Political Economy and Globalization

The Supranational Corporation

“…Whether I was considering environmental justice (Westra, 2006(Westra, , 2007(Westra, , 2009, in general or human rights in relation to legal instruments affecting the collective (Westra, 2011b), or even various aspects of global governance (Westra, 2011a(Westra, , 2012, the main issue, or common source of most of the problems I researched appeared to be corporate power. This power manifests itself in a number of ways, some obvious, some insidious.…”

Globalization and Capitalist Geopolitics

“…As we have seen, the opening of Eurasia to capital instantiated by globalization has problematized the international political economy of Western power. As an historically insular civilization-state, China is less of a security threat to the West than a powerful expression of the emancipation of capital from its Lockean heartland to the 'interstices' of the global economy (Westra 2010). This global economy incorporates diverse economic regions into decentred networks of country clusters and commodity chains, and is decoupled from territorial sovereignty.…”

“…While transnational governance may be considered a functional precondition for the supranational consolidation of market rationality, it is no substitute for the localization (Ortung) of violence in demarcated zones of economic production and political exclusion which facilitate the legal segregation and appropriation of labour-power necessary for the self-augmentation and spatial organization of capital -particularly in peripheral economies where legal constraints are weaker and where the traditional 'limits' of capital can be superseded through barbarism. This reflects the paradoxical decommodification of capitalist wage labour in corporate globalization, a politically regressive shift that undermines the formal contractual relation of free exchange between capital and labour as a marketable commodity by introducing extra-pecuniary systems of coercion to manage capitalist production in legally demarcated accumulation sites (Westra 2010). It also reflects the totalitarian organization of subjects in zones of legal uncertainty where statebased juridical sovereignty 'no longer orders forms of life and juridical rules in a determinate place but, instead, contains at its very centre a dislocating localization that exceeds it and into which every form of life and every norm can be virtually taken' (Agamben 1998: 175).…”

“…Corporate capitalism, in this respect, is a 'rigged' politicaleconomic system that functions in the interests of dominant capital. Neoliberal corporate capitalism also places a higher value on primitive accumulation than productivity, removing entire sections of the manual and non-manual working class from 'traditional capitalist encasements' (Sassen 2011: 23), thus eroding the commodified form of labour-power itself (Westra 2010). Furthermore, neoliberal corporate capitalism flourishes in a postliberal managerialist environment founded on the privatization and instrumentalization of capital and technical expertise, transforming societies into 'laboratories' for refining the means of extraction and accumulation while eroding legal restraints on surveillance and control (Suarez-Villa 2010: 10).…”

“…This breach in the growth-oriented logic of Western capitalism is already corrosive for Western economies, causing social fracture and political instability as inequality and oligarchy triumph on the ruins of social democracy. While globalization has increased GDP per capita among the global elite and among the new middle classes of India and China (Milanovic 2012), it has done so by freeing global capital from dependence on the traditional matrix of consumerism in Western economies (Westra 2010). This reflects the proletarianization the Western middle class as an exhausted social force in low-growth, deflation-prone economies of America and Europe that are dependent on bank-created private debt to sustain mass consumption.…”