Authored by Paul C Mocombe*
Abstract
This article highlights the origins and constitution of the black power elites who would come to serve as the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for black people the world-over in the age of neoliberal globalization. The work puts forth the argument that people of African descent in the age of neoliberal globalization are under the ideological and linguistic domination of two identities, the negro, i.e., black bourgeoisie, or African Americans, on the one hand, under the leadership of educated professionals and preachers; and the “my nigga,” i.e., the black underclass, on the other hand, under the leadership of street and prison personalities, athletes, and entertainers vying for ideological and linguistic domination of black America. These two social class language games were historically constituted by different ideological apparatuses, the church and education on the one hand and the streets, prisons, and the athletic and entertainment industries on the other, of the global capitalist racial-class structure of inequality under American hegemony, which replaced the African ideological apparatuses of Vodou, peristyles, lakous, and agricultural production as found in Haiti. Contemporarily, given both groups’ overrepresentation in the ideological superstructures of the American empire, they, antagonistically, have become the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for all black youth the world-over..
Keywords: African americanization; Racial identity; Religiosity; Black diaspora; Spiritualism
This article highlights the origins and constitution of the black power elites who would come to serve as the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for black people the world-over in the age of neoliberal globalization. The work puts forth the argument that people of African descent in the age of neoliberal globalization are under the ideological and linguistic domination of two identities, the negro, i.e., black bourgeoisie, or African Americans, on the one hand, under the leadership of educated professionals and preachers; and the “my nigga,” i.e., the black underclass, on the other hand, under the leadership of street and prison personalities, athletes, and entertainers vying for ideological and linguistic domination of black America. These two social class language games were historically constituted by different ideological apparatuses, the church and education on the one hand and the streets, prisons, and the athletic and entertainment industries on the other, of the global capitalist racial-class structure of inequality under American hegemony, which replaced the African ideological apparatuses of Vodou, peristyles, lakous, and agricultural production as found in Haiti. Contemporarily, given both groups’ overrepresentation in the ideological superstructures of the American empire, they, antagonistically, have become the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for all black youth the world-over..
Keywords: African americanization; Racial identity; Religiosity; Black diaspora; Spiritualism
Introduction
This article highlights the origins and constitution of the black power elites who would come to serve as the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for black people the world-over in the age of neoliberal globalization under American hegemony. The work puts forth the argument that people of African descent in the age of neoliberal globalization are under the ideological and linguistic domination of two identities, the negro, i.e., black bourgeoisie, or African Americans, on the one hand, under the leadership of educated professionals and preachers; and the “my nigga,” i.e., the black underclass, on the other hand, under the leadership of street and prison personalities, athletes, and entertainers vying for ideological and linguistic domination of black America. These two social class language games were historically constituted by different ideological apparatuses, the church and education on the one hand and the streets, prisons, and the athletic and entertainment industries on the other, of the global capitalist racial-class structure of inequality under American hegemony, which replaced the African ideological apparatuses of Vodou, peristyles, lakous, and agricultural production as found in Haiti. Contemporarily, given their overrepresentation in the ideological superstructures of the American empire, the hegemon of the neoliberal (globalizing) world-system, the representatives of the aforementioned two social class language games, antagonistically, have become the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for all black youth the worldover in the age of globalization.
This article highlights the origins and constitution of the black power elites who would come to serve as the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for black people the world-over in the age of neoliberal globalization under American hegemony. The work puts forth the argument that people of African descent in the age of neoliberal globalization are under the ideological and linguistic domination of two identities, the negro, i.e., black bourgeoisie, or African Americans, on the one hand, under the leadership of educated professionals and preachers; and the “my nigga,” i.e., the black underclass, on the other hand, under the leadership of street and prison personalities, athletes, and entertainers vying for ideological and linguistic domination of black America. These two social class language games were historically constituted by different ideological apparatuses, the church and education on the one hand and the streets, prisons, and the athletic and entertainment industries on the other, of the global capitalist racial-class structure of inequality under American hegemony, which replaced the African ideological apparatuses of Vodou, peristyles, lakous, and agricultural production as found in Haiti. Contemporarily, given their overrepresentation in the ideological superstructures of the American empire, the hegemon of the neoliberal (globalizing) world-system, the representatives of the aforementioned two social class language games, antagonistically, have become the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for all black youth the worldover in the age of globalization.
