Thus, the question is not whether or not the crisis in Asia is grounded in real economic, political and cultural factors, but rather why did the crisis happen now, rather than five or ten or fifteen years ago. Capitalism has not changed as dramatically as some social commentators would have us believe. Capitalism remains founded upon the deployment of capital for the purpose of generating profits from the productivity of workers, past and present.
Capital is a social construct.
From the contemporary periods of slavery and colonialism, global capital has been concentrated within the so-called Western nations, mostly the United States, Britain and Western Europe. This concentration of capital is reflected in the role of the U.S. dollar, in particular, as an international medium of exchange and store of value. The competition for hard currency-denominated capital is fierce and international in scope. Success at this competition means gaining access to the technological and raw material inputs required to be competitive in a global economy and to finance industrial transformation, a condition for sustained economic growth and improved living standards. For most of the period since the end of World War II, geopolitics was dominated by the competition between the Soviet Union and other nations governed by communist parties and the United States and its NATO allies.