Modern Global Capitalism Research Articles

More Than a Cup of Coffee and Tea: A Generation of Lutheran-Muslim Relationships ed. by David D. Grafton

Reviewed by: More Than a Cup of Coffee and Tea: A Generation of Lutheran-Muslim Relationships ed. by David D. Grafton Robert F. Shedinger More Than a Cup of Coffee and Tea: A Generation of Lutheran-Muslim Relationships. Edited by David D. Grafton. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2021. 212 pp. This book provides an overview of Lutheran-Muslim relationships spanning the last thirty years. Following forewords by Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) Bishop Elizabeth Eaton and Sayyid Syeed, head of the Islamic Society of North America, the book begins with four essays focused on official documents produced by Lutheran bodies on the topic of Lutheran-Muslim relationships as well as the influence of Islamophobia on those relationships. This section includes an essay on the 1986 document God and Jesus: Theological Reflections for Christian-Muslim Dialogue and one on the development of the Lutheran-Muslim consultative panel. These chapters lay the foundation for how the ELCA has thought theologically about its engagement with Islam and Muslims. The next three chapters take us inside specific examples of Lutheran-Muslim engagement in the United States. We learn how Lutherans are engaging with the Somali community in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis. We learn also about Lutheran-Muslim community connections in Southern California fostered by the Claremont School of Theology and the development of the Center of Christian-Muslim Engagement for Peace and Justice at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. The final four chapters expand the focus beyond the United States to Lutheran-Muslim encounters in Palestine, Indonesia, Senegal, and India. No doubt, Lutherans have been at the forefront of good faith efforts to build bridges of mutual understanding and cooperation with Muslims around the world. This book does an excellent job of documenting this. But despite all the good work —like the work of the Lutheran World Federation's Augusta Victoria Hospital serving Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza—I think Lutherans, like other Christians, continue to view Christian-Muslim dialogue from [End Page 232] within a specifically Christian worldview. Are Lutherans authentically hearing Muslim voices? We see a hint of this in the Rev. Jane Buckley-Farlee's essay on engagement with the Somali community in Minneapolis. She relates how Trinity Lutheran Church launched a Safe Place Homework Help program in 2001. An average of fifteen Muslim students come to the church each day after school for help with homework provided by tutors from Augsburg University and the University of Minnesota. One day, Rev. Buckley-Farlee relates how a student asked to use her office to engage in one of the five daily prayers. Rev. Buckley-Farlee, who was working on prayers for her Sunday service, invited the student in to pray. "I could see her standing, bowing, and kneeling, praying, out of the corner of my eye as I tried to type my own prayers for Sunday. It suddenly dawned on me that we were doing the same thing" (83). Well, not exactly. Christian prayer is much more akin to the Muslim practice of dua (intercessory prayer). The obligatory five daily prayers (or salat) involving ritual physical prostration are one of the five pillars of Islam and as such are part of a larger Islamic system designed to inculcate submission to God in all affairs of life in a way that transcends the carefully maintained boundaries between the sacred and secular so fundamental to the Western Christian worldview. This same mistake occurs when Christians liken the Islamic pillar of zakat to charity, missing the fact that zakat is really an obligatory wealth tax and the heart of what many Muslims believe is a uniquely Islamic economic system. I hope that as Lutheran-Muslim relationships move forward, there will be a greater interest among Lutherans and all Christians to understand Islam from a Muslim perspective. They might find real common ground, not necessarily theologically, but in a shared vision of the devastating and dehumanizing effects of modern global capitalism. Christians and Muslims can do much together to save the planet from human-caused catastrophe. [End Page 233] Robert F. Shedinger Luther College Decorah, Iowa Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

