests in the global economy, are projected, dependent on levels and rates of growth in a declining capitalist world economy. Finally, the sociopolitical ramifications of the conjunctures in and decline of the world economy are explored. It becomes clear that the world might benefit from the inception of a global ideology not determined by historical precedent, but the content of that ideology is not clear.