The Global South is dead, long live the Global South! The intersectionality of social and geographic hierarchies in global capitalism

Abstract

This article explores two critical approaches to the study of the continuing relevance of the North—South divide. One is based on a postcolonial politics of difference and stresses the fundamental geographic divergences between the North and South. The other, referred to as the global capitalism school, argues that the North—South divide is rendered obsolete by social divisions, represented by the rise of a transnational capitalist class. I criticize the former due to its dismissal of the idea of capitalism as a universal force. In regards to the latter, to determine whether the primary fault line in global capitalism revolves around transnationally organized classes, I conduct an interpretive analysis of the world views of capitalist elites in Latin America. My findings demonstrate the complex, intersecting nature of different axes of identity, and contradict this literature by suggesting the continuing relevance of a place-based North—South divide. In other words, neither position can by itself elucidate the contours of our contemporary global economic system. What I propose is a framework that captures the intersectionality between the social and geographic within a universal story of capitalist globalization. The key is to conceptualize how global capitalism operates as a universalizing force, but not a homogenizing one.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, Department of Political Science, and Graduate School of the University of Florida.

Notes

¹ Branwen Gruffydd Jones (ed.), Decolonizing International Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). See also the recent Routledge book series, “Worlding Beyond the West.”

² Arlene Tickner, “Seeing IR Differently: Notes from the Third World,” Millennium—Journal of International Studies 32:2 (2003), pp. 295–324.

³ I utilize “Global South” or “South” as shorthand for regions characterized by greater levels of poverty (at both the national and individual levels), colonial legacies, ongoing imperial practices, and a subservient position in the global economy (that is, economies based on raw-material exports). The “Global North” or “North” refers to regions with the opposite set of characteristics. On the origins of this nomenclature, see Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007). See also the below section ¿Será posible el sur? for a brief overview of the development of this dichotomy, particularly concerning its origins in the Cold War-era First/Second/Third World categorization scheme.

⁴ Drew DeSilver, “U.S. Income Inequality, on Rise for Decades, is now Highest since 1928,” Pew Research Center, December 5, 2013, available online at: <http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/05/u-s-income-inequality-on-rise-for-decades-is-now-highest-since-1928/>.

⁵ Chris Matthews, “Wealth Inequality in America: It's Worse Than You Think,” Fortune, October 31, 2014, available online at: <http://fortune.com/2014/10/31/inequality-wealth-income-us/>.

⁶ Brenda Cronin, “Some 95% of 2009–2012 Income Gains Went to Wealthiest 1%,” Wall Street Journal blog, September 10, 2013, available online at: <http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/09/10/some-95-of-2009-2012-income-gains-went-to-wealthiest-1/>.

⁷ Paul Krugman, “Twin Peaks Planet,” New York Times, January 1, 2015, available online at: <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/02/opinion/paul-krugman-twin-peaks-planet.html>.

⁸ For example: William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and State in a Transnational World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001); and, William K. Carroll, The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the 21st Century (New York: Zed Books, 2010).

⁹ Samuel P. Huntington, “Dead Souls: The Denationalization of the American Elite,” The National Interest, March 1, 2004, available online at: <http://nationalinterest.org/article/dead-souls-the-denationalization-of-the-american-elite-620?page=show>.

¹⁰ David Rothkopf, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. xiii, 14.

¹¹ For a sampling of foundational and current works by Kimberlé Crenshaw, who is responsible for popularizing intersectional analysis, see: Kimberlé Crenshaw, On Intersectionality: The Essential Writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw (New York: New Press, 2012).

¹² Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” boundary 2 12:2 (1984), pp. 333–358.

¹³ Ibid., 335.

¹⁴ Ibid., 353–354.

¹⁵ Ibid., 334.

¹⁶ Ibid., 335.

¹⁷ Kevin B. Anderson, “Karl Marx and Intersectionality,” Logos: a Journal of Modern Society & Culture 14:1 (2015), available online at: <http://logosjournal.com/2015/anderson-marx/>.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Joseph M. Schwartz, “A Peculiar Blind Spot: Why did Radical Political Theory Ignore the Rampant Rise in Inequality Over the Past Thirty Years?” New Political Science 35:3 (2013), pp. 389–402.

²¹ Ibid., 392.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid., 397.

²⁴ As I explain below, parts of the Marxist tradition, such as dependency theory, have conceptualized universal capitalist relations as taking different forms across space and time.

²⁵ Aida Hozic, “Between ‘National’ and ‘Transnational’: Film Diffusion as World Politics,” International Studies Review 16: 2 (2014), pp. 229–239.

²⁶ Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

²⁷ See, for example, Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) and Lucy Taylor, “Decolonizing International Relations: Perspectives from Latin America,” International Studies Review 14:3 (2012), pp. 386–400.

