Global Finance Capital and Third World Debt

Abstract

This essay provides a historical geographical political economy of the deep connection between global capitalist finance, global flows of capital in the form of money, and modern imperialism. It argues that the money-power of capital to appropriate living labor and extra-human natures has expressed itself in particular violent ways in the spaces of the global capitalist economy successively referred to as the peripheries, the colonies, the Third World, and the Global South. The essay suggests that a crucial factor of explanation for the violence of the money-power of capital in those spaces is that they have retained a subordinate positionality in the network of space and power relations within which money-capital flows. This has been largely due to a multitude of imperialist policies and practices on the part of advanced capitalist economies and powerful agents and institutions located within them.