This article argues that historians of neoliberalism could benefit from Moishe Postone’s call to move beyond the “surface” of market dynamics and engage the “deep structure” of capitalist value. Postone’s approach offers several suggestions for historians of neoliberalism: (1) to resituate the neoliberal era as one of many different “historical forms” of capital; (2) to write a history of the 1970s crisis through the categories “value” and the “composition of capital” explicated by Marx; (3) to frame the 1970s less as a “terminal crisis” or “distortion” of capitalism’s normal operations than as the latest in a long-term series of restructurings; and (4) to open up the historiographical fixation on north Atlantic deindustrialization and to think about stagnation more expansively. This article offers a suggestive exploration of Asia-Pacific history in the second half of the twentieth century that gestures toward a more global, capital-centered account of 1970s restructuring.
Andrew B. Liu (Sun,) studied this question.