Description
This collection of essays on corporations, globalization and the state takes a radical look at the role of the state in globalization and its transformation thereby. It addresses such key questions as:
What role is the state (in both the North and South) playing in its own rollback and demise?
How has the emergence of global production chains facilitated the emergence of a transnational capitalist class?
Do states still serve the interests of the peoples they govern, or do they now primarily serve the interests of global transnational capital?
How can the struggle for democracy be realized in a globalized state?
The contributors seek, in the context of the worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement, to analyse why and how democracy might be achieved in globalized states. The editors and contributors are long-time social activists approaching the issues from the perspective of the global South. This collection is unique in that it includes work from and about Cuba in relation to the impact of globalization.
ARNOLD AUGUST, author of Democracy in Cuba –
“The book is published at a very opportune moment in the history of the world. Since 2011, democracy is a common thread running through a wide variety of movements and countries. From peoples seeking democracy such
as in Egypt and more recently the U.S., to those striving to improve it by innovating as in Cuba and Venezuela, democracy is on the minds and in the plans of millions of people around the globe. DuRand and Martinot have done
an excellent service to this inspiring quest by bringing together distinguished writers especially from the U.S. and Cuba: a fitting challenge to imperialist globalization.”
ARNOLD AUGUST, author of Democracy in Cuba and the 1997-98
Elections and Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion
(forthcoming).
MIKE MCGUIRE, Occupier and Organizer –
“As popular movements surge around the globe, people everywhere are asking about the possibilities of social, political and economic transformation. DuRand, Martinot and their contributors sharpen this discussion with an
assessment of the shifting terrain of state power, corporate power, and popular sovereignty. How do we transform the state if we do not understand its permutations over the last thirty years? How do you tame corporations whose national identities are now questionable given how easily they can relocate? What tools do popular movements have to affect changes? Pick up the book and find some provocative answers.”
MIKE MCGUIRE, Occupier and Organizer
CHRISTOPHER CHASE-DUNN, world systems sociologist –
“This book passionately challenges the orthodoxies that legitimate neoliberal corporate globalization and explores the practices of direct democracy in social movements that prefigure the emergence of a more humane global commonwealth.”
CHRISTOPHER CHASE-DUNN, world systems sociologist, author of
Global Formation: Structures of the World-Economy
EFF FAUX, author of The Global Class War –
“DuRand and Martinot pull no punches in this insightful analysis of the fundamental causes of our current crisis. If you’re looking for an interpretation of the geo-political world that is independent of the wooly-headed evasions of
the conventional wisdom, read this book.”
JEFF FAUX, author of The Global Class War and The Servant
Economy: Where America’s Elite is Sending the Middle Class
(forthcoming); founder Economic Policy Institute
JERRY HARRIS, Race and Class –
“In Recreating Democracy in a Globalized State, Cliff Durand and Steve Martinot confront one of the most important political and theoretical problems facing modern society: how the national state can be democratised in an era when transnational corporations rule a global economy….Recreating Democracy in a Globalized State is a lively and involving work that gets the reader to think about some of the most important questions of our time. The authors’ approach helps to update national liberation strategies common in the 1950s and 1960s, addressing these questions in the context of globalisation in a creative and radical manner. Engaging with this book is certainly time well spent.”
JERRY HARRIS, Secretary of the Global Studies Association of
North America, reviewed in Race and Class, 2013