Background of the Problem
Contemporarily, “culture of globalization” and the “globalization as culture” metaphors represent two sociological approaches to understanding the contemporary post-modern phenomenon we call globalization, the current configuration of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, under American hegemony (1970s-2000s). These two sociopolitical understandings regarding the origins and nature of globalization, as Kevin Archer et al (2007) points out, have “set off a vigorous and at times rancorous debate within the social sciences” (2007, pg. 2). On one side of the debate you have theorists who emphasize the “culture of globalization” and argue the idea that “the constitutive role of culture is critical for grasping the continued hegemony of capitalism in the form of globalization… Culture, they assert is increasingly being co-opted and deployed as a new accumulation strategy to broaden and deepen the frontiers of capitalism and to displace its inherent crisis tendencies” (Archer, 2007, pg. 2-3). In a word, in the continual hegemonic quest of capitalism to equalize the conditions of the world to serve capital, globalization, in the eyes of “culture of globalization” theorists, represents a stage of capitalism’s development highlighted by the commodification of culture as a means for accumulating profits from the purchasing and consuming power of a transnational class of administrative bourgeoisies and professional cosmopolitan elites in core, semi-periphery, and periphery nation-states who subscribe to the social integrative norms of liberal bourgeois Protestantism (hard work, economic gain, political and economic liberalism, consumption, etc.).
In other words, the material and symbolic cultural elements of the cultures of the world are commodified by the upper class of owners and high-level executives of core countries-where finance capital and service jobs predominate-to make a profit or produce surplus-value-given the declining significance of profit from industrial production that have been shipped or outsourced to semi-periphery and periphery nations giving rise to their national bourgeoisies whose cultural practices and tastes have been nationalized-by fulfilling the consumption tastes of the financiers, administrative bourgeoisies, professional classes, and cosmopolitan elites of nation-states throughout the world who control their masses as a surplus labor force and cultural producers for global capital. Globalization, therefore, is the integration of the cultural realm and individual experiences into the commodity chains of the capitalist elites, who homogenize, through the media and other “ideological state apparatuses,” the behavior and tastes of global social actors as consumers thereby homogenizing the cultural practices and tastes of the middle and under class peoples of the world in order to generate profit in postindustrial economies such as the US and UK.
This “culture-of-globalization” understanding of globalization or the postmodern condition in late capitalist development is a well-supported position, which highlights, in the twenty-first century, the continued hegemony of capitalism or capitalist relations of production in the form of globalization (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Kellner, 1988; Giddens, 1991; Harvey, 1989, 1990; Jameson, 1984, 1991). This line of thinking, in which theorists point to the underlining drive of globalization as the continuing historical push to socially, economically, and politically (under) develop the rest of the world along the lines, or as a simulacrum, of Western American and European Societies to facilitate capital accumulation, began with European colonialism, continued through the “development project” of the Cold-war era, and now is embodied in the globalization process. This historical process is highlighted in modernization, development, dependent development, worldsystems theories, and contemporarily it is a trend outlined in the theoretical works of postmodern theorists such as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson swho view globalization as postmodern or the cultural logic of capitalist development in core or developed countries. “Culture of globalization” theorists, such as Harvey and Jameson, therefore, view globalization as the new initiative, with the same intentions, replacing the accumulation and modernization project of colonialism and development with the consumerism of finance capital in core nations.
The sociocultural outcome of the colonial exploitative and oppressive socioeconomic military system was a racialized social structural relationship relationally constituted based on the “unequal” colonial division of labor and “unequal” ecological exchanges, which divided the social actors of the world between white, Christian, civilized, and “developed” European colonizers (masters) whose “burden” was to civilize and (under) develop the “undeveloped,” “backward,” non-European, colonized, colored, other, “heathens” (slaves) of the world. This European civilizing of the non-European colored “heathens” of the world initially took place through the Christian churches of the West, whose biblical tenets and metaphysics were used to justify the master/slave relationship of colonialism as well as teach its work ethic, which eventually homogenized the social actions of social actors to benefit the white male power elites of an emerging gendered, racialized, and religious global capitalist world-system that developed the white colonizer, while simultaneously under developing the colored colonized who were systematically forced to become agents of the Protestant ethic in agricultural production. A hybrid administrative bourgeoisie, and the poor seeking to be like them, emerged among the colonizers.
