The language of globalization evokes images of celebration and despair, domination and resistance, and totalizing forces overwhelming local variations. Where observers find important variations within the global economic order, they typically forego the language of global capitalism to focus on institutional variations in political economies and “varieties of capitalism” (Fligstein, 2001; Hall and Soskice, 2002). What language might we develop that takes capitalism seriously as a “structured totality” (Burawoy, 1985) but that sees that totality as itself constituted by multiple overlapping institutional complexes? Such a language could provide both the analytical “bite” necessary to explain contemporary processes of globalization and their effects while also allowing us to identify important political spaces of contestation and structuration of global capitalism.

This chapter undertakes that task. The first sections briefly outline a theoretical perspective on capitalism and the state that, with Marx, sees capitalism as a system of exploitation, accumulation, and uneven development but, with Polanyi, sees those relations as always and everywhere socially and politically embedded. Capitalism is a “structured totality” but one that is shaped by multiple and intersecting political logics, not by a “logic of the capitalist system.” Furthermore, states and other institutions of governance do not simply “regulate” a system with its own logic but rather constantly structure and restructure capitalist social relations, even as they are constrained by them. Emphasizing the political creation of capitalism means that developmental states are central to the project of global capitalism; the next section outlines the characteristic dilemmas of semiperipheral capitalist development.