Globalization and the postcolonial world : the new political economy of development /

In this postmodern analysis of the issues of globalization and development, Hoogvelt (sociology, Sheffield Univ., UK) claims that the neoliberal strategies of economic restructuring of the past two decades or so have drastically changed capital-state relations, capital-labor relations, and core-periphery relations. Specifically, the new, "transformed" global capitalism has led to (a) "the internationalization of the state in which the state becomes a vehicle for transmitting the global market discipline to the domestic economy," and (b) the "replacement of information for capital and labor as sources of value." Furthermore, globalization no longer means "expanding and incorporating, but deepening and excluding," implying that the bases for core-periphery distinctions are no longer geographic but social divisions. (Despite this last claim, the author, in the tradition of postmodernism, carefully avoids the use of words such as class or class struggle.) These views are, at best, half truths: the state has always played a crucial role in the expansion of markets, capitalism has always revolutionized technology and the process of production, and it has always developed in a combined and uneven way. To claim that these developments are only "post-1970s" phenomena betrays a misunderstanding of how capitalism develops. But perhaps the weakest part of the book is its proposed alternative to capitalism for the "excluded" peoples and regions: eschew capitalism and preserve or return to some sort of self-sufficient, "autonomous, culturally-grounded," precapitalist communities or social formations. E. Hosseinzadeh; Drake University