The end of the socioeconomic military colonial system in the form of decolonization in the twentieth century did not end the colonizer/colonized relational relationship, but gave rise to a new nation-state system of civilizing, domination, and exploitation within the hegemony of this emerging gendered, racialized, and religious global capitalism. Decolonization gave birth to what Philip McMichael calls, “the development project.” According to McMichael, “[t]he mid-twentieth century development project (1940s-1970s), an internationally orchestrated program of national economic growth, with foreign financial, technological, and military assistance under the conditions of the Cold War, managed the aftermath of collapsing European and Japanese empires within the idealistic terms of the United nations and its focus on [national-state] governments implementing a human rightsbased social contract with their citizens…to equalize conditions across the world in laying the foundations of a global market that progressively overshadowed the states charged with development in the initial post-World War II era” [1]. Hence, the development project from the postcolonial era to the 1970s emphasized and continued the “unequal” colonial division of labor and “unequal” ecological exchanges within an Americentric dominated capitalist world-system subdivided into three geopolitical segments to benefit capitalist accumulation: the First World, the developed (postindustrial) capitalist Western countries plus Japan with America the model for development; the (industrial) Second World comprised of Communist Soviet blocs; and the (agricultural) Third World comprised of postcolonial bloc of nations.
Whereas under colonialism, as McMichael notes, “[t]he basic pattern was to establish in the colonies specialized extraction and production of raw materials and primary products that were unavailable in Europe. In turn, these products fueled European manufacturing as industrial inputs and foodstuffs for its industrial labor force” (31), in the development phase of postcolonial capitalism, the process was reversed as the First World sought to take advantage of the desire of the postcolonial elites, the administrative bourgeoisie, of the Third World to develop their nation-states along the lines of the industrial First World. The basic global pattern was to establish in the emerging postcolonial “Third- World” nation-states specialized manufacturing and industrial production sites that were outsourced from the First World. In turn, the outsourcing of these manufacturing and industrial jobs by the First World to take advantage of the urban underemployment and low-wage economy caused by the de-agriculturalization of Third World countries fueled First World, especially American, agribusinesses that channeled food surpluses, under a “food-aidregime,” to Third World countries. “In agriculture, the Third World’s share of world agricultural exports fell from 53 to 31 percent between 1950 and 1980, while the American granary consolidated its critical role in world agricultural trade. By the 1980s, the United States was producing 17 percent of the world’s wheat, 63 percent of its corn, and 63 percent of its soybean; its share of world exports was 36 percent in wheat, 70 percent in corn, and 59 percent in soybeans”[1]. What developed from this global economic relationship was that Third World industrialization outlined by W.W. Rostow’s stages of development fueled First world economic growth agriculturally and technologically, while under developing some Third World countries, and dependently developing others within the capitalist global world-system, hence recolonizing the Third World as they became indebted given their need to import food to feed their populous.
The postcolonial nations had no say in this new “unequal” development paradigm as “decisions about postcolonial political arrangements were made in London and Paris where the colonial powers, looking to sustain spheres of influence, insisted on the nation-state as the only appropriate political outcome of decolonization”[1]. Be that as it may, “[t]his new paradigm inscribed First World power and privilege in the new institutional structure of the postwar international economy. In the context of the Cold War between First and Second Worlds (for the hearts and resources of the ex-colonial world), “development” was simultaneously the restoration of a capitalist world market to sustain First World wealth, through access to strategic natural resources, and the opportunity for Third World countries to emulate First World civilization and living standards”[1]. The “development project,” in this way, as McMichael further observed, continued the hegemony of capitalism, which started with colonialism, through the universalization of a global market system driven by the nation-state and economic growth through agricultural and industrial productions (2008, pg. 46). Globalization (1970s-2000s) is a continuation of this hegemonic capitalist process in a postcommunist world under the guidelines of neoliberalism.
