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Book Reviews

Aaron Major. 2014. Architects of Austerity: International Finance and the Politics of
Growth. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 264 pages, ISBN 978-0804788342 Cloth
($60.00).

Architects of Austerity is a well-researched, clearly written, and convincingly argued book on the
political history of international finance regulation of the post-WWII period. I don't think I
exaggerate when I say that, with this book, Aaron Major establishes himself as a leading voice
among analysts who, over the past decade or so, have done some serious rethinking of the
common wisdom surrounding our understanding of this crucial period.
This common wisdom looks something like this: the end of the Second World War
coincides with the emergence of a new international regime broadly governed by a logic of
"embedded liberalism." Unlike the gold standard regime and its focus on monetary stability at
the expense of all else, under embedded liberalism new economic priorities become dominant,
and among those priorities the primacy of growth and full employment over the need for stability
takes pride of place. But for reasons having to do with the weak political will of the forces
underlying this regime, the tension created by the Cold War and the rise and decline of US
hegemony, and the contradictions of the regime itself, embedded liberalism falls apart under the
weight of stagflation and international volatility, to be replaced surprisingly by a resurgent liberal
doctrine. While neo-liberalism is not free of problems and contradictions, it acquires an
uncontested, hegemonic status that to this day sets strict limits on the financial and fiscal
autonomy of national governments. Neoliberalism underpins the current politics of austerity.
In what ways is this common wisdom incorrect? Scholars from a variety of fields and
approaches have taken issue with its lack of nuance: neoliberalism is surely dominant, but its rise
has been uneven to say the least, and understanding the sources of this unevenness yields insight
into the political processes that underlie it. Put differently, understanding neoliberalism as a
reaction to the economic failure of embedded liberalism hides the institutional foundations of
neoliberalism, and the identity and shape of the political constellations that have facilitated its
diffusion. But ignoring those institutional foundations means implicitly accepting that neoliberal
success is a function of its effectiveness as an economic solution. The search for institutional
differences in the intensity, timing, and configuration of neoliberalism, in turn, has unearthed
unexpected evidence about the political coalitions where important ideas that neoliberalism later
appropriates come from (see in this respect Monica Prasad's book The Politics of Free Markets).
Major's book joins this conversation by pointing not to national differences, but to
institutional continuity at the international level in order to explain neoliberalism's resurgence. In
fact, Major's argument is that classical liberalism never went away; rather, it constituted the
ideological terrain of international financial institutions throughout the period of embedded
liberalism, and exercised important constraints on national governments even at the height of
Keynesianism. Architects of Austerity engages in sustained historical research in order to
substantiate this argument. The story begins in the 1950s, when the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) takes a strong position on the perennial question of the
trade-off between stability and growth by reasserting the classical liberal orthodoxy in favor of
stability. Consistent with this economic orientation, the OECD begins a drawn-out political and
ideological battle aimed at preserving the stability of the international balance of payments while
delegitimizing the demand for flexibility originating with national policies targeting domestic

This work is licensed rmder a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States License.
Jownal of World-Systems Research, Volume 21, Number 1, Pages 215-237, ISSN 1076-156X
216 Journal of World-Systems Research

economic growth. In a series of detailed chapters on the ramifications of this institutional

