Capitalist Globalization as World-Historic Context: A Response (original) (raw)

Globalization: A Critical Introduction by Jan Aart Scholte

Development and Change, 2007

has written a great book, a history of human development as he calls it, which offers a fascinating account of global capitalism as it evolved over a period of four centuries. Bagchi provides a perspective on the global ascendancy of capitalism which is fundamentally different from conventional (western) views of global history.

Theorizing Globalization

Sociological Theory, 2002

I sketch aspects of a critical theory of globalization that will discuss the fundamental transformations in the world economy, politics, and culture in a dialectical framework that distinguishes between progressive and emancipatory features and oppressive and negative attributes. This requires articulations of the contradictions and ambiguities of globalization and the ways that globalization both is imposed from above and yet can be contested and reconfigured from below. I argue that the key to understanding globalization is theorizing it as at once a product of technological revolution and the global restructuring of capitalism in which economic, technological, political, and cultural features are intertwined. From this perspective, one should avoid both technological and economic determinism and all one-sided optics of globalization in favor of a view that theorizes globalization as a highly complex, contradictory, and thus ambiguous set of institutions and social relations, as well as one involving flows of goods, services, ideas, technologies, cultural forms, and people.

Globalization or Empire: New Tendencies in Contemporary Capitalism?

ACME 2(2), 2003

Translated by Blanca Ramírez and Scott Kirsch Despite the fact that contemporary social paradigms emphasize the importance of particularity and specific topics in order to describe reality, it is remarkable how two knowledgeable researchers have joined their experiences and studies in the effort to develop new directions for understanding the global order. In times when the moment and the here and the now are important, they use an historical perspective that seeks to understand the evolution of the world, in an attempt to analyse in detail the passage from the modern to the post-modern period, from Imperialism to Empire, as a strong effort to understand movements in society and changes in space. Under this context, Hardt and Negri intend to develop new trends for understanding contemporary capitalism in what is considered an unbounded and open space. Those who adopt a critical perspective might be excited and stimulated to encounter this alternative investigation that explains contemporary capitalism to us. Nevertheless there are different problematic features of the book that it is necessary to recognize. Their attempt to go beyond Marx in the explanation of capitalism is far too ambitious, resulting sometimes in general and superficial explanations and at other...

Globalization and its Discontents

Critical Sociology, 2012

In this issue of the journal, William Robinson offers his analysis of the rise of transnational elites emerging outside of the traditional frame of nation-based capitalism. What is significant, in large part, is that unlike their national-capital predecessors, this new cadre has little concern for all that we refer to as social reproduction, industrialization, and local development. In its place, argues Robinson, are elites guided by a definition of global development rooted in the expansion of global markets and the integration of national economies into a global capitalist reality. This picture is a logical extension of a narrative that takes capitalism from a period of internationalization to globalization, and while the distinction between these two periods of capitalist development remains somewhat unclear we can agree significant changes are underway.