The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism

Authors

  • John Bellamy Foster
  • Robert W. McChesney
  • R. Jamil Jonna

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-063-06-2011-10_1

Keywords:

Political Economy, Labor

Abstract

In the last few decades there has been an enormous shift in the capitalist economy in the direction of the globalization of production. Much of the increase in manufacturing and even services production that would have formerly taken place in the global North—as well as a portion of the North's preexisting production—is now being offshored to the global South, where it is feeding the rapid industrialization of a handful of emerging economies. It is customary to see this shift as arising from the economic crisis of 1974–75 and the rise of neoliberalism—or as erupting in the 1980s and after, with the huge increase in the global capitalist labor force resulting from the integration of Eastern Europe and China into the world economy. Yet, the foundations of production on a global scale, we will argue, were laid in the 1950s and 1960s, and were already depicted in the work of Stephen Hymer, the foremost theorist of the multinational corporation, who died in 1974.

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Published

2011-11-01

Issue

Section

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