Neoliberal globalization under American capitalist hegemony seeks to dismantle the state-centered exploitation of colonial and development capitalism via the invisible hand of economic (neo) liberalism, deregulation, privatization, education, class division, and social relations of global production. “The globalization project (1970s-2000s),” as McMichael observes, “liberalizing trade and investment rules, and privatizing public goods and services, has privileged corporate rights over the social contract and redefined development as a private undertaking” (2008, pg. 21). That is to say, in reestablishing a global capitalist economy through the development project that followed colonialism, the First World was able to indebt Third World countries through an exportoriented industrialization that fueled the wealth of First World agribusinesses, transnational corporations, and their citizens who became consumers of inexpensive manufactured goods from the Third World. Hence, “export-oriented industrialization fueled rapid economic growth, legitimizing a new ‘free market’ model of development, and in the 1980s this was represented as the solution to the debt crisis [of Third World countries]. Development, which had been defined as nationally managed economic growth, was redefined in the World Bank’s World Development Report 1980 as ‘participation in the world market’” [1].This global market is controlled and directed by multinational and transnational corporations operating in First World postindustrial cities where high finance banking jobs and low-end service jobs predominate over manufacturing and industrial jobs that have been outsourced to semi-periphery or developing nations. What has developed in turn is a continuation of the tripartite system of the development phase. In the globalization phase, however, what has developed is a tripartite system in which the global economic system parallels Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems conception: a periphery group of poor nations whose comparative advantage are raw materials, agricultural production, and tourism; a semi-periphery group of industrial based nations, i.e., India, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Russia, and China; and a postindustrial group of core or developed nations led by the United States of America who generate profit by servicing the cultural consumptive needs of a multicultural and multiethnic transnational capitalist class who control and monitor their (US and other core countries) investments in periphery and semi-periphery nations.
In other words, the contemporary (1970 to the present) post-industrial mode of production in developed (core) states like the US is no longer characterized or driven by the industrial means for accumulating capital, which dominated the social relations of production of the last one hundred years in core or developed nations. Instead, the present globalization condition is driven-by, post-industrialism (consumerism)-the new means for accumulating capital-, and in such “developed” societies like the U.S., is characterized not by the industrial organization of labor, which have been outsourced overseas, but rather by capitalist finance and service occupations catering to the consumerist demands of a dwindling (transnational, transcultural, transracial, etc.) middle class the world over. In short, the rate of economic gain for its own sake or profit has fallen in industrial production due to labor laws (products of the welfare state) and ecological cost in developed countries like the US; hence the practice now among investors operating out of the US and other developed nations is on financial expansion “in which ‘over-accumulated’ capital switches from investments in production and trade, to investments in finance, property titles, and other claims on future income” (Trichur, 2005, pg. 165).
Contemporarily, “culture of globalization” and the “globalization as culture” metaphors represent two sociological approaches to understanding the contemporary post-modern phenomenon we call globalization, the current configuration of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, under American hegemony (1970s-2000s). These two sociopolitical understandings regarding the origins and nature of globalization, as Kevin Archer et al (2007) points out, have “set off a vigorous and at times rancorous debate within the social sciences” (2007, pg. 2). On one side of the debate you have theorists who emphasize the “culture of globalization” and argue the idea that “the constitutive role of culture is critical for grasping the continued hegemony of capitalism in the form of globalization… Culture, they assert is increasingly being co-opted and deployed as a new accumulation strategy to broaden and deepen the frontiers of capitalism and to displace its inherent crisis tendencies” (Archer, 2007, pg. 2-3). In a word, in the continual hegemonic quest of capitalism to equalize the conditions of the world to serve capital, globalization, in the eyes of “culture of globalization” theorists, represents a stage of capitalism’s development highlighted by the commodification of culture as a means for accumulating profits from the purchasing and consuming power of a transnational class of administrative bourgeoisies and professional cosmopolitan elites in core, semi-periphery, and periphery nation-states who subscribe to the social integrative norms of liberal bourgeois Protestantism (hard work, economic gain, political and economic liberalism, consumption, etc.).
In other words, the material and symbolic cultural elements of the cultures of the world are commodified by the upper class of owners and high-level executives of core countries-where finance capital and service jobs predominate-to make a profit or produce surplus-value-given the declining significance of profit from industrial production that have been shipped or outsourced to semi-periphery and periphery nations giving rise to their national bourgeoisies whose cultural practices and tastes have been nationalized-by fulfilling the consumption tastes of the financiers, administrative bourgeoisies, professional classes, and cosmopolitan elites of nation-states throughout the world who control their masses as a surplus labor force and cultural producers for global capital. Globalization, therefore, is the integration of the cultural realm and individual experiences into the commodity chains of the capitalist elites, who homogenize, through the media and other “ideological state apparatuses,” the behavior and tastes of global social actors as consumers thereby homogenizing the cultural practices and tastes of the middle and under class peoples of the world in order to generate profit in postindustrial economies such as the US and UK.
