The Integrated Circus: The New Right and the Restructuring of Global Markets

by Patricia Marchak

When Pax Americana began to disintegrate in the late 1960s, economic leaders in corporate America joined with their counterparts in Western Europe and Japan to develop a self-interested strategy for dealing with the political and social impacts of a changing global economy. As Marchak shows, the political agenda of the emerging New Right the dismantling of the welfare state was supported by corporate-funded think-tanks which influenced public policy and by media campaigns which swayed public opinion. The New Right promoted the resurgence of laissez-faire political and economic ideas which Marchak traces back to the theories of Adam Smith. Marchak describes the changes such strategies created in the world economy and examines their effects on the United States and Canada, Western and Eastern Europe, Japan, the newly industrializing nations, and the increasingly impoverished third world countries. She includes chapters on the silicon revolution, Japanese expansion, the automobile industry, special export zones, the debt crisis, environmental issues, and international organizations.

336 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1991

Reviews

[Tarbuckle · Rating 3 out of 5]

The late Patricia Marchak was an anthropologist, not an economist, and her historical analysis stemmed from her immersion in that first discipline as well; and yet it is quite remarkable how prescient and timely her academic polemic against the early instantiation of the New Right as a globally spread ideological force termed Neoliberalism, from the vantage point of our new millennial hindsight, proved to be. There was some lightly veiled attribution of malice to the entire affair that I don't believe was warranted or vindicated by the events, but as regards a motive purposiveness she laid-out her evidence convincingly.