²⁸ See, especially: Robinson, Theory of Global Capitalism and William I. Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

²⁹ Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, 2^nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978), p. 476.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Cited in: Huntington, “Dead Souls.”

³² Quoted in: Robinson, Theory of Global Capitalism, p. 35.

³³ Sklair, Transnational Capitalist Class, p. 16.

³⁴ For example, see: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Mark Rupert and M. Scott Solomon, Globalization & International Political Economy: The Politics of Alternative Futures (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

³⁵ Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 476.

³⁶ Sklair, Transnational Capitalist Class, p. 295.

³⁷ Robinson, Theory of Global Capitalism, pp. 47–48.

³⁸ Ibid., 38.

³⁹ Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 476.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006), pp. 6–7. For another work that utilizes the “imagined community” concept to theorize this class, see: Kees van der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International Relations (New York: Routledge, 1998).

⁴² Carroll, Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class, p. 1.

⁴³ Whether the global capitalism school actually departs from Marx’s thoughts in a significant way is open to debate and is an issue that goes beyond the scope of this article. What is relevant here is that these theorists view their work as representing a substantive leap beyond Marx because of this analytical focus on transnationalism.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 37.

⁴⁵ As I discuss below, this particular axis of relations between Latin America and the Arab world provides a number of distinct advantages both for analyzing transnational and intersectional identities, as well as for probing the notion of the North—South divide.

⁴⁶ Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism, p. 92.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 43.

⁴⁸ Karen Bouffard, “Infant Mortality Rate in Detroit Rivals Areas of Third World,” The Detroit News, January 30, 2014, available online at: <http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140130/LIFESTYLE03/301300005>.

⁴⁹ Drake Bennett and Mark Niquette, “Detroit Is Dead. Long Live Oakland County,” Bloomberg Business, July 25, 2013, available online at: <http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-07-25/detroit-is-dead-dot-long-live-oakland-county>.

⁵⁰ Dirlik, Global Modernity, p. 137.

⁵¹ Ibid., 138.

⁵² BBC, “Richest 1% to own more than rest of world, Oxfam says,” January 19, 2015, available online at: <http://www.bbc.com/news/business-30875633>.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ Ami Segdhi, “World's richest man would take 220 years to spend his wealth,” The Guardian, October 29, 2014, available online at: <http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/oct/29/oxfam-report-220-years-richest-man-spend-wealth>.

⁵⁵ Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006).

⁵⁶ Alexander D. Barder, “American Hegemony Comes Home: The Chilean Laboratory and the Neoliberalization of the United States,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 38:2 (2013), pp. 103–121.

⁵⁷ This refers to the mostly Chilean economists who received graduate training at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and other staunch neoliberal proponents between the late 1950s and early 1970s. Infamous in much of Latin America, they were given carte blanche by the Pinochet regime to implement drastic and abrupt structural changes in the Chilean economy, including mass privatization. Dissenting voices—and many others—were systematically silenced and eliminated by the highly authoritarian Chilean state apparatus, which enjoyed significant backing from the US. See: Juan Gabriel Valdés, Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School of Economics in Chile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

⁵⁸ David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 9.

⁵⁹ Kevin Funk, “The Political Economy of South America’s Global South Relations: States, Transnational Capital, and Social Movements,” The Latin Americanist 57:1 (2013), pp. 3–20.

⁶⁰ Brazil is by far the leader, with annual exports to and imports from Arab countries increasing from less than ten billion dollars to over twenty-five billion in the last decade. See: Arab-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce, “International Trade: Brazil—Arab Countries” (no date), available online at: <http://www.ccab.org.br/infobiz-online/en/home.aspx>.

⁶¹ John Tofik Karam, Another Arabesque: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2007), p. 174.

⁶² For sources concerning these relations, see the bibliographies compiled by the Interdisciplinary Research Network on the Arab World and Latin America, available online at: <http://rimaal.org/>.

⁶³ For an exception, see: Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism.

⁶⁴ Carroll, Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class, pp. 54, 84.

⁶⁵ Sklair, Transnational Capitalist Class, p. 100.

⁶⁶ Arlene B. Tickner and David L. Blaney (eds), Thinking International Relations Differently (New York: Routledge, 2012).

⁶⁷ These are the South American countries with the largest amount of economic exchange with the Arab world.

⁶⁸ Insofar as my focus is on language, the reflexivity of actors, and “an overarching appreciation for the centrality of meaning in human life,” my study is firmly rooted in the “interpretive turn” in the social sciences (see: Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (eds), Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn [Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2006], p. xii).