position, Major goes on to show how the OECD (in particular the Economic Policy Committee,
later joined by the Bank of International Settlements) was able to impact the economic policies
of Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s by forcing them to
submit to the requirements of international monetary stability.
The selection of these three cases is quite strategic: all three countries attempted to
embark on a path to sustained economic growth, but, in spite of dramatic differences in terms of
domestic politics and international leverage, none of them succeeded because of mounting
international pressure on the national currency. Of course, pressure on the currency is precisely
what international monetary institutions had been designed to alleviate. When balance of
payment problems arose, as a consequence of states pursuing domestic growth objectives, it was
the task of international financial institutions to step in, in line with Keynesian theory. But this is
the core of Major's argument: international financial institutions were unwilling to fulfill this
role, for they privileged long-term financial stability above all else, and followed classical liberal
rather than Keynesian principles. Whose interests were these institutions serving by refusing to
lessen national short-term adjustment problems, Major asks? He identifies international finance
as the major player, though a player that works in the background, so to speak, jockeying for
monetary stability so as to set the stage for the free flow of international capital. To simplify a
much richer argument, the front stage of international finance are the finance ministers of various
national governments (the German, the Dutch and the French appear to be the most active)-
through their control over the international institutions of monetary governance, they discipline
the national governments that have the nerve to challenge classical liberal orthodoxy.
Major's final contribution to the analysis of neoliberalism is a claim to the effect that the
rise of neoliberalism should be understood as a shift in political power away from the
government agencies tasked with interacting with society, and towards the government agencies
(like Finance Ministries and Central Banks) closely aligned with international finance. While this
is not a novel claim, it nicely concludes Major's political history of financial governance in that
it illustrates just how far the consequences of classical liberal orthodoxy being kept alive in the
sphere of international financial institutions reach into the present.
Like any good book, Architects of Austerity raises some questions as well as generating
calls for further clarification. Let me begin with the latter. For one, I would have liked to see
more systematic evidence of the connection between political actors in the OECD and
international finance. Biographical data on key players would help shed further light on the very
institutions that Major points to as crucial carriers of classical liberalism. Otherwise, it is easy to
lose track of the politics going on within those institutions. Similarly, I would have liked to see
more detailed discussion of the evolution of central banks during this period. Is there cross-
national variation in terms of how closely linked to international finance central banks are? Do
all central banks give in so easily to the demands of international capital?
On a more theoretical level, while I understand that the genre in which this book is
written is that of political economy and economic history, I would have liked to see a discussion
of the broader implications of this work. Specifically, how does the book speak to debates within
economic or political sociology? To be sure, the first part of the book does an excellent job
situating the argument in political economy debates about the relationship between domestic and
international forces, but the book does not quite return to those debates at the end. Thus, for
instance, Major often writes as if interests were fixed and politics were just a matter of some
interests prevailing over others, but a more institutionally sensitive perspective would be
Book Reviews 217

attentive to the ways interests change over time as a function of the political contexts in which
they develop. Finally, does the analysis have implications for the study of neoliberalism in the
particular period under examination, or can it yield insight into capitalism in general? I think
sociology has the potential to offer such general accounts, and books such as Architects of
Austerity will be invaluable building blocks to that end.

Simone Polillo
Department of Sociology
University Of Virginia
[email protected]

William I. Robinson. 2014. Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity. New York:
Cambridge University Press. 252 pages, ISBN 978-1107691117 Paper ($29.99).

In a preface to his highly celebrated book, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, Poulantzas

stated that his aim in studying the capitalist class is to provide better conceptual tools for
working class organizations in their struggle with the capitalist system. In a similar fashion,
William Robinson, a long time scholar of capitalist class, openly embraces Poulantzas' effort not
only to understand the changing nature of global capitalism over the last four decades, but also to
change it. Robinson is one of the most prominent advocates of a rising approach within the
literature on state-capitalist class relations: the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) perspective.
Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity extends his more than 15 years of theoretical and
empirical work. In fact, the book can be read as a good introduction to Robinson's theory of
contemporary capitalism. For those familiar with his framework and eager to follow up with the
recent debates within the TCC perspective, the book nicely reviews and engages with those
authors who are critical of his approach. However, Robinson states that the book's main focus is
to identify the main causes and responses to the 2008 global financial crisis, utilizing his global
capitalism theory. It therefore provides invaluable updated information on the ravening effects of
the recent 2008 global crisis class, making the text appealing for any student of Marxism
interested in global inequality and capitalist class dominance.
Robinson spends half of the book introducing his global capitalism theory before
discussing his more recent work on the 2008 global crisis and its aftermath. He organizes this
first part as a debate with other Marxist schools of thought, especially world system analysis. He
argues that the capitalist class does not organize itself nationally as in the pre 1970s period, but
rather transnationally. In a similar vein, the nation state does not function for the benefit of its
national bourgeoisie. It is structured for the transnational capitalist class. Moreover, today's
transnational state (TNS) is a network of global institutions such as the IMF, WB, WTO, UN,
and G20, as well as nation states.
The key to the formation of TCC and TNS, Robinson argues, is a qualitative change in
productive relations after 1970s. Historically commodity production was organized by capitalists
within the confines of national states. However, globalization fractured the production process so
that different capitalists in different regions of the world collaborate for the production of a
commodity. More and more commodity production is dominated by these transnational relations,
making the transnational capitalist class the dominant capitalist fraction in the metropolitan and
dependent regions of the world. It is this qualitative change in the nature of commodity
218 Journal of World-Systems Research