ЦІННІСНА ДИФЕРЕНЦІАЦІЯ В ЄВРОПЕЙСЬКОМУ СОЮЗІ: ІСТОРИЧНІ ПЕРЕДУМОВИ ТА ТЕНДЕНЦІЇ

The article shows the dynamics of changes in the dominant social values ​​in the European Union and the impact of this trend on the peculiarities of political processes. The pandemic has accelerated the process of crystallization of liberal-democratic and authoritarian models of modern global capitalism. Social changes provoke a conflict of values. Socialist, liberal and conservative parties are losing credibility. The situation is being used by populists. The historical period of uncertainty disorients public opinion. The crisis of traditional liberal-democratic values ​​creates an ideological vacuum. The manifestation of this trend is a change under the influence of changing social stratification of socio-political identities of individuals and societies. The post-industrial European information society is creating a shortage of traditional ideas about work and Christian morality. This process destroys trade union and social democratic political practices. The dominant information socio-political sphere is characterized by the blurring of the criteria of truthfulness and falsity of information. Gone is the idea of ​​a rational, well-informed voter capable of making a conscious political choice in favor of one’s own and the public’s interests. The article shows the correlation between the change of values ​​and the political culture of Western, Eastern, Southern and Northern Europe. The choice in favor of a “green economy” stimulates a change in social values ​​and everyday practices of human behavior. The pandemic created a crisis of power legitimacy. Quarantine “shutdowns” of the economy creates a crisis of administrative rationality. The consequence of these trends is a crisis of motivation of government and society due to stressful overload of competing values. The conclusions prove that value differentiation in the European Union is a consequence of the peculiarities of the development of national history. These trends are evident during the intergovernmental conference on the future of the European Union. Uncertainty about the European Union’s development strategy freezes the EU’s enlargement process. The realization of the tendency to harmonize different values ​​is hypothetical.

Colours of a revolution. Post-communist society, global capitalism and the Ukraine crisis

The Ukraine crisis is usually treated either as Russia’s return to the old-style empire-building (the right) or as a clash of two imperialisms (the left). However, the essence of this crisis can be understood only from the dual perspective of the consequences of the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the fate of the modern global capitalism. The most rotten sections of the Soviet bureaucracy moved the society to capitalism. However, this effort could secure only a peripheral (Ukraine) or at best semi-peripheral (Russia) position in the capitalist world-system as a provider of cheap raw materials. Meanwhile, modern capitalism led to world economic crisis. In these conditions, the capital of the core capitalist countries obviously decided to strengthen its control over the periphery, and Russia’s aspirations to secure its domination over the former Soviet space were in the way. To thwart them, Western powers decided to provoke a Ukraine crisis, exploiting Ukrainians’ justified indignation at the backwardness and corruption inherent in their own peripheral capitalism. Hence, a study of the properties of the post-Soviet societies and their place in the world hierarchy is the key to understanding the Ukraine crisis.

Rethinking the ideology of responsible tourism

Drawing on the critique of ideology elaborated by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in this conceptual paper we rethink responsible tourism. More specifically, in line with Žižek’s argument that ideology is closely linked to reality and not a dreamlike illusion, we reconceptualise the ideological character of responsible tourism. This ideological character, we propose, is fundamentally rooted in real global issues, and often inadvertently and implicitly sustains the mechanism of modern global capitalism. Although responsible tourism has been a powerful unifier among tourism stakeholders, we argue that its critical conceptual considerations have not yet been given sufficient robust reflection. Hence, in this conceptual paper, we rethink responsible tourism through the lens of ideology contributing to further knowledge about this topic. In doing so, we analyse two key policy documents: the Cape Town (2002) and Kerala (2008) Declarations from which the term of responsible tourism originated. Following Žižek’s critique of ideology, we aspire to shape more inclusive and effective sustainable and responsible development as advocated by the Sustainable Development Goals and responsible tourism stakeholders. Furthermore, the novel interjection of the Žižekian concept of ideology to the context of responsible tourism opens up new theoretical possibilities for critical tourism studies.

The Rabbit and the Goat: A Trickster's Tale of Transnational Migration of Mayas to the United States of America (El Norte)

Victor Montejo analyzes and interprets this Maya folktale as a way of explaining current transnational migration and dislocation in Maya communities. Through the story and the discussion, we see the many aspects of Maya migration, Guatemalan ethnic relations, and the power of modern global capitalism. Written from the standpoint of the year 2009, “The Rabbit and the Goat” establishes a strong marker in time and allows the reader deep insights into the present.

State Power and the Enforcement of Prohibition in Mexico

This article positions the prohibition of psychoactive substances as a material means of strengthening States and State power. We argue that the militarized enforcement of prohibition has known outcomes beyond the control of substances, including the creation of cash economies that, firstly, support the smooth flowing of modern global capitalism, and secondly, finance US allied (reactionary) armed groups internationally. Various national contexts are considered, with a special focus on how these trends are developing in the ongoing “war on drugs” in Mexico.

