Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

REGULATION SCHOOL THEORY
interpenetration of global economies has resulted in nations having to shape
themselves in accordance with international circumstances, the upshot of which
is that individual states ‘have found it extraordinarily difficult to maintain their
integrity in the face of the new international realities of capitalism’ (Scott and
Storper, 1986, p. 7).
Most nations now seek, more or less avidly, investment from TNCs, but the
necessary precondition of this is subordination to the priorities of corporate interests
which are committed to market practices (in so far as these maximise their
interests) but at the same time are not restricted to particular territories. Hence
the freedom of particular governments to determine their own national policies
is constrained by the need to succour foreign investors.
Again, the outcome of unification of the world’s financial markets has been
that individual governments find their monetary sovereignty challenged whenever
investors and traders sense vacillation or weakness. This means that political
options and the autonomy of governments are taken away, since
an anonymous global capital market rules and its judgements about governments’
credit-worthiness and sustainability are the ultimate arbiter – and
much more important than the opinion of national electorates. It is before
these that so many governments quail. If they do not obey the . . . policies
that the market approves, then their debt and currencies will be sold – forcing
them to face an unwanted policy-tightening.
(Hutton, 1994, p. 13)
During the mid-1960s the then Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson complained
of mysterious ‘gnomes of Zurich’ whose trading in sterling compelled his government
to devalue the pound and reduce public expenditure. These experiences
are frequently cited as instances of the power of financiers to limit national
policies. And so they are, but how much more inhibiting are the pressures of
today’s immensely more integrated, electronically connected financial centres.
Post-Fordism
These trends – the imperatives to develop global corporate strategies, an unprecedented
degree of competitive ferocity between transnational behemoths, the
undermining of national sovereignty with the globalisation of financial affairs –
combined with the recessions which afflicted advanced capitalism during the
1970s, have stimulated the creation of a new regime of accumulation. The suggestion
is that, after a twenty-five-year period of stability, Fordism had run its course.
New circumstances required radical changes, not least a thorough restructuring
of corporate organisations if they hoped to achieve the sustained expansion
they once enjoyed and come to terms with the new milieu in which they found
themselves.
An important part of this was to be an assault on organised labour, initially
the trade unions, but extending to collectivist ideas tout court. At one level labour
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