Imperialism as a dispositif includes many elements. But in the last instance, the United States has never been hesitant about the use of force where it has seen its broader interests – and the interests of capital – endangered.
In this cycle of migration, deportation, and outsourcing, then, the enterprise of deportation takes on a more sinister tone, as open coercion is combined with precarious forms of wage labor. It offers a singular example of the cynical and cruel efficiency of global neoliberal capitalism. The rise of the call center industry in countries like Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador signals the reimagining of mass deportation as outsourcing, in which not only are jobs offshored, but so are the workers that fill them, whose years of living and working in the United States have made them uniquely qualified for the work.
European Integration is a process traversed by class antagonisms, and particular class relations of force can explain both its history and its particular institutional configuration. Yet its particular economic, institutional, and monetary architectures represent material obstacles to the actual coordination of the struggles of the subaltern classes all over Europe, struggles that are necessarily uneven because of the different temporalities of social antagonism in different social formations. This what makes a strategy of rupture and exit the necessary condition for social change but also for the possibility of creating new forms of coordination and cooperation between movements.
With the ascendance of Evo Morales to the presidency of Bolivia, the government disinterred “anti-imperialist” sentiments to challenge the overbearing influence of the United States on Bolivian politics. This renewed anti-imperialist discourse draws from layers of localized history accreted during Bolivia’s long status as a peripheral country entangled in the workings of the world system. My intention here is not to focus on the re-emergence of this politics today, but to re-assess the origins and conditions of anti-imperialist consciousness among workers the 20th-century Bolivian Andes.
A strong socialist movement in this country is impossible without a firm and unwavering commitment to overthrowing imperialism in all its forms. To do that, however, we need a clearer idea of exactly what we are up against.
The bourbon capitalists of the South have been able to maintain their semi-feudal sway over the millions of brutally oppressed and bitterly exploited Negro and white toilers solely because of their ability to keep these workers unorganised and divided. About this the Southern ruling class has no illusions. It knows that these workers and especially the Negro workers, when organised under the militant leadership of the Communist Party and the revolutionary trade unions can be but a battering ram for the smashing of the entire capitalist system, breeder of all forms of economic, social and political inequalities.
Specter // Neoliberalism // Crisis // Proletariat // Class Struggle // Communists // Communism // Forms of Life // Program // Soviet // Future
A specter is haunting North America — the specter of postmodernism. Or at least, that’s what Jordan Peterson would have you believe.
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