History

Unpacking Super-Exploitation in the 21st Century: The Struggles of Haitian Workers in Brazil

“…Their experiences serve to highlight how export-oriented and consumer-led strategies in Brazil’s 21st century development do not resolve but rather emphasise a particular citizenship model that sustains the yawning gap between the minimum wage and a basic living income. The socio-spatial and economic reproduction of colonial legacies, including residential segregation, were seen to be underpinned by a racialised dimension of super-exploitation (Latimer, 2016) and discriminatory police profiling, education and employment access. These social relations of super-exploitation converge towards an enduring lack of effective social and employment rights having little in common with Keynesian welfare legacies assumed in much of the literature on citizenship and migration (McGovern, 2012; Munck, 2013).…”

“…Instead, the intensified competition inherent in the global economy and south–north commodity flows have motivated local elites to continuously attract foreign capital and super-exploitation has expanded (Osorio, 2013; Selwyn, 2020; Valencia, 2015). An equally important aspect to a distinctive super-exploitation in the periphery is how this economically motivated organisation between local elites and foreign capital is manifested in social relations of production (Marini, 1973); specifically colonial legacies of racism (Latimer, 2016; Mbembe, 2019), patriarchy (Pinango et al, 2021), class inequality and the absence of social welfare states (Garvey and Stewart, 2015) common to the industrial core countries. Indeed, peripheral countries subsidised the development of core countries through repressive labour regimes that allow(ed) for super-exploitation, including long periods of dictatorial and oligarchical regimes in Brazil (Marini, 1973).…”

“…In this context, renewed interest in the concept of super-exploitation (Latimer, 2016; Peña López, 2012; Roberts, 2016; Selwyn, 2018, 2020; Smith, 2016) and its relevance in explaining capital–labour relations in Latin America more broadly is instructive. As the contradictions in contemporary globalised capitalism become increasingly apparent through myriad crises, Marini’s original analysis (Marini, 1973) helps explain the progressive integration of developing countries into global markets, but in a manner that retains or indeed deepens core–peripheral hierarchies with implications for labour value and conditions.…”

Imperialism in the Financial Capital Era: Forgotten Contributions from Marxist Dependency Theory

“…That requires the further subjugation of the working class under the imperial power—represented by foreign capital, in a hierarchical association with domestic capital—and the increasing accumulation of reserves in the form of world-money by the periphery, given the increasing external vulnerability brought by financial liberalization. These two movements are the two main phenomena analyzed by new imperialism theories (Vernengo 2021; Vasudevan 2016; Lapavitsas 2009). As a result, the Weberian-Marxist tradition is not a stream that allows us to understand the effects of the new forms of imperialism in the periphery; rather, it advocates for the deepening of these imperialist structures.…”

“…That last question directly relates to the discussion about imperialism and globalization, a trending topic in contemporary imperialism studies. One line of scholars argues that the international hunt for cheap labor perpetuated by big industrial corporations gives rise to the intensification of exploitation as one of the main structural characteristics of contemporary imperialism, that now considers a global pool of workers from which surplus value can be extracted, instead of a local one (Vasudevan 2016). On the opposite side of the spectrum, other authors claim that globalization and imperialism cannot coexist in a coherent theoretical model, and nation-states are still the concrete framework in which specific social formations are reproduced under capitalism; there is no such thing as a global capital or a global working class, given that there is no unified globalized system of social relations (Sakellaropoulos 2009).…”