Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis

By Brett Clark, Daniel Auerbach. Contemporary Sociology, 2018

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite decades of international development programs, purportedly premised on improving human well-being, extreme poverty and global inequality remain steadfast markers of the contemporary economic system. Journalistic exposés have documented human trafficking and modern conditions of slavery, such as on fishing boats in Southeast Asia and in mining operations in Africa. Commodity chain scholars have illuminated the important global links from extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal, revealing distinct labor conditions, national policies, marketing strategies, and environmental consequences. Globalization scholars have addressed an array of important issues, including, but not limited to, women and development, migration, foreign direct investment, the role of the state, and trade networks and agreements. Scholarship is clearly not limited to debates regarding modernization and dependency, as there is a plethora of issues to address. At the same time, there remains a need for systematic analysis of the dynamic character of capitalism and its historic development, which can help provide a rich synthesis. John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis is a contemporary classic. Smith acknowledges the historic role that imperialism played in the creation of the global hierarchy of nations and how capital flowed to core countries at the expense of the rest of the world. While capitalism is a system of generalized commodity production, premised on the ceaseless accumulation of capital, Smith investigates the historically specific patterns regarding labor, production, and trade that have emerged with neoliberal globalization. He selects three everyday commodities—coffee, t-shirts, and cell phones—to reveal ‘‘the hidden structure of the global capitalist economy’’ whereby ‘‘the capital-labor relation has become a relation between Northern capital and Southern labor’’ (p. 12). As is to be expected, cheap labor and the lack of organized labor play an important role in increasing profits. Fortunately, Smith’s major contribution here is revealing how the social relations associated with these commodities are intimately connected to a series of contradictions and anomalies related to the emergence of neoliberal capitalism. Smith explains how industrialized production has increasingly shifted to lowwage countries, especially following the 1970s. He notes that this form of production is uneven, as it is heavily concentrated in specific regions and countries. Nevertheless, most of the nations in the global South are integrated into the larger global economy in a distinct way: their manufacturing exports are primarily destined for the North as production is increasingly outsourced to the South. One of the unique factors of neoliberal capitalism is the development of both ‘‘inhouse’’ and ‘‘arm’s length’’ relations of production between the North and South. In-house production occurs when foreign transnational corporations have a parentsubsidiary relationship with producers. Arms-length production, a newer version of the outsourcing relationship referred to as the ‘‘hands clean’’ approach, involves a dominant firm outsourcing production to an independent supplier. This model helps externalize the costs of production and removes culpability for the associated pollution, low wages, and suppression of unions from the firm that collects the value added elsewhere. Additionally, outsourcing production to independent suppliers puts firms in lowwage countries in competition with each other to gain contracts to produce these goods. Smith explains there is little to no competition between the firms in the South and those in imperialist nations. These conditions help 628 Reviews

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

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