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The Capitalist Globalization of Latin America

Latin America and Global Capitalism is Robinson’s latest book in the field of critical globalization studies, in which he has distinguished himself as a scholar and theorist since the late 1990s. Robinson’s region of expertise is Latin America, but the task he has set for himself is to locate the region – and especially the radical structural changes it was undergoing in the late 20th century – within the global capitalist system. However, in attempting to do this, he found himself facing a problem: the global capitalist system had itself undergone a radical restructuring. Even more, this transformation of the global system had yet to be adequately theorized. Thus it was that, a scholar on Latin America, he found it necessary to formulate a theory of global capitalism, one that explained the profound transformations in production concomitant with fundamental changes to classes and institutional structures. However, he is not alone in this type of research; many others have pointed to the fundamental changes to political economy under globalization (Cox, 1987; Dicken, 2003; Harris, 2006; Sklair, 2001, 2002). Between 1999 and 2003 Robinson was involved in a global crisis working group, convened by the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. He says, ‘It was through this working group that I began to think about the nature of the crisis in the global system, a crisis that more generally I believe to be civilizational, in the sense that its scope is all of humanity and its non-resolution could well result in a collapse of our present global civilization’ (p. xii). From that experience Robinson began to call for a ‘critical globalization studies’. While all of his writings since the late 1990s have addressed global capitalism theory, he summed up his concept in A Theory of Global Capitalism (2004). This is a unified theory, and it takes theorizing of the state to a new level. It looks to classical Marxism, restoring the definition of capitalism as a system based on relations of production rather than exchange, and restores the definition of the state as a thing formed by the capitalist class rather than a geopolitical entity. It also takes a fresh look at the division of labor, which has changed along with the productive structures. Correctly describing the productive structure and the division of labor is crucial to theory, since it is from this structure that the capitalist class arises, which in Critical Sociology 37(6) 889 –895 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0896920511402702 crs.sagepub.com Review essay