Imperialism and Capitalism: Rethinking an Intimate Relationship (original) (raw)
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Radical approaches to Development are nowadays being dominated by two traditions: On the one hand, the conception of Globalization is supposed to describe the characteristics of the “world economy” and so to define the presuppositions of development, in a similar way as theories of “world capitalism” shaped radical approaches to capitalist development and underdevelopment in the past decades. On the other hand, the notion of imperialism is supposed to interpret the relation of forces between states and also the contemporary forms of world economic and political order. This paper critically reviews the fundamental theses of both approaches: It is argued that all notions of globalization which interpret social evolution and capitalist development as the outcome of the functioning of the “world (economic) system”, which supposedly shapes the class relation of forces and class-struggle in the interior of each capitalist social formation, must also be rejected. Among the relations that d...
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Ever since the search for the elusive El Dorado began in the sixteenth century, the history of Latin America has been a tale of resource extraction. Key resources (such as silver, gold, tin, and copper) drew foreign investment but left local populations deeply impoverished. As Eduardo Galeano (1973: 29) described it, "the Spanish colonies' economic structure was born subordinated to the external market and thus centralized around the export sector, where profit and power were concentrated." Five centuries later, this overall pattern remains unchanged. Its persistence propelled twentieth-century social scientists to use Marxist analytic frames, Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer's theories on declining terms of trade, and dependency theory more generally to explain how resource extraction created geographic and historic asymmetries between nation-states and peoples. Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America (1973) described how the European quest for resources in Latin America led to the penetration of foreign capital and fueled early European industrialization while generating highly unequal labor relations and differential access to the means of production. Eric Wolf (1982) traced the movement of goods, capital, and people in concert with expanding capitalism in the Old and New Worlds. Sidney Mintz (1985) showed that sugar production in the Caribbean was basic to the emergence of a global market and rose together with tea, colonial slavery, and the machine era. Researchers also reported resistance to these realities: for example, June Nash (1979) considered how Bolivian miners drew on their indigenous roots to advocate for more adequate wages, health care coverage, and schooling for their children. Forty years later, in our current era of advanced capitalism and after 30 years of neoliberal restructuring, it is time to revisit these themes and explore new frameworks for understanding how expanded global interconnectedness and technological improvements have facilitated transnational capital's expansion in Latin America today. The region still possesses 66 percent of the world's Linda Farthing is a writer, researcher, and educator who has written three books on Bolivia. She writes for the Guardian, the Nation, Al Jazeera, and Indian Country Today and is a contributing editor for the North American Congress on Latin America. Her latest policy report is The Left in Power: Perspectives on Effective Progressive Governance-the Case of Bolivia (2018). Nicole Fabricant is an associate professor of anthropology at Towson University in Baltimore. She has published several books and articles on resource extraction and landless politics in contemporary Bolivia and has been working on a long-term participatory action project in South Baltimore on environmental injustice. Both are participating editors of Latin American Perspectives. The collective thanks them for organizing this issue.
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Development projects at the national level in Latin American countries are linked with the needs of global transnational extractive-rentier capital accumulation. The concept of unequal geographic development is useful for understanding the articulation between the strategies of transnational capital in the extraction of minerals, hydrocarbons, and agri-foods and the national-scale development projects expressed in the political and economic configurations of the states of the region. This articulation must be approached in terms of the conflictive relations between dominant and subaltern actors and the way in which they are expressed in the structure of the state. Analysis of three concrete cases of subaltern struggles against the strategies of extractive-rentier transnational capital (Peru, Ecuador, and Argentina) reveal the limits and possibilities of transcending local-level disputes to produce a development project that is an alternative to extractivism on the national and continental levels. Los proyectos de desarrollo a escala nacional de los países de América Latina están vinculados con las necesidades de la acumulación global del capital transnacional extrac-tivo-rentista. El concepto de desarrollos geográficos desiguales ayuda a comprender la articulación existente entre las estrategias del capital transnacional que se ubica en la extracción de minerales, hidrocarburos y agro-alimentos y los proyectos de desarrollo a escala nacional que se expresan en las configuraciones políticas y económicas de los estados de la región. Dicha articulación entre escalas debe abordarse a partir de las relaciones conflictivas entre actores dominantes y subalternos y la forma concreta en que estas rela-ciones se expresan en la estructura estatal. Un análisis de tres casos concretos de luchas subalternas de oposición a las estrategias del capital transnacional extractivo-rentista (Perú, Ecuador y Argentina) revela los límites y las posibilidades de traspasar las disputas en el plano local para posicionar un proyecto de desarrollo alternativo al extractivismo en escala nacional y continental.
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This article engages critically with an emerging Brazilian research programme, ‘Varieties of Capitalism and Development in Latin America’, a perspective which seeks to ascertain the institutional chances of, and limits to, implementing state-led ‘national development strategies’. Adopting a critical political economy viewpoint, the text discusses the deficiencies inherent to this perspective and its neoinstitutionalist and neodevelopmentalist fundamentals. In particular, it questions the vision of the world economy as an arena of free competition and that of the nation-state as a ‘collective actor’, both of which are politically and analytically problematic. These criticisms are substantiated through evidence drawn from a case analysis of the recent trajectory of the Argentine neodevelopmentalist project.