Immigrants, Precarious Workforce as a Structural Necessity of Modern Global Capitalism

This article focuses on the socio-economic aspects of migration and migrants – economic refugees. The author presents the migrants as a precarious workforce, which is an indispensable part of modern global capitalism. In this article, the author points out that among the many factors influencing migration, the economic ones play the most crucial role. Forces released by the neo-liberal paradigm led to the global economic and social tensions. This is due to the fact that the market has become the only regulator of economic and social relations. This article is not another critique of neo-liberal doctrine, advocating for replacing capitalism by “something else.” The author believes, similarly to John Gray, that what we need is a consensus between the states on different models of capitalism, as there are different cultures.

Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature

Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature

Book Review of "Academic Capitalism in the Age of Globalization"

Cantwell, Brendan & Kauppinen, Ilkka (Eds.) (2014). Academic Capitalism in the Age of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pages: 296. Price: 34.95 USD (paper).Academic Capitalism in the Age of Globalization acts as a scholarly interrogation of the theory and practice of academic capitalism within the context of globalization. Brendan Cantwell and Ilkka Kauppinen assemble an international team of leading scholars that reexamine the theory of academic capitalism and analyze the intersection of academic capitalism and globalization. Drawing on scholarship from Sheila Slaughter, Larry Leslie, and Gary Rhoades, the text situates various aspects of higher education - student recruitment, classroom instruction, faculty research, administrative governance, and the control of intellectual property - within a political economy consequent to the market and state. The authors explore how institutions and the political economy are interrelated, referencing key categories such as time, academic labour, and knowledge as a commodity within different (inter-) national settings.Cantwell and Kauppinen (Chapter 1) extend, refine, and challenge research and practice associated with academic capitalism and outline two recent and significant contributions to scholarship in academic capitalism theory. First, the authors present a conceptual framework to study the shift in institutional policy from public to private welfare and competitive regimes. Second, they offer methodological tools for tracking (re-) formation of interconnectedness in postsecondary institutions, considering intellectuals, institutions, and networks. The authors explore academic capitalism within the context of knowledge-driven economies as both a concept and analytic tool. Discourse throughout the text draws on classical Marxian and Weberian thought and Foucauldian notions of government and regime and globalization theory.Slaughter (Chapter 2) assesses the explanatory power of academic capitalism within the context of globalization - a thought project on how elite United States institutions are networked with global actors. Slaughter examines how knowledge actors shape, and are shaped by, various global flows and contexts. She argues that networks are new forms of governance; and policy entrepreneurship is a way of examining the role of agency in policy creation and dissemination - and ultimately network legitimization.Jussi Valimaa (Chapter 3) situates academic capitalism within a broad historical context - from medieval European roots to contemporary globally networked postsecondary institutions. Valimaa reinforces the shift in institutional and individual roles in global knowledge production and dissemination. This is especially prevalent during university revolutions (p. 33) when knowledge producers have been challenged by novel ideas, technologies and polices. He emphasizes administrative roles in the context of academic work, organizational structure, and relationships to society, and the influence of technology in knowledge production and work within academia. The establishment of a knowledge-networked society (Valimaa, 2012) promotes open access to knowledge.Judith Walker (Chapter 4) focuses on academic capitalism and time. This perspective opens new means of theorizing academic capitalism as a temporal, structural and behavioral process. Walker cites massive open online courses (MOOCs), which appear uncapitalistic - almost entirely free and for no credit, but embody the tenet of post-Fordist, neoliberal academic capitalism - entrepreneurial in sprit and based on a partnership model. Modern global capitalism has moved from industrial production based economies to service and knowledge based economies. This is due to developments in technological innovations and changes in capitalism and the rise of global outcomes.Chapter 5 examines technology transfer and intellectual property. Jacob H. Rooksby and Brian Pusser discuss how academic capitalism and technology transfer expose institutions to increased financial risk and revenue generation. …

“I haven’t seen you since (a specific date, a time, the weather)”: Global Identity and the Reinscription of Subjectivity in Brian Castro’s Shanghai Dancing

