Restructuring

Introduction

The concept of ‘restructuring’ has become widely used in the last two decades by a variety of writers and academic disciplines as a means of characterizing the nature and impact of economic changes. An important expression of this has been its use in Marxist writings, where ‘in the last few years, the focus of attention … has shifted from the issue of capitalist crisis to the question of the restructuring of capitalism’ (Bonefeld and Holloway, 1991: 1). Restructuring is a central term in Marxist (and post-Marxist) writing on capitalism today. None the less, the notion of restructuring has spread beyond these confines to become a template for a much more varied set of analyses of contemporary developments. Yet while restructuring has been widely invoked in explaining and developing change, there has been relatively little direct discussion of the concept itself. Moreover, the term has come to be used to explain a number of distinct processes with limited examination of the extent to which these are connected.

This chapter will examine the usefulness of the concept of restructuring in accounts of social change. It focuses on two distinct kinds of restructuring, productive restructuring and financial restructuring. The central argument of the chapter is that there are significant parallels between the development of recent debates in both areas. In each case the introduction of the concept of restructuring, during the 1980s, opened up important areas of analysis, making connections evident which had hitherto been obscured, and advancing bold and interesting hypotheses. In each case, however, those adopting the concept made a number of sweeping claims which were difficult to [Page 253]substantiate. This left them open to a range of detailed empirical criticisms which raised many necessary questions about the use of restructuring as an organizing framework. While these criticisms were to a large extent justified, however, they also had the effect of narrowing the debate over restructuring so that many of the connections originally highlighted became neglected. In particular the 1990s have seen a reassertion of disciplinary boundaries which has come at the expense of some of the broader perspectives opened out in the previous decade. Further progress is likely to depend on recovering some of the vision of the earlier analyses while substantiating them with greater empirical care.

The chapter will look at productive restructuring and financial restructuring in turn; first outlining the arguments of those using the concept and then examining criticisms. The conclusion compares the debates around the two variants of the concept.

Productive Restructuring

The debate around productive restructuring has its roots in the revival of Marxist economics in the 1970s. Perry Anderson has argued that this revival reached its highest point in three key works which examined ‘the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production as a whole’ (Anderson, 1983: 21). These were Harry Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capital (Braverman, 1974), Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism (Mandel, 1975) and Michel Aglietta's A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience (Aglietta, 1979). In retrospect each of these three works can be seen to have played an important role in the emergence of the concept of restructuring at the turn of the decade.

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