It said that half of the students would be community activists and that the course would delve into the philosophy and history of social justice movements "in the context of modern capitalism, the limits of the welfare state, the meaning of globalization, and the impasse of radical politics." Although Gindin no longer serves as Packer Chair, he is still affiliated with York. He also remains active in labour and social movements as a member of the Socialist Project and the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly. The Making of Global Capitalism In 2012, Sam Gindin, with his friend and colleague Leo Panitch, published The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (2012). As its title suggests, the 456-page book is a comprehensive study of the growth of a global capitalist system over more than a century. Gindin and Panitch argue that the process known as globalization was not an inevitable outcome of expansionary capitalism, but was consciously planned and managed by the United States of America, the world's most powerful state. They dispute the idea that globalization was driven by multinational corporations that have become more powerful than nation states. For them, this claim ignores the intricate relationships between states and capitalism; states maintain property rights, oversee contracts and sign free trade agreements, for example, while deriving tax revenues and popular legitimacy from the success of capitalist enterprises within their borders. Panitch and Gindin also dismiss claims that the American Empire is in decline as shown, for example, by U.S. trade deficits, industrial shutdowns and layoffs. They argue that the opposite is true. In recent decades, American firms "restructured key production processes, outsourced others to cheaper and more specialized suppliers and relocated to the U.S. south — all as part of an accelerated general reallocation of capital within the American economy." They write that although it is always highly volatile, the robust and globally dominant U.S. financial system facilitated this economic restructuring while making pools of venture capital available for investment in new, high-tech firms. As a result, the U.S. share of global production remained stable at around one quarter of the total right into the 21st century. American-led global capitalism According to Gindin and Panitch, the institutional foundations for American-led global capitalism were laid during the Great Depression of the 1930s when the Roosevelt administration strengthened the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury while establishing a wide