Globalization and Postmodern Politics: From Zapatistas to High-Tech Robber Barons

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Pluto Press, Jan 20, 2001 - Business & Economics - 176 pages
The book begins with an overview of globalization, showing how wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a transnational elite while ever increasing numbers of people are being marginalised. Institutions such as the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund are intent upon exercising a new hegemony over individuals as the role of the traditional nation state is transformed. At the centre of this power shift is a group of high-tech robber barons who dominate the Information Age and exploit the technologies of globalization for their own narrow interests. The second part of the book explores the rise of the new grass roots oppositional movements around the world. Manifest in such diverse struggles as the uprising of the Zapatistas in Mexico and the battle of Seattle against the World Trade Organisation, this new postmodern politics is "de-centred" and has little interest in the old ideologies that dominated much of the twentieth century. The final section of the book contextualizes postmodern politics by drawing on contemporary examples. The authors discuss the demise of socialist and proto-socialist experiments in Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua and Cuba and the emergence of postmodern movements in Latin America. The final two chapters take a specific look at the Zapatista movement and its significance for revolutionary struggles around the world.

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Contents

The Epochal Shift 221
21
Third Worldization and
38
Heisting the Information Age
51
Shades of Postmodern Politics
69
The Undefining of Postmodern Marxism
82
The Virtually Existing Global Revolution
92
Zapatistas and the Latin American
103
Roots of the Postmodern Rebellion in Chiapas
116
Zapatismo and the Intergalactic Age
129
The Millennial Cracks
145
Bibliography
162
Index
169
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About the author (2001)

Roger Burbach is Director of the Center for the Study of the Americas. He has written extensively on Latin America, US politics, and on post-communist societies and is the author, with Octavio Nunez and Boris Kagarlitsky, of Globalization and its Discontents: The Rise of Postmodern Socialisms (Pluto Press, 1996).