[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Capitalist Modernity
A growing number of countries--among them, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and Russia--are in a state of financial turmoil. They are all suffering from the effects of currency devaluation, widespread bankruptcies and insolvencies, actual or impending bank failures, collapsing stock markets, and mounting unemployment. Venezuela, Mexico, China, Brazil, and Argentina may soon join the list. Far more ominously, so too may be Japan. And while their problems up to this point have not been the result of the developing financial crisis, the most important countries of continental Europe have for some years suffered from depression-levels of unemployment--i.e., double digit rates in France, Germany, and Italy. In a word, the world appears to be coming face to face with the closest thing to the conditions of a global depression since the 1930s.
For most of the 20th century capitalism has been buffeted by wars, revolution, and depression. World War I brought revolution and a Marxist-based communism to Russia. The war also spawned the Nazi system in Germany, a malevolent mixture of capitalism and state socialism, brought together in a regime whose violence and expansionism eventually pushed the world into another major conflict. In the aftermath of World War II, Communist economic systems took hold in China and Eastern Europe. However, as the cold war came to an end in the 1980s and the former Soviet-bloc nations turned to free enterprise (though with mixed success at first), China was the only major power to retain a Marxist regime.
Many of the developing nations, strongly influenced by Marxist ideas in the early postcolonial period, turned to a modified form of capitalism in their search for answers to economic problems. In the industrial democracies of Western Europe and North America, the sharpest challenge to capitalism came in the 1930s.....