⁶⁹ That my research reveals their identities as multifaceted configurations of different phenomena, including not only nationalism and transnationalism, but also ethnic and immigration-based ties, again speaks to the advantages of intersectional analysis, which calls for skepticism concerning the notion that lines between categories can be drawn so neatly.

⁷⁰ This refers to a caffeinated drink, nearly ubiquitous in Argentina, Uruguay, and some other parts of the Southern Cone, which is made from the dried leaves of the yerba mate plant.

⁷¹ Cámara de Comercio Argentino Árabe, “Intercambio comercial Argentino—Árabe” (no date), available online at: <http://ccaa.com.ar/estadisticas.html>. By comparison, Argentina imports less than $3 million in Lebanese goods annually.

⁷² Calvin Sims, “The World; Formerly Arrogant, Utterly Argentine,” New York Times, May 24, 1998, available online at: <http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/24/weekinreview/the-world-formerly-arrogant-utterly-argentine.html>.

⁷³ Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 476.

⁷⁴ This title refers to an album (and eponymous song) by the late Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa. It translates as, Is the South Possible? or Will the South Be Possible?

⁷⁵ Latha Varadarajan, “The Transnationalism of the Embattled State,” New Political Science 36:3 (2014), pp. 366–386.

⁷⁶ Saskia Sassen, A Sociology of Globalization (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2007), p. 169.

⁷⁷ Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013), p. 285.

⁷⁸ Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 476.

⁷⁹ Chibber, Postcolonial Theory, p. 288.

⁸⁰ Taylor, “Decolonizing International Relations,” p. 396.

⁸¹ Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 5.

⁸² Vivek Chibber, “How Does the Subaltern Speak?” Jacobin, April 2013, available online at: <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/04/how-does-the-subaltern-speak/>. Notably, Chibber observes that postcolonialism has displaced Marxism as the vanguard of critical thought in Western academia. As Arif Dirlik notes, postcolonialism “has offered a refuge to radicals who retreated from Marxism and socialism in the face of the global decline or abandonment of socialist alternatives in the 1980s, who have found relief in displacing their social and political radicalism to the realm of culture.” See: Arif Dirlik, Postmodernity’s Histories: The Past as Legacy and Project (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 9. Notably, this abandonment of class-based analysis has been incentivized within universities and other institutions.

⁸³ Taylor, “Decolonizing International Relations,” p. 389.

⁸⁴ Mignolo, Idea of Latin America, p. 156.

⁸⁵ Chibber, Postcolonial Theory, p. 285.

⁸⁶ Ibid.

⁸⁷ Dirlik, Postmodernity’s Histories, p. 7.

⁸⁸ Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2012), p. 331.

⁸⁹ Lourdes Casanova, Global Latinas: Latin America's Emerging Multinationals (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Robinson seems to recognize this, noting that, “There remain very real regional distinctions in the form of productive participation in the global economy.” Yet his analysis downplays these crucial differences. See: Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism, p. 45.

⁹⁰ For the most prominent example, see: Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979).

⁹¹ Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism, p. 172.

⁹² The Economist, “It's only natural,” September 9, 2010, available online at: <http://www.economist.com/node/16964094>.

⁹³ Ibid.

⁹⁴ The Economist, “Copper solution,” April 27, 2013, available online at: <http://www.economist.com/news/business/21576714-mining-industry-has-enriched-chile-its-future-precarious-copper-solution>.

⁹⁵ Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism, pp. 40–41.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 42.

⁹⁷ The Economist, “The loss of El Dorado,” June 27, 2015, available online at: <http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21656185-after-commodity-boom-region-needs-new-formula-growth-loss-el-dorado>.

⁹⁸ BBC, “Brazilian economy overtakes UK's, says CEBR,” March 5, 2012, available online at: <http://www.bbc.com/news/business-16332115>.

⁹⁹ Greg Grandin, “Building a Perfect Machine of Perpetual War: The Mexico-to-Colombia Security Corridor Advances,” The Nation, February 11, 2011, available online at: <http://www.thenation.com/article/building-perfect-machine-perpetual-war-mexico-colombia-security-corridor-advances/>.

¹⁰⁰ Greg Grandin, “The Latin American Exception: How a Washington Global Torture Gulag Was Turned Into the Only Gulag-Free Zone on Earth,” TomDispatch.com, February 18, 2013, available online at: <http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175650/>.

¹⁰¹ Bruce Gilley, “The Challenge of the Creative Third World,” Third World Quarterly 36:8 (2015), pp. 1405–1420.

¹⁰² The Economist, “The purse of the one percent,” October 14, 2014, available online at: <http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/10/daily-chart-8>.

¹⁰³ Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1:3 (2000), pp. 533–580.

¹⁰⁴ Tickner, “Seeing IR Differently,” p. 296.

¹⁰⁵ Anderson, “Karl Marx and Intersectionality.”