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This book provides an overview of the key issues of development studies from a critical perspective: the nature of the global capitalist system and the dynamics associated with the development process, the outmigration and urbanization of rural areas, the formation of a global working class and the emergence of powerful resistance movements.
Perhaps no word today is used and misused more than globalization. It generally serves to refer to worldwide epoch-defining changes in the organization of societies, economies and politics. But as Petras and Veltmeyer demonstrate, the term globalization obscures much more than it reveals. In practice, globalization provides a cover for a new form of imperialist exploitation and the institution of US hegemony over a global process of capital accumulation. In the last decade, capitalists in Europe and the United States have created favourable conditions for the takeover and recolonization of economies across the developing world. International capital has managed to restore highly profitable r...
In a primary commodities boom spurred on by the rise of China, countries the world over are turning to the extraction of natural resources and the export of primary commodities as an antidote to the global recession. The New Extractivism addresses a fundamental dilemma faced by these governments: to pursue, or not, a development strategy based on resource extraction in the face of immense social and environmental costs, not to mention mass resistance from the people negatively affected by it. With fresh insight and analysis from Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, this book looks at the political dynamics of capitalist development in a region where the neoliberal model is collapsing under the weight of a resistance movement lead by peasant farmers and indigenous communities. It calls for us to understand the new extractivism not as a viable development model for the post-neoliberal world, but as the dangerous emergence of a new form of imperialism.
This book concerns recent and current political developments in Latin America related to the emergence of left-leaning regimes riding the waves of anti-neoliberalism and a primary commodities boom. Based on five years of field research and a critical engagement with social movements in the region, the book documents the short-term advances and strategic weaknesses of these left-leaning regimes, highlighting their failure to take advantage of favourable economic and political conditions. The authors profile four cases of recent and current political developments, and the prospects for socialism, in Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba and Venezuela.
The focus and concern of Agrarian Change, Migration and Development is the problem of labour migraton. Veltmeyer and Wise explore the dynamics and development implications of the migration processes set in motion by the capitalist mode of production. The dynamics of these processes are both international -- in regard to the international or cross-border flows of labour migrants -- and internal to countries that have undergone, or are undergoing, a process of agrarian change and social transformation.Veltmeyer and Wise examine what they call the "migration-development nexus" from both a political economy and a sociological perspective, highlighting current trends, the global scale and the hum...
The Essential Guide to Critical Development Studies provides an up-to-date and authoritative introduction to the field, challenging mainstream development discourse and the assumptions that underlie it. Critical development studies lays bare the economic, political, social, and environmental crises that characterise the current global capitalist system, proposing instead systemic change and different pathways for moving beyond capitalism into a new world of genuine progress where economic and social justice and ecological integrity prevail. In this book, the authors challenge market-driven, neoliberal development agendas, incorporating analyses of class, gender, race, and the dynamics of une...
The 1980s in Latin America saw the implementation of a sweeping programme of economic reforms, either imposed as a condition for securing new loans or to embrace the neoliberal doctrine of structural adjustment, the ideology of a newly formed transnational capitalist class. However, the structural adjustment programme also generated widespread resistance, especially from within the popular sector of civil society. This book analyses both the politics of the adjustment process and the political dynamics of this resistance in Latin America.
Recent changes in the global economy, which include a growing demand for energy and natural resources such as industrial minerals and agro-food products, have brought about a massive devastating pillage of resources in the developing world by multinational corporations as well as states with energy and food security concerns—and concerns about a system (global capitalism) in the throes of a global crisis. These developments have also brought about a major change in the form taken by imperialism (actions taken by the state to advance the interests of the dominant capitalist class). This book explores the changing face of US imperialism in the regional context of the Americas, a major stage in the unfolding drama of a system in crisis.
"With irony, insight, and elegant simplicity, Veltmeyer shows us how the power of money and the power of collective commitment interact in the sweepstakes of social history." - Jan Knippers Black, Monterey Institute for International Studies
The book argues that the Cuban Revolution warrants a closer look as a model of socialist human development. A re-reading of the Cuban Revolution from this angle engages unresolved issues in the theory of socialist humanism and the notion of human development popularized by the United Nations Development Programme (i.e., predicated on capitalism). UNDP economists and other agencies of international cooperation for development give a human face to a capitalist development process that is anything but humane. Socialism in Cuba has taken a very different form (socialist human development) than it did elsewhere in the twentieth century. The Cuban Revolution's unique characteristics enabled it to survive adverse conditions - a 'near-perfect storm' - that still threaten its evolution.