Globalization and American Common Sense: Struggling to Make Sense of a Post-Hegemonic World

Abstract

During the postwar decades, industrial workers in the USA were incorporated into a broad ‘middle class’, and thereby also brought into an historic bloc which promoted the transnational hegemony of liberal capitalism while seeking to contain the putative menace of expansionist Communism. Now, as capitalism becomes more fully transnational and the Fordist class accommodation is under attack by the state and corporate capital, American industrial workers find themselves largely disempowered and under severe economic pressures. Political ideologies appropriate to an era of Fordist prosperity and Cold War certainties may now begin to appear increasingly anachronistic.