One indicator of the deepening crisis of profitability is that competition has replaced cooperation as the dominant aspect of the relationship among global capitalist elites. New productive capacity and stagnant if not declining global demand is the recipe for the exacerbation of the crisis of profitability. On the other hand, the export of capital has created massive new industrial capacity in China and selected other countries. On the one hand, neoliberal policies in the North and structural adjustment programs in the South have gutted global demand. Efforts by global capital to regain profitability by more intensively exploiting labor in the North or moving out to take advantage of significantly lower wages elsewhere have merely exacerbated the crisis. The result has been, over time, drastically lowered growth rates in the central economies, stagnation, and a crisis of profitability. This refers to the growing gap between the tremendous productive capacity of the global capitalist system and the limited global demand for the commodities produced by this system. The second is the crisis of overproduction, overaccumulation, or overcapacity. Hugo Chavez' scintillating defiance of American power would not be possible without the Iraqi resistance's successfully pinning down US interventionist forces in a war without end. This has led to an erosion of its strategic position globally and made the threat of the employment of US military force to discipline recalcitrant governments and forces throughout the world less credible than it was three years ago. The first is the crisis of overextension, or the growing gap between imperial reach and imperial grasp, the most striking example of which is the US's being drawn into a quagmire in Iraq. In my book, Dilemmas of Domination, I identify three dimensions of this crisis. I have been asked to speak on the crisis of American hegemony. Francis Xavier University, and York University, Canada, October 2005.) (Speech delivered at Dalhousie University, St.
The Global Crisis of Legitimacy of Liberal Democracy
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