We have here a commanding study of over 150 years of the evolution of global capitalism, increasingly under the auspices of the US state. This is an encyclopedic work, and for those who lack background, all the significant turns are addressed and pieced together, in an integrated and readable way. For those more familiar with various debates about global capitalism, Panitch and Gindin can be seen to be presenting a path through the debates. Their work is “light touch” on theory, and so wins its audience by writing a compelling history, without claims to (or for or against) theoretical orthodoxy.

This is, we believe, a refreshing way of writing, for we observe on the Left too many interpretations of recent history that are driven by defending orthodoxies (be they Keynesian, or generally social democratic, or Marxist, or of particular Marxisms). One of the challenges of the recent financial crisis, and indeed the financial transformations of which it was an expression, is to ask whether our conventional ways of framing industrial capitalism still hold. Can we usefully think of the global financial crisis through the theory of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall? Are more state expenditure and/or more state “regulation” a way to reflate capital accumulation? We would like to think that the answer to these sorts of questions is not pre-determined, for in the challenges to conventional understandings new interpretations generate new angles of political engagement.

So because economic formalism is absent from this book, the issue of which orthodoxies are to be defended and which transformed or ditched does not directly arise. In many ways, and pleasingly so, this means that it can be read as a statement to be evaluated “on its merits.” But, at the risk of drawing Panitch and Gindin back to conventional debates that they have avoided, there are two big questions that we want to pose which do take, or are in danger of taking, their analysis back into those conventional debates, although we hope not to engage it dogmatically.