The crisis of Detroit and the emergence of global capitalism.

The article highlights that Detroit, Michigan faces a grim future of high unemployment, growing demands on the municipal budget and a shrinking revenue base. Historically, the economic health of the region has been intertwined with cyclical variations in the vitality of the U.S. automobile industry. When the industry experienced hard times, so would the residents of the Detroit metropolitan region. The article contends that the world system of capitalism is undergoing a transition from a period in which national economies in the older industrial regions were dominated by monopoly firms and were adequately understood as monopoly capitalist social formations to a period in which the global firm is dominant and the dominant form of the capitalist mode of production is to be understood as global capitalism. As global capitalism takes shape the function of Detroit and other cities in the older regions in the world division of labour becomes transformed. The crisis of Detroit is rooted in this transition from monopoly to global capitalism.