Limites du capitalisme et contradictions néolibérales : le cas des districts industriels italiens
Limits of Capitalism and Neoliberal Contradictions: the Case of Italian Industrial Districts

Summary/Abstract: In the past three decades, the Italian industrial districts (ID) have been regarded as a model of civilized capitalism, a sort of capitalism “with a human face” based on the positive interaction among economic factors and sociocultural variables at local scale. This is why the Italian economists who have studied the ID (the distrettualisti) believe that an interdisciplinary approach is necessary in order to understand how an ID works, and that mainstream economics cannot explain its peculiarity. Although this posture is a first important step towards regaining the primacy of politics over economics, the distrettualisti are trapped into the contradictions of the neoliberal ideology. This paper intends to provide a framework based on the Marxian analytical tools, in order to detect the limits and contradictions of both the idea of a “civilized” capitalism and the distrettualisti posture.

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