Editorial Notes

Abstract

The concept of a transnational capitalist class is a feature of many attempts to understand the spatial reconfiguration of contemporary capitalism. In “The Transformation of Contemporary Capitalism and the Concept of a Transnational Capitalist Class: A Critical Review in Neo-Poulantzian Perspective,” Joachim Hirsch and Jens Wissel question approaches that suggest this class has displaced national states. They develop an alternative approach that stresses how this class is integrated into national power blocs while also being articulated to international institutions, and explore how this balance has changed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The financial crisis has had some unsettling effects within university economics departments, fuelling interest in alternatives to the neoclassical consensus that has long dominated teaching and research. Marc Lavoie’s “The Global Financial Crisis: Methodological Reflections from a Heterodox Perspective” argues that the central theoretical division is between orthodoxy and the various heterodox schools, a division that can be grasped through five pairs of presuppositions. The basic heterodox view is that markets left on their own are unstable and need to be tamed. Many progressive accounts of the 2008 financial crisis have linked it to a conscious attack on government regulation, often by unscrupulous individuals; the Oscar-winning film “Inside Job” is a case in point. Robert Froese’s “The Limits of Inside Job : Crisis, Ideology, and the Burden of Capitalism” challenges this perspective, arguing that it abstracts the crisis from the underlying logic of capitalism and the way that states and markets mutually constitute each other. This market-making role of states is reflected in Tim Fowler’s “Working for the Clampdown: How the Canadian State Exploits Economic Crises to Restrict Labour Freedoms.” He presents an argument, based on a case study of the 2007–09 CAW automobile negotiations, that the Canadian state intervened, to a remarkable degree, to coerce the union into signing a concessionary collective agreement. While neoliberal governments of all stripes