So here is what is at stake: surveillance capitalism is profoundly antidemocratic, but its remarkable power does not originate in the state, as has historically been the case. Its effects cannot be reduced to or explained by technology or the bad intentions of bad people; they are the consistent and predictable consequences of an internally consistent and successful logic of accumulation. Surveillance capitalism rose to dominance in the US under conditions of relative lawlessness. From there it spread to Europe, and it continues to make inroads in every region of the world. Surveillance capitalist firms, beginning with Google, dominate the accumulation and processing of information, especially information about human behavior. They know a great deal about us, but our access to their knowledge is sparse: hidden in the shadow text and read only by the new priests, their bosses, and their machines.

An effective counter-hegemonic challenge requires access to large financial resources, knowledge and information, and a degree of control over production and distribution processes. In this respect, co-operatives...are a small beginning. However, to mount a significant challenge these groups would need to become much larger, forge more comprehensive transnational links between themselves and mobilise significant support from unions and other producer interests and perhaps from political parties (old and new) who might be sympathetic to these alternatives. Organisations and movements which might form part of a counter-hegemonic bloc include Amnesty International, Green parties and ecological groups, socialist think-tanks link the Transnational Institute, peace groups such as European Nuclear Disarmament, development agencies such as Oxfam, and religious organisations such as the World Council of Churches...Much more research needs to be done on the ways in which such coalitions might become better organised and represented.

The hyperliberal [read: neoliberal] model rests ultimately on the patriarchal family. Women’s work in the home reproduces a primarily male labor force. The male worker’s top status at home compensates for his dependent status at the workplace. The wife’s consumption habits and desires, assuming she behaves as the advertising industry would hope, keep the ‘patriarch’ at work (and less inclined to strike) and keep the demand side of the economy active. This kind of family is functional to capitalist development. The patriarchal family may also have been functional to redistributive societies have mobilized more women into the labor force and they have recognized at least formal equality in the workplace, even as they did nothing to alter the sexual division of labor in the home. Alternative visions of society raise the question of a restructuring of family production, as well as of industrial production: a sharing of domestic tasks not based on sexual stereotypes; removal of the barriers between work for family consumption, social service, like education, care of the aged, and so forth; and production of some exchange values of a specialized kind by the application in the home of small-scale, high-tech productive equipment, craft skills, and tools, etc.

Reflections on: Konings, Martijn. (2008) “The Institutional Foundations of US Structural Power in International Finance: From the Re-Emergence of Global Finance to the Monetarist Turn.” Review of International Political Economy 15 (1): 35–61.

In the contemporary era, the exercise of sovereignty presents a paradox. In effect, many national states have used their exclusive right to act as legal entities in international fora to undermine the scope of their internal sovereignty and policy autonomy. Through membership in the World Trade Organization or as signatories of regional agreements such as the NAFTA, national governments agree to narrow the terrain of state competency by complying with externally derived and binding rules that almost exclusively relate to the deregulation of capital within their jurisdictions. Compliance in many of the countries of the global South has been achieved under the wright of international debt repayment schemes, Structural Adjustment Programs and, most recently, poverty reduction strategy papers. The new constitutionalism turns binding control over designated national policy fields to external constitution-like agreements that facilitate the mobility of global capitalism. Such agreements often trump the decisions of national democratic bodies, are binding for an indefinite future, and define a new set of negative freedoms from democratic interventions for global capital operating in national spaces.

The political economy of international change begins with the consciousness and dynamics of power relations in production, of forms of social relations, but its route takes it through the teeming diversity of culture, religion, history and tradition. It is these that translate into forms of social action the chafing of the peasant under the domination of moneylender, landlord, or merchant; the anomie and bitterness of workers at the extremes of employer domination in the enterprise labor market; the frustration of being rejected that is felt by primitive labor market workers; the querulous insecurity of some occupations of the self-employed; and the emerging sense of injustice felt by the woman household worker. It is the elements of local diversity that will also interpret and provide instruments for the power of landlords trying to recapture lost social prestige in peasant-lord relations; of emerging rural employers in enterprise labor market farm enterprises; of embattled privilege minorities, fearful of, among other things, losing their labor-surplus life-style provided by primitive labor market workers; of overenthusiastic tax inspectors harassing self-employed; and of heads of households no longer confident of the continuing servitude of their women workers in household social relations. How all of this is fitted into, or fits into, strategies for reformist change, for stabilizing the status quo, or for revolution is then what makes politics and change at both the national and international levels. The analysis incorporated in the multiple social relations or production approach provides the fundamental themes, and the local circumstances provide the variations; the study of both is essential for any meaningful and fruitful social and political analysis.