production which radically changes the character of both the bourgeoisie and the capitalist state.
Therefore, Robinson rejects those analyses coming mostly from the world system approach,
which see globalization as a quantitative change due to the increasing scale and scope of global
commercial networks.
In the latter part of the book, Robinson analyzes the 2008 global crisis. He reiterates the
theories of underconsumption and globalized financialization as the root of the crisis. In this
regard, his analysis differs little from extant Marxist scholarship on the subject. However, where
he does depart from the current literature is in his analysis of the response given to the crisis. He
argues that the enormous bail-outs provided by the U.S. government in the 2007-8 period were
not only for the benefit of U.S. financial institutions, but also for the security of the transnational
(finance) capitalist class. Moreover, he sees the huge military campaigns of the U.S. army in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and the Obama-era drone wars as part of the conflation of the interests of
global finance capital with those of the "military-security-industrial-construction-engineering-
petroleum complex" (148). Militarized accumulation and the reassertion of the power of finance
capital have been the two responses given to the global financial crisis. Robinson rightly states
that this has created massive human insecurity, to which the TNS has responded with more
intensified policing.
Robinson claims that neo-imperialist theories that trace their intellectual trajectory to the
classical analyses of imperialism developed by Lenin and Luxemburg have little explanatory
capacity to make sense of developments since the 1970s. At the core of these analyses is the
argument that capitalism is based on a dynamic of uneven accumulation, and that this
unevenness is defined through the core-periphery relation; core nation states compete with each
other to dominate peripheral regions within the structure of interstate relations. Robinson
maintains that uneven development of capitalism has lost its territorial significance; today it
expresses itself via the formation of a TCC and a global working class without much reference to
regional differences. Worldwide, the conditions of the global working class have become more
similar across former core and peripheral regions, as the post-World War II national welfare
states have almost vanished.
In my view, Robinson's interpretation of the neo-imperialism debate has some serious
flaws, particularly in terms of understanding the legacy of dependency theory and world systems
analysis regarding the character of the uneven development of capitalism. According to
Robinson, neo-imperialist theories following the classical texts on imperialism by Lenin,
Bukharin and Hilferding argue that national states compete within the inter-state system for the
benefit of their national bourgeoisie. Contrary to Robinson's characterization of the dependency
school, prominent dependistas such as Cardoso and Enzo, as well as Poulantzas, stated already in
the 1970s that the dependency relation is not imposed from the outside, but rather is instituted
through an alliance between the comprador bourgeoisie of the dependent countries and the
bourgeoisie of the core countries. It was this alliance that enabled the exploitation of the colonies
for the benefit of both the metropolitan and dependent country bourgeoisies. A contemporary
contributor to the new imperialism debate, David Harvey (2005), also pointed to this alliance in
the formation and the consolidation of neoliberal policies around the world. Rather than pointing
to the endless conflict within the interstate system, contemporary theories of new imperialism
point to the existence of hegemonic or counter-hegemonic alliances that regulate the conflicts in
global accumulation of capital. World systems analysis is especially rich in its focus on the rise
and fall of hegemonic cycles. The upshot is that Robinson misrepresents the novelty of his own
argument within the imperialism debate.
Book Reviews 219