This “culture-of-globalization” understanding of globalization or the postmodern condition in late capitalist development is a well-supported position, which highlights, in the twenty-first century, the continued hegemony of capitalism or capitalist relations of production in the form of globalization (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Kellner, 1988; Giddens, 1991; Harvey, 1989, 1990; Jameson, 1984, 1991). This line of thinking, in which theorists point to the underlining drive of globalization as the continuing historical push to socially, economically, and politically (under) develop the rest of the world along the lines, or as a simulacrum, of Western American and European Societies to facilitate capital accumulation, began with European colonialism, continued through the “development project” of the Cold-war era, and now is embodied in the globalization process. This historical process is highlighted in modernization, development, dependent development, worldsystems theories, and contemporarily it is a trend outlined in the theoretical works of postmodern theorists such as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson swho view globalization as postmodern or the cultural logic of capitalist development in core or developed countries. “Culture of globalization” theorists, such as Harvey and Jameson, therefore, view globalization as the new initiative, with the same intentions, replacing the accumulation and modernization project of colonialism and development with the consumerism of finance capital in core nations.
The sociocultural outcome of the colonial exploitative and oppressive socioeconomic military system was a racialized social structural relationship relationally constituted based on the “unequal” colonial division of labor and “unequal” ecological exchanges, which divided the social actors of the world between white, Christian, civilized, and “developed” European colonizers (masters) whose “burden” was to civilize and (under) develop the “undeveloped,” “backward,” non-European, colonized, colored, other, “heathens” (slaves) of the world. This European civilizing of the non-European colored “heathens” of the world initially took place through the Christian churches of the West, whose biblical tenets and metaphysics were used to justify the master/slave relationship of colonialism as well as teach its work ethic, which eventually homogenized the social actions of social actors to benefit the white male power elites of an emerging gendered, racialized, and religious global capitalist world-system that developed the white colonizer, while simultaneously under developing the colored colonized who were systematically forced to become agents of the Protestant ethic in agricultural production. A hybrid administrative bourgeoisie, and the poor seeking to be like them, emerged among the colonizers.
The end of the socioeconomic military colonial system in the form of decolonization in the twentieth century did not end the colonizer/colonized relational relationship, but gave rise to a new nation-state system of civilizing, domination, and exploitation within the hegemony of this emerging gendered, racialized, and religious global capitalism. Decolonization gave birth to what Philip McMichael calls, “the development project.” According to McMichael, “[t]he mid-twentieth century development project (1940s-1970s), an internationally orchestrated program of national economic growth, with foreign financial, technological, and military assistance under the conditions of the Cold War, managed the aftermath of collapsing European and Japanese empires within the idealistic terms of the United nations and its focus on [national-state] governments implementing a human rightsbased social contract with their citizens…to equalize conditions across the world in laying the foundations of a global market that progressively overshadowed the states charged with development in the initial post-World War II era” [1]. Hence, the development project from the postcolonial era to the 1970s emphasized and continued the “unequal” colonial division of labor and “unequal” ecological exchanges within an Americentric dominated capitalist world-system subdivided into three geopolitical segments to benefit capitalist accumulation: the First World, the developed (postindustrial) capitalist Western countries plus Japan with America the model for development; the (industrial) Second World comprised of Communist Soviet blocs; and the (agricultural) Third World comprised of postcolonial bloc of nations.
Whereas under colonialism, as McMichael notes, “[t]he basic pattern was to establish in the colonies specialized extraction and production of raw materials and primary products that were unavailable in Europe. In turn, these products fueled European manufacturing as industrial inputs and foodstuffs for its industrial labor force” (31), in the development phase of postcolonial capitalism, the process was reversed as the First World sought to take advantage of the desire of the postcolonial elites, the administrative bourgeoisie, of the Third World to develop their nation-states along the lines of the industrial First World. The basic global pattern was to establish in the emerging postcolonial “Third- World” nation-states specialized manufacturing and industrial production sites that were outsourced from the First World. In turn, the outsourcing of these manufacturing and industrial jobs by the First World to take advantage of the urban underemployment and low-wage economy caused by the de-agriculturalization of Third World countries fueled First World, especially American, agribusinesses that channeled food surpluses, under a “food-aidregime,” to Third World countries. “In agriculture, the Third World’s share of world agricultural exports fell from 53 to 31 percent between 1950 and 1980, while the American granary consolidated its critical role in world agricultural trade. By the 1980s, the United States was producing 17 percent of the world’s wheat, 63 percent of its corn, and 63 percent of its soybean; its share of world exports was 36 percent in wheat, 70 percent in corn, and 59 percent in soybeans”[1]. What developed from this global economic relationship was that Third World industrialization outlined by W.W. Rostow’s stages of development fueled First world economic growth agriculturally and technologically, while under developing some Third World countries, and dependently developing others within the capitalist global world-system, hence recolonizing the Third World as they became indebted given their need to import food to feed their populous.
