SUMMARY
History continually messes up the neat conceptual frameworks and the more or less elegant theoretical speculations with which we endeavor to understand the past and forecast the future of the world we live in. In recent years, two events stand out as eminently subversive of the intellectual landscape: the sudden demise of the USSR as one of the two main loci of world power and the gradual rise of East Asia to epicenter of world -scale processes of capital accumulation. Although each event has received more than its due of scholarly attention, it is their joint occurrence that has the most significant conceptual and theoretical implications.