A more novel part of Robinson's theory of imperialism is his assertion of the territorial
independence of the uneven development of contemporary capitalism. However, he also
acknowledges that "there remain significant regional differences in relation to global
accumulation and particular histories and configurations of social forces that shape distinct
experiences under globalization. Moreover these social forces operate through national and
regional institutions" (114). Therefore, while he writes that "the fundamental social contradiction
in global society is between subordinate and dominant classes" (114), on the very same page he
accepts the persistence of the North-South divide (similar to Arrighi's 2001 article published as a
critique of Robinson's early work on the TCC). This acknowledgment of the persistence of the
North-South divide stands as a tension within his theory of global capitalism that emphasizes the
territorial independence of the unevenness of capitalism. These issues, in turn, have implications
for Robinson's thesis regarding the global working class. Even a quick look at the social
development indices in areas such as housing, health care, education, and food security reveals
persistent differences between historically peripheral and core regions of the world. In this
regard, I find his conceptualization of the global working class a more effective plea for
transnational/international class solidarity than a solid argument about the character of working
class existence in the context of contemporary global capitalism.
Another problematic point is Robinson's treatment of clashes within the transnational
capitalist class. Although Robinson mentions at various points that such clashes exist, he does
not provide any empirical or theoretical discussion of why they arise and how they affect the
functioning of global capitalism. He rather emphasizes the high degree of cooperation within the
TCC and argues that U.S. military power works for the protection of its interests against those
few countries and military groups that try to check its power. Not surprisingly, Robinson views
the increasing global alliance of BRICS countries as a manifestation of its quest to reconfigure
the power within the TCC rather than a challenge of the global geopolitical power of the U.S. As
he does not delve into the cleavages that exist within the TCC, the reader cannot understand the
military and economic tensions that are now occurring-for example, those between Russia and
the U.S.-EU over Syria and Ukraine, and between China and the U.S.-Japan over the East China
Sea and North Korea
In the concluding chapter Robinson proposes a broad strategy of global social movements
in order to check the power of the TCC. I find this bold attempt particularly valuable, given the
fact that many commentators on the left avoid risking an answer to the question "what is to be
done?" Robinson is pessimistic about the usefulness of massive social upheavals without a
political body organizing the expression of this opposition. He is mostly critical of "horizontal"
approaches geared towards the creation of certain social spaces that are independent from global
capitalism. For Robinson, without dealing with the power of the transnational state, there is no
way to challenge the power of the TCC. He also criticizes vanguardist tendencies of the "old
left" and proposes a strategy of social movement unionism that organizes across the living and
working space of the global working class. Although Robinson does not address how to
challenge the enormous coercive power of the capitalist class, I still find his attempt to grapple
with these issues impressive. Overall, and despite my reservations with elements of his account, I
regard Robinson's book a must read for anyone seeking to understand the contemporary
manifestations of global capitalism.
220 Journal of World-Systems Research

References
Arrighi, G. 2001. "Global capitalism and the persistence of the north-south divide." Science &
Society 65( 4): 469-476.
Cardoso, F. H., & Faletto, E. 1979. Dependency and Development in Latin America. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History ofNeoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Poulantzas, N. A. 1975. Classes in contemporary capitalism. London: NLB.
Wallerstein, I. 2012. "Robinson's critical appraisal appraised." International Sociology 27(4):
524-528.

Mehmet Baki Deniz

Department of Sociology
SUNY Binghamton
[email protected]

David Redmon. 2015. Beads, Bodies, and Trash: Public Sex, Global Labor, and the
Disposability of Mardi Gras. New York: Routledge. 256 pages, ISBN 978-0415525404 Paper
($35.95).

