Provincialising American Capitalism: From Universal Instance to Contingent Case
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article draws on theories of uneven development to deconstruct a set of universalising assumptions in the critique of American capitalism. While these theories have called for more relational understandings of capitalism, there is a tendency to naturalise the United States as an instance of universal capitalist relations. Engaging such diverse thinkers as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Michel Aglietta, and Cedric Robinson, the article identifies three recurrent universals, including: (1) abstraction from the US as the most “advanced” capitalist formation; (2) assumption of American capitalism as developing in a particularly “pure” state; and (3) subsumption of the dynamics of American capitalism under universal logics. Reading these against the methodological principles of Uneven and Combined Development, the article argues for provincialising the capitalist formation that appears the most “complete”.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".