“Who am I? Where am I? Where and to whom do I belong?” These are, according to sociologist Ulrich Beck (1997: 107), key questions facing the individual in the globalizing world. Yet even this formulation is too essentialist, the interrogative pronouns pointing to monolithic sources upon which to found contemporary identities. The present is a time “when power is no longer so neatly centred or easily tracked and when people’s lives and identities are no longer so neatly bounded or easily located” (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010: 255). Contemporary literature holds a unique position: through fiction, writers connect aesthetically with the public imagination, commenting and reflecting upon contemporary instabilities. In Shanghai Dancing , Australian author Brian Castro not only presents readers with a protagonist whose national heritage is so “spectacularly hybridised” that he explodes “any perceived distinction between a homogenous, dominant culture and multiethnic others” (Brennan 2008: 4), his innovative and linguistically challenging prose performs playful subjective shifts. Whilst Castro’s novels often envision dialogues between different cultural affiliations (principally those pertinent to his own hybridized identities - Australian, Chinese, Portuguese, French, and English), Shanghai Dancing also blurs autobiography with fiction to explore the multiple negotiations within contemporary identity construction. This article offers a detailed reading of the literary representations of identity in Shanghai Dancing . Focusing upon perceptual deixis in the form of pronoun usage and narrative address, particularly the literary manipulation of pronominal positioning, the analysis links Castro’s experimental poetics to his socio-political critique. In a reflective essay, the author suggests that autobiography and the first-person pronoun “invokes multiplicity” and offers “a proliferation of selves. A juxtaposing of differences”. He declares “ I am not only Portuguese, Chinese and French, but I am writing myself out of crippling essentialist categorisations, out of the control exerted over multiplicities .” (1999 [1996]: 114-5; original italics). Thus, multiple subjective positionings are both a feature of the innovative texture of Castro’s prose and a vehicle of liberation. This article places Castro’s writing within the discourse of metamodernism, tendering “ aesth-ethical ” commitment (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010) and being “pointedly relational, turning as it does on self and other’s foundational co-relationality with respect to one another” (Moraru 2011: 17). The analysis shows that Shanghai Dancing depicts metamodernist identity as self-reflexive for characters and more significantly for writer and readers too, whose cosmopolitan identities (our attitudes, our purchases, our leisure activities including literary reading) connect with and are complicit in modern global capitalism.

Adjunct Faculty and NFL Referees: The Appropriation of Value from Professional Part‐Time Workers

This article distinguishes a particular category of “part‐time worker”—the professional who works part‐time—and traces how such workers have the value of their professional skill appropriated by their employers. We do this by a comparison of the NFL Referees' Strike of 2012—NFL referees are part‐time employees—with the debate over whether adjunct faculty should be covered by the terms of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These two seemingly disparate labor actions are joined in the analysis by the fact that both involved a series of textual constructions. These textual constructions are explored using sociologist Dorothy E. Smith's patterning of modern global capitalism as a system divided into “the local actualities of lived experience” where the world's work is done and “the extra‐local relations of ruling” where “texts” are created that pattern and appropriate that work. We consider the NFL Referees' Strike as a “teachable moment” when public attention was turned to a labor issue; we then question whether the debate over the ACA and adjunct faculty might serve the same purpose. We conclude that the diversity among adjunct faculty in terms of their financial and career relation to adjunct teaching—which contrasts with a uniformity among NFL referees—makes it hard to craft a unifying message. We end by suggesting that the relations of ruling are perhaps well served by the current lack of information about adjunct faculty, a lack that makes it hard for organizers to mobilize them.

