REVIEWS The Global Gamble – Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance PETER GOWAN London: Verso, 1999 Global Social Policy – International Organizations and the Future of Welfare BOB DEACON with MICHELLE HULSE and PAUL STUBBS London: Sage, 1997 Reviewed by KEES VAN DER PIJL Two Modes of Capitalist Incorporation The anti-globalisation movement that took shape in the campaigns against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment before achieving world notoriety in Seattle, has rekindled all the debates within the Left that animated it during the twentieth century. Although the contemporary, ‘global’ Left has moved beyond the xation on conquering national state power, its concept of politics has suffered from the fact that so far, very little is on offer in the way of a framework analysing power struggles among social forces in the global arena and identifying their focus, if the state no longer can be that focus. The two books that I consider here, can be fruitfully discussed in this light. Gowan discusses what he labels the ‘Dollar-Wall Street Regime’, which denotes the set of monetary mechanisms by which the United States seeks to reinforce and deepen its hold on the rest of the world. As a result, the benets of the ‘régime’ will accrue to the rich in the United States, whereas the risks and costs can be passed on abroad. The author rightly qualies this as a ‘gamble’, and if there is anything about this book that has meanwhile been vindicated, it is indeed the title. The suicide attacks on the symbols of the Dollar-Wall Street Régime, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, on 11 September 2001, have dramatically demonstrated the stakes that are being played for here. Deacon, on the other hand, is concerned with ‘the globalization of social policy and the socialization of global politics’. 1 By socialisation, Deacon means the rise of the social (cohesion, interdependence, collective responsibility) relative to the political and the economic. This use of the term socialisation comes close to Polanyi’s concept Historical Materialism, volume 11:3 (201–213) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003 Also available online – www.brill.nl 1 Deacon 1997, p. xi.