The postcolonial nations had no say in this new “unequal” development paradigm as “decisions about postcolonial political arrangements were made in London and Paris where the colonial powers, looking to sustain spheres of influence, insisted on the nation-state as the only appropriate political outcome of decolonization”[1]. Be that as it may, “[t]his new paradigm inscribed First World power and privilege in the new institutional structure of the postwar international economy. In the context of the Cold War between First and Second Worlds (for the hearts and resources of the ex-colonial world), “development” was simultaneously the restoration of a capitalist world market to sustain First World wealth, through access to strategic natural resources, and the opportunity for Third World countries to emulate First World civilization and living standards”[1]. The “development project,” in this way, as McMichael further observed, continued the hegemony of capitalism, which started with colonialism, through the universalization of a global market system driven by the nation-state and economic growth through agricultural and industrial productions (2008, pg. 46). Globalization (1970s-2000s) is a continuation of this hegemonic capitalist process in a postcommunist world under the guidelines of neoliberalism.
Neoliberal globalization under American capitalist hegemony seeks to dismantle the state-centered exploitation of colonial and development capitalism via the invisible hand of economic (neo) liberalism, deregulation, privatization, education, class division, and social relations of global production. “The globalization project (1970s-2000s),” as McMichael observes, “liberalizing trade and investment rules, and privatizing public goods and services, has privileged corporate rights over the social contract and redefined development as a private undertaking” (2008, pg. 21). That is to say, in reestablishing a global capitalist economy through the development project that followed colonialism, the First World was able to indebt Third World countries through an exportoriented industrialization that fueled the wealth of First World agribusinesses, transnational corporations, and their citizens who became consumers of inexpensive manufactured goods from the Third World. Hence, “export-oriented industrialization fueled rapid economic growth, legitimizing a new ‘free market’ model of development, and in the 1980s this was represented as the solution to the debt crisis [of Third World countries]. Development, which had been defined as nationally managed economic growth, was redefined in the World Bank’s World Development Report 1980 as ‘participation in the world market’” [1].This global market is controlled and directed by multinational and transnational corporations operating in First World postindustrial cities where high finance banking jobs and low-end service jobs predominate over manufacturing and industrial jobs that have been outsourced to semi-periphery or developing nations. What has developed in turn is a continuation of the tripartite system of the development phase. In the globalization phase, however, what has developed is a tripartite system in which the global economic system parallels Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems conception: a periphery group of poor nations whose comparative advantage are raw materials, agricultural production, and tourism; a semi-periphery group of industrial based nations, i.e., India, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, Russia, and China; and a postindustrial group of core or developed nations led by the United States of America who generate profit by servicing the cultural consumptive needs of a multicultural and multiethnic transnational capitalist class who control and monitor their (US and other core countries) investments in periphery and semi-periphery nations.
In other words, the contemporary (1970 to the present) post-industrial mode of production in developed (core) states like the US is no longer characterized or driven by the industrial means for accumulating capital, which dominated the social relations of production of the last one hundred years in core or developed nations. Instead, the present globalization condition is driven-by, post-industrialism (consumerism)-the new means for accumulating capital-, and in such “developed” societies like the U.S., is characterized not by the industrial organization of labor, which have been outsourced overseas, but rather by capitalist finance and service occupations catering to the consumerist demands of a dwindling (transnational, transcultural, transracial, etc.) middle class the world over. In short, the rate of economic gain for its own sake or profit has fallen in industrial production due to labor laws (products of the welfare state) and ecological cost in developed countries like the US; hence the practice now among investors operating out of the US and other developed nations is on financial expansion “in which ‘over-accumulated’ capital switches from investments in production and trade, to investments in finance, property titles, and other claims on future income” (Trichur, 2005, pg. 165).
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