Poetry and Sociality in a Global Frame

Poetry and Sociality in a Global Frame Walt Hunter (bio) Dowdy, Michael. 2013. Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. $30.00 sc. 296 pp. Furani, Khaled. 2012. Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press. $55.00 hc. 312 pp. A formidable hermeticism has long held sway over Anglophone poetry criticism. While criticism of other literary genres expands its grasp, most notably into new sociological approaches to literature, knowledge of the tropes and schemes of poetry serves as a border check for those interested in poetic criticism, slowing contemporary poetry’s reception, inhibiting pedagogy, and operating in general like a canon of revealed truths. Generally speaking, to read poetry means to learn the history of poetic devices and to recognize the various appearances (or absences) of this history in an individual poem: why a line break works the way it does, why a metaphor appears where it does. But these claims about poetic design do not only represent a neutral language specific to literary study or a convenient mechanism for distinguishing between traditional and avant-garde strands of poetry. By attributing a private and individual, rather than global and material, foundation to the aesthetics of poetry, such claims also prevent poetry from being recognized as a social form. As a result, canonical notions of line, verse, and enjambment are theorized as though poetry developed and continues to develop in monastic seclusion from the political economies and emergent precarities of modern global capitalism. [End Page 129] No sustained analysis exists in which the history of poetry and poetics is reread in the light of the history of globalization. Books on Anglophone poetry in particular have been cautious in adopting a postcolonial, global, or transnational critical perspective and, in general, complacent in upholding the immutable value of a small set of formal devices and traditions. Within this tradition, however, there are critics who are moving toward a global and socially attuned poetics. Jahan Ramazani’s The Hybrid Muse (2001) and A Transnational Poetics (2009) link poetic tropes of metaphor and figures of irony with theories and themes of hybridity, migration, and exile in postcolonial Anglophone poetry. After Ramazani, the Jamaican poets Claude McKay and Louise Bennett can no longer be treated as marginal, neither to postcolonial studies nor to poetry, while the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and the Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott, who are already the subjects of a voluminous critical corpus, appear newly relevant. Focusing on the late nineteenth century, Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005) calls attention to the processes by which a variety of poetic genres had been “lyricized” into a single, dominant genre, at the same time that it incites new histories of poetic subgenres, genealogies of American poetry, and compelling defenses of lyric as a collective voice (Costello 2012) or the “performance of an event” (Culler 2009, 887). Meanwhile, Stephen Burt’s many accessible reviews of contemporary poets bypass altogether the retrenched arguments for conceptual and lyric forms. The cultivation of a catholic taste for multiple, often discrepant styles in poetry, rather than buttressing a single framework of value, makes Burt a welcome voice in the wake of Language and post-Language scuffles over the politics of poetic form and political identity. Most recently, the poetics of precarious life under neoliberal conditions has been the object of attention by a scattered group of leftist poets and thinkers, including Anne Boyer (2014), Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013), Jasper Bernes (2013), Christopher Nealon (2011), Joshua Clover and Keston Sutherland (2013), Franco Berardi (2012), Judith Butler (2013), Chris Chen (2013), and Rob Halpern (2013). If we place this work alongside emergent, innovative work on post-war Anglophone, Russian, and Nigerian poetry by critics as diverse as Jennifer Ashton (2013), Marijeta Bozovic (2014), and Nathan Suhr-Sytsma (2013), it becomes immediately apparent that the entire field of poetry and poetics has taken on a new urgency and a pluralism of method. There is no reason why more work on poetry cannot wager the ambition, strength of argument, accessibility, and cross-disciplinary reach of groundbreaking books on globalization and culture such...

The Crisis of Family and Unions in Late Modern Global Capitalism

The Crisis of Family and Unions in Late Modern Global Capitalism

The Apotheosis of Frida and Ché: Secular Saints and Fetishized Commodities

This article explores the contradictory positionings of two significant Latin Americans, Ché Guevara and Frida Kahlo, through reflection on their historical, ideological, and folk meanings. Frida and Ché have ceased to be historical figures as their images have become commodified as part of the rampant consumerism that typifies modern global capitalism. I argue that Ché and Frida have been transformed into secular icons, in particular by the Latin American left, owing largely to their tragic death/lives which reflect the martyrdom of Catholic saints. As pop cause célèbres , consumed by audiences that care little to understand the complexities of their ideologies, desires, and agendas, their images have been appropriated and marketed by the fashion, novelty, and cottage industries. Frida and Ché now function as fetishized commodities used as stylistic elements designed to sell a range of consumer goods, yet remain powerful icons that challenge the hegemony of globalization, patriarchy, and, in the case of Frida, heteronormativity.

