The New Geoeconomics of Capital in Latin America: Alternative Trade and Development in an Era of Extractive Capitalism

Abstract

Capitalism is a system in crisis. An oft-repeated truism, but what does it mean — beyond a succession of different phases of capitalist development in which the system is pushed to the limits of its capacity to expand the forces of production and then restructured by mobilizing the forces of change released by the crisis? Take the post–World War II process of capitalist development, which has been periodized as an era of state-led development celebrated by historians as the ‘golden age of capitalism’ (two decades of unprecedented rapid economic growth that came to an end with a system-wide production crisis at the turn into the 1970s), followed by a decade of restructuring and transition to what has been described as a ‘brief history of neoliberalism’. The beginnings of this historical epoch can be traced back to the early 1980s in conditions of a fiscal crisis of the capitalist state, attributed by conservatives to the excessive costs of the social and development programmes of the liberal reformist development state; a matrix of forces released by actions taken to find a way out of the crisis and restructure the system; and a new world order based on market fundamentalism and the Washington Consensus regarding the virtues of free market capitalism and the ‘structural reforms’ needed to bring it about.