This was the neoliberal order of free trade: the systematic reduction of tariff barriers and the creation of a global financial system that facilitated the easy movement of both capital and commodities from one part of the world to another. The rise of new technologies of transport and communications also helped a great deal. One of the consequences of this was the development of multiple alternative centers of capital accumulation. Japan, for example, developed very strongly during the 1960s only to find itself with huge quantities of surplus capital at the end of the 1970s. And what was it going to do with it? The Japanese explored a spatial fix.

Marx has an interesting description of how this spatial fix works. The territory with surplus capital lends money to some other place in the world, which then uses it to buy commodities from the capital surplus country. The destination country can use the commodities it purchases either to satisfy the wants and needs of its population (through consumerism) or to build infrastructures and operations conducive to the further development of capitalism in its territory.

And so, Japan started to ‘colonise’ the US consumer market. The Japanese ‘invasion’ of the US economy followed; they bought the Rockefeller Center, and they got into Hollywood, buying Columbia Pictures. Surplus capital flowed from Japan back into the US, but it also expanded around the rest of the world, even assuming a mini-imperialist posture in many emerging markets, such as in Latin America. Shortly afterwards, we saw similar sequences throughout the rest of Asia. South Korea developed, not initially as a free-market economy but under military dictatorship. The US encouraged this for one very simple reason: the containment of communism.