The Global Sphere: Peter Sloterdijk’s Theory of Globalization

The Global Sphere: Peter Sloterdijk’s Theory of Globalization

God, Gold, Glory and Gender: A Postcolonial View of Mission

Recently I taught workshop at the Institute of Formation and Religious Studies in Manila. The group included large number and variety of women religious from different Asian countries, as well as Protestant clergywomen, and lay women and men from different churches. Together we struggled to find new vision of the which would be one of peace, justice, and the inclusion of women, as well as men, in all aspects of leadership and decision-making. As we gathered in mixed groups, both large and small, we constituted what I call church in the round: a community of faith and struggle working to anticipate God's New Creation by becoming partners with those who are at the margins of and society. (1) This gathering in the Philippines reminded me again and again that mission is alive and well. Here were women and men risking their lives to work in solidarity with workers, peasants, excluded groups and all the rest. They understood their calling to mission as call to serve those in need, and to proclaim the good news that God cares about the broken and despised of every nation. Such was the view of sister from Vietnam, where speaking the gospel in public is forbidden. She told of reaching out to people to help them in their need and thus living out the gospel through service. The gathering also reminded me that colonialism is alive and well, and that the same is true of forms of domination in the and our societies. Countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America may describe their circumstances as postcolonial, but in reality the world looks very much neo-colonial as modern global capitalism and US imperialism manage to control the life and death of people across the globe. One witness to this was the testimony of human rights worker who is wanted by the death squads in Mindoro in the Philippines, and twelve-year old girl who witnessed her parents' arrest and death while hiding in her home. This intimidation, torture and military harassment is part of systematic neo-colonial policy of the United States to support state terrorism against the Philippine people in order to open lands to development by multinational corporations. Such structures of domination and subordination call for new look at missions and their traditional connection to colonialism and to structures of patriarchy. Fortunately for us, writers of interpretation are beginning to provide us with an analysis of the contradictions between the rhetoric of liberation and democracy, and the reality of oppression in many countries like the Philippines that have colonial history. Postcolonial interpretation has been developing field of analysis since the publication of Edward Said's book, Orientalism, in 1978. Said focused on ... colonial discourse--the variety of textual forms in which the West produced and codified knowledge about non-metropolitan areas and cultures, especially those under colonial control. (2) The term postcolonial addresses all aspects of the colonial process from the beginning of colonial contact up to and including its present affects in both colonizing and colonized nations. The work of interpretation is both that of analysis and that of resistance and reconstruction as scholars examine the many contradictions between the colonial and neo-colonial rhetoric, and the continuing cultural, political, economic and religious oppression experienced by colonized peoples. (3) Those who write this theory are committed to documenting the contradictions in their many fields, and to future in which post- applies not only to the centuries after colonial contact and struggles for independence, but also to time after which colonialism and imperialism are ended. Attention to rhetoric and literary theory has led biblical scholars to include these perspectives in their postmodern interpretations, and gradually feminist scholars of religion have begun to write in this field. …

The Moral Basis of Global Capitalism: Beyond the Eclectic Theory

Dunning's recent discussions of the morality of global capitalism, as developed from his eclectic theory, are critically reviewed. It is argued that, in highlighting the benefits of globalisation, Dunning has underestimated the extent to which globalisation amplifies the costs of capitalism. The nature of capitalism varies according to the social and religious framework within which economic activity is embedded. An effective framework creates a high-trust form of capitalism based on self-regulation and self-control. This framework aligns private and social interests in cases where the forces of law and competition are weak. Late twentieth-century Western culture is secular and atomistic: it has fostered a low-trust form of capitalism, based on a selfish, individualistic and competitive concept of the entrepreneur. Low-trust capitalism provides entrepreneurs with unrivalled opportunities to manipulate consumer tastes, and frees them from any inhibitions about exercising this power. The globalisation of consumer product markets has reinforced this tendency, by strengthening the incentive to refine manipulative marketing techniques. The increasing reliance on mass media - especially television - for advertising distinguishes modern global capitalism from the international capitalism of the late nineteenth century. Because of these changes, people's wants are satisfied with unprecedented abundance, but their social needs are met much less adequately than before.

Global Incorporation and Cultural Survival: The Surinamese Maroons at the Margins of the World-System

The Maroons of Suriname enter the twenty-? rst century as the only surviving, culturally and politically autonomous Maroon communities in the Americas. The paper adopts a world-systems approach to explain the evolution of the Surinamese Maroon nations vis-à-vis the ever expanding Surinamese state and global political economy, with particular attention paid to the cultural survival of the Maroon nations. Prior to emancipation, limited colonial integration and mutual fear between the Maroons and Surinamese coastal society facilitated the development of the Maroon communities as relatively independent nations. Despite the best efforts of colonial authorities after emancipation, the weak economy and infrastructure of the Surinamese colony as well as continued mutual fear and distrust enabled the Maroons to guard their autonomy. However, after the Second World War, a period of global economic expansion, the rapid development of the Suriname as an integrated political, economic and cultural unit, and the depletion of and strain on natural resources in traditional Maroon territory dealt serious blows to Maroon autonomy. Maroon cultural survival depends on the ability of the Maroon nations to navigate the rapid changes currently affecting Maroon society, guarding political autonomy and cultivating the most treasured aspects of their cultural heritage, while participating, albeit peripherally, in modern global capitalism.