Neoliberal Global Capitalism Research Articles

Theorizing the Cuban Revolution

An assessment of the outcomes of the Cuban Revolution in terms of theories of both the causes and outcomes of revolutions in general reveals that that the revolution has been spectacularly successful in terms of ensuring the well-being of the vast majority of Cubans, while at the same time failing to deliver fully democratic institutions and freedoms. The success of the revolution in maintaining itself against U.S. hostility and the deepening of neoliberal global capitalism is attributed to the strength of the political culture that the revolution has forged and carried forward across the generations. The future of the revolution looks bright, especially if the Cuban people find a way to secure deeper democratic gains to match their social and economic ones.

From Covert to Overt: Everyday Peasant Politics in China and the Implications for Transnational Agrarian Movements

This contribution spotlights overt collective action as the form of everyday peasant politics in post‐socialist China. It first considers the interlinking in the post‐socialist period of global neoliberal capitalism and internal (so‐called) primitive accumulation by corrupt officials and eager entrepreneurs. Against this background it examines the collective protests of the last 20 years, focusing first on the issue of corrupt local power and then on land seizures. It argues that the emergence of sustained rural contention has been informed by China's socialist legacy as well as older peasant ideologies, and it has involved the coalescence of a shared class perspective among the poor and dispossessed. The final portion of the article considers the implications of these everyday peasant politics, especially land struggles, for transnational agrarian movements.

Forging a Migration Policy for Capital: Labor Shortages and Guest Workers

The expanding use of guest work is the wave of the future global neoliberal capitalism, but is a recurring theme in capitalism. The trade in global labor was pervasive during the Victorian age, second only to trade in finance. As the United States lost manufacturing to the global South, service and professional workers and their unions found it reassuring that that their jobs could not sent abroad. In the last decade, importing service workers from the global South is a dominant trend. As the United States is closing doors to traditional forms of immigration, it promotes migrant labor as a means to fill job shortages created by capital to lower wages. Guest work destabilizes the working class through turning “good jobs” into “bad jobs.” If comprehensive immigration reform includes guest work, borders will close and free migrant labor will become indentured labor. The World Bank and WTO view these programs as the new development model for the global South. Promoting export of skilled and unskilled labor benefits a bare few while driving most workers and peasants into abject poverty while heightening exploitation of labor worldwide.

From Transitional Postsocialist Spaces to Neoliberal Global Capitalism

From Transitional Postsocialist Spaces to Neoliberal Global Capitalism

Farmers and Farmworkers

Strategic alterity is defined here as a process of shifting between different assertions of devalued group identity in order to valorize free-trading citizens of the market and to mask the labor of those making that free market participation possible (by moralizing the devalorization). The examples provided here - based on ethnographic, oral history, and archival research in an eastern Kentucky, US community - focus on the ways that different markers of identity have characterized the farmworkers providing the low-wage or non-wage labor in tobacco over the past two centuries that has made it possible for those whose crops they work in to see themselves as independent, family farmers. Tobacco is viewed, here, as having always been a global crop produced by a ‘globalized’ labor force. The ideological arguments, most recently neoliberal, justifying the differential power (and ‘market citizenship’) of farmers and farm-workers are examined within a US context, with suggestions for comparative and historical approaches to interpreting current strategies of inclusion and exclusion related to neoliberal capitalist globalization.

‘More Fire’ Next Time?

Have the Social Forums that have taken place in southern Africa between 2003 and 2005 provided a useful forum for the region's social movements to improve their understanding of, and response to, the impact of global neo-liberal capitalism? The global Social Forum movement remains biased towards Western activists and agendas. Interviews with participants in southern African Social Forums, suggest that while the influence of Africans on the global social justice movement remains limited, southern African social movements are utilizing the Social Forum model to strengthen their own struggles.

History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism

As is well known, the period since the early 1970s has been one of massive historical structural transformations of the global order, frequently referred to as the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism (or, better, from Fordism to post-Fordism to neoliberal global capitalism). This transformation of social, economic, and cultural life, which has entailed the undermining of the state-centric order of the mid – twentieth century, has been as fundamental as the earlier transition from nineteenth-century liberal capitalism to the stateinterventionist, bureaucratic forms of the twentieth century. These processes have entailed far-reaching changes in not only Western capitalist countries but communist countries as well, and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and European communism in addition to fundamental transformations in China. Consequently, they have been interpreted as marking the end of Marxism and of the theoretical relevance of Marx’s critical theory. And yet these processes of historical transformation have also reasserted the central importance of historical dynamics and large-scale structural changes. This problematic, which is at the heart of Marx’s critical theory, is precisely that which eludes the grasp of the major theories of the immediate post-Fordist era — those of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jurgen Habermas. Recent transformations have revealed those theories to have been retrospective, focused critically on the Fordist era, but no longer adequate to the contemporary post-Fordist world. Emphasizing the problematic of historical dynamics and transformations

Seeing Like an Oil Company: Space, Security, and Global Capital in Neoliberal Africa

In this article, I seek to identify a limitation in the analysis James Scott offers in Seeing Like a State (1998) by asking to what extent his account of the follies of schemes for planned improvement by states provides critical leverage on the present world of neoliberal global capitalism. Scott has claimed that a dynamic of standardization, homogenization, and grid making applies not only to developmentalist states but also equally to the contemporary world of downsized states and unconstrained global corporations. I contest that claim by tracing how recent capital investment in Africa has been territorialized, and some of the new forms of order and disorder that have accompanied that selectively territorialized investment. Because such investment has been overwhelmingly in mineral resource extraction—particularly in oil—a contrast will become visible between the homogenizing, standardizing state optic Scott analyzed and a rather different way of seeing, proper to the contemporary global oil company.

Liberalism and Neo-liberal Capitalist Globalization: Contradictions of the Liberal Democratic State

Liberalism and Neo-liberal Capitalist Globalization: Contradictions of the Liberal Democratic State