Número 30, may-ago 2013 Imprimir
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Editorial

Foundations and Debate

  • Aviva Chomsky
    Immigration and the US Economy

    Abstract: Mexican migrant workers played an important role in U.S. economic development as an exploitable labor force deprived of legal rights starting in the nineteenth century. Undocumentedness, though, is a recent phenomenon, becoming important to the economy in the late twentieth century. Until the Civil Rights era, the mere fact that a worker was Mexican was enough to justify legal and economic subordination. Mexicans were consistently accorded special treatment under immigration law because they were seen as necessary, temporary workers rather than as potential immigrants to be admitted or excluded. They were legally discriminated against—but not by having their entry restricted. The legal and ideological mechanisms for maintaining a cheap, exploitable Mexican labor force changed in the 1960s as overt racial discrimination became less acceptable. After 1965, and especially after 1986, new exclusions and a new ideology and structure of supposedly race-blind “illegality” became the principal method of justifying the marginalization of Mexican, and increasingly other Latin American, workers, even as they became even more important to the U.S. economy. Global economic restructuring in the second half of the twentieth century expanded the need for exploitable labor in areas like agriculture where Mexican migrants were already employed, in areas like construction and meatpacking that were de-unionized and relocated, and in new service jobs that sustained both the new elites and the struggling middle class created by deindustrialization and neoliberal austerity.

  • Jorge Beinstein
    The illusion of imperial metacontrol of chaos

    Abstract: This essay periodizes the complex relationship between the economy and the U.S. military system, contrasting what is known as “military Keynesianism” or “permanent war economy” with a ulterior phase of post-Keynesianism. While the phase of military Keynesianism is characterized as a stage in which the growth of the military economy works as a force to propelling the level of employment and general prosperity; postkeynesian phase is scrutinized showing how, since the end of the decade of the nineties, the rise of military spending does not produce the same impact, so that leads to fiscal deficit and debt without contributing in any way the net increase in employment levels in the U.S.

  • Leo Panitch
    American Empire and the Global South

    Abstract: The classical theory of inter-imperial rivalry, developed in the pre-World War One era to understand the export of capital and the rush for colonies amid the emergence of finance capital, presupposed several imperialist powers. After World War Two, the old capitalist empires of Europe and Japan were penetrated and incorporated by the US informal empire. Also, since the early 1980s, the several capitalist states have gradually embraced neoliberalism, alongside a further spread of American financial, corporate and legal practices. The American empire’s post-war relationship with the global south was very different. The thesis of the development of underdevelopment has become as irrelevant as the old theory of inter-imperialist rivalry. The shift to export-led manufacturing production involved not only a transformation in the international division of labor but also the reconfiguration of social relations in one country after another. Their capitalist classes became more and more linked to international capital accumulation. The spatial and social effects of the restructuring of production gave rise to a massive expansion of the proletariat in the global south. The crisis that began in 2007 needs to be placed in this context. It was a crisis “made in America” that was not caused by either “overaccumulation” or “external imbalances” but rather by the volatility of capitalist finance. The severity and extent of the current crisis has once again exposed how far the world’s states are enveloped in capitalism’s irrationalities. The new working class struggles that have attended this crisis highlight the future of what is needed, including the development of new socialist political parties that are oriented to a radical restructuring of states on all continents, so as to really make them substantively democratic in ways that capitalist states can never be.

  • Armando Bartra
    Against providentialism radicalize the subject’s perspective

    Abstract: The alterworldist rise of the third millennium is seen as a challenge that demands critical review of providentialism that marked much of the utopianism of the past, and especially of certain Marxism. Historical determinism whose immediate predecessor is the philosophy of Hegel, partially retaken by Marx but in materialistic key. The option proposed is an open and a dialectic view of history, not as a destination but as a feat of freedom. Position that since the late nineteenth century begins to take root in Marxism itself, in the context of revolutionary upsurge in a peripheral country, presumably “immature”, as Russia.

Articles and Miscellany

  • Daniel Romo / Fernando Pérez / Rolando V. Jiménez
    The Norwegian Oil Industry Applicable Experiences in Mexico?

    Abstract: This work analyzes the Norwegian oil industry model considered to be one of the most successful models of our times, not only on economic grounds but also in those related to technological development, environmental protection and social benefits for present and future generations. This analysis allows us to have a more clear understanding of what have been the main failures in the Mexican oil industry, in order to find valuable experiences that could be applied in the design of a reformed Mexican oil policy at a moment in which the debate on this topic is again in the public agenda.

  • Jesús Amador Valdés Díaz de Villegas
    Rereading Marx’s Economic Theory

    Abstract: Projecting the methodology employed by C Marx, for the study of capitalist society beyond positions on politicized and idealized, is a necessity in the modern world. The abandonment of the study of phenomena and process of economic life on the basis of a methodology that provides deep political economy is one of the most serious limiting decisions to new challenges. Our aim in this paper is to provide an interpretation of Marx, beyond apologetic approaches, offering a vision that is necessary for the interpretation of modern events.

  • Rubén Cantú / Ana Santibáñez
    Impact of tendency of the rate of profit to fall in socio-urban environment of the metropolis

    Abstract: The socio-urban environment of the city has multiple determinations; from their complex articulations the inner-city living conditions emerge. An environment that goes beyond the problems of ecology, but that is in the field of economy, politics and social issues. The law of the falling tendency of the profit of the capitalist economy, which basically establishes the existence of the urban lifestyle in the metropolis coupled with public politics, is the expression of the emerging economy of relative overpopulation, which proliferate in the city and is expressed in urban, social and political environmental problems. In determinate areas of the city they are exhibited greater extent of conditions of life as social events in Historic Centers, civic centers or in the urban zones of the metropolis, as well as urban-architectural testimonies, social, political and particularly related to the economy of the city, region or country. The socio-urban environmental explanation comprises, besides the tendency of the rate of profit, alienation of labor, public politics and in the physical urban space of the Historic Center, being the heritage site with more references of national identity. The impact of the falling tendency of the rate of profit in the socio-urban ambient and relative overpopulation is vast in the metropolis, essay of this paper show below.