Overseas investment absorbed US surplus capacity by creating global mass markets

Evidence

This opening up of foreign investment (chiefly in Europe) and trade permitted surplus productive capacity in the United States to be absorbed elsewhere, while the progress of Fordism internationally meant the formation of global mass markets and the absorption of the mass of the world’s population, outside the communist world, into the global dynamics of a new kind of capitalism. Furthermore, uneven development within the world economy meant the experience of already muted business cycles as so many local and broadly compensating oscillations within a fairly stable growth of world demand. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 821

Categorization

• DEFINE: This clarifies how Fordism as a regime requires surplus absorption — a key mechanism in the flexible-accumulation comparison.
• XREF: connects to: Underdeveloped nations uniquely channel surplus to the world metropolis — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 14; US financial-military hegemony structured the postwar Fordist world economy — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 825; The forces of capital returned globally by the late 1970s and reshaped the world (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Underdeveloped nations uniquely channel surplus to the world metropolis #complicates (0.75) — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 14
• US financial-military hegemony structured the postwar Fordist world economy #expands (0.72) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 825
• The forces of capital returned globally by the late 1970s and reshaped the world #complicates (0.72)
• Capital abandons regions then re-exploits them via new investment #expands (0.72) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 285