David Redmon, in this book, extends the journey begun in his previous documentary Mardi
Gras: Made in China, following the plastic Mardi Gras beads from the factory in South China
where they are produced, to the site of consumption on New Orleans' Bourbon Street, to the
landfills where the beads end up, to the environmental organizations seeking to replace them
with more sustainable Mardi Gras paraphernalia. Redmon underscores that the common theme
undergirding this journey, and the central argument of the book, is that "the senses shape, form,
and govern the commodity chain of Mardi Gras beads" (7). To support his argument, Redmon
demonstrates the ways in which the bodily experiences of touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell
"organize and give shape to social relations," (7) and at the same time, "intertwine with the
political economy to produce a commodity chain" (8). Redmon contends that his argument
furthers the existing literature on sensuality through illustrating that "a commodity chain is a
corporeal association of assembled senses that fuses with the economy as a seemingly reified
sensual object that, in turn, governs and reproduces what has recently been labeled a sensual
sphere" (8).
Redmon's book aims to combine an objective account of the ways in which the "senses
shape the political economy of the objects" and a subjective account of the ways in which people
interact with the beads as sensuous objects. In so doing, Redmon theorizes sensualities of human
tastes, smells, sights, and touch as a social force that drives the demand for the production of the
beads and facilitates their circulation across national borders. In Redmon's words, sensualities
"influence the political economy, materiality, and the global division of labor" (9).
This book comprises six chapters. The first chapter lays out the central argument,
approaches, and theoretical advances of the book. The second chapter delves into the production
site in China where teenage girls constitute the labor force to manufacture the beads. Redmon
demonstrates the ways in which workers live in "the relations of sensuality-especially of
discipline, placement of the body inside the factory, repetition of movements, embodied
governance, and the materiality of experiential aesthetics." Redmon points out that human touch,
Book Reviews 221

perceptions, smells and sounds organize and shape workers' social relations of order and
discipline in the factory. He argues that "sensual degradation, sensual discipline, and sensual
social control are central ways of organizing workers' movements and ways of creating dullness"
(47).
The third chapter examines the use of beads during celebrations of the carnival on
Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Redmon illustrates the ways in which human senses generate
effervescence through the ritual of bead exchange and create what he calls "a sensual
community" during the Mardi Gras. Redmon contends that such sensory experiences shape
"social relations of exchange, scripted disorder, and interaction rituals" (85).
The fourth chapter follows the beads to the dump sites where, as Redmon states, the
VerdiGras organization feels "displeasurable sensations" from the beads (133). The organization
believes that environmental protection warrants the eradication of the plastic beads and their
replacement with a sustainable version. To the VerdiGras organization, the beads represent
"sensual objects of avoidance" (133), as the beads are perceived as a threat to both bodies and
the environment.
The last two chapters are devoted to an audiovisual approach to capture sensory
phenomena. Redmon first explores the sociology of sensual relations along commodity chains.
He then discusses the meaning and the process of a sensory sphere, and theorizes the gift
exchange as a means of social control. In the end he presents a theoretical and practical example
of using audiovisual methods as a vehicle for sociologists to produce video ethnography.
Ultimately, this book, as Redmon states, "tells a story of globalization and inequality
through merging materialist and sensory frameworks." Redmon is an extremely talented and
brilliant film producer, and his films have been widely adopted and celebrated in sociology and
anthropology classrooms where students and scholars are made to see with their own eyes and
feel with their own bodies the insidious inequality and injustice inherent in global capitalism.
Consistent with this mission, Redmon's book offers a wonderful and innovative introduction to,
and theorization of, video ethnography for students and scholars whose passion lies in visual
sociology and visual anthropology.

Tiantian Zheng
Department of Anthropology
State University of New York, Cortland
[email protected]
http://facultyweb.cortland.edu/zhengt/

Wilma A. Dunaway, ed. 2014. Gendered Commodity Chains: Seeing Women's Work and
Households in Global Production. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 285 pages, 978-
0804789080 Paper ($29.95).

Over the last two decades, scholars have produced a voluminous literature on global commodity
chains, value chains and production networks. As readers of this journal are no doubt aware, the
thrust of the world-systems formulation of commodity chains - to highlight the extraction and
transfer of surplus from periphery to core - has since taken a backseat to firm-centric analyses of
competition and, increasingly, 'win-win' cooperation. The present volume highlights just how
much has been lost in this transformation. In her thorough introduction, drawing on nearly three
222 Journal of World-Systems Research

decades of scholarship, the volume's editor, Wilma Dunaway, foregrounds the centrality of
households and social reproduction in the world-systems tradition. This focus remains as
important today as it was in the late 1970s when Hopkins and Wallerstein theorized the
household as a site of surplus generation and extraction in the world-system. The semi-
proletarian households that they and Marxist feminist scholars such as Maria Mies, Lourdes
Beneria and Claudia von Werlhof observed have since become mainstays of contemporary
capitalism, especially in the wake of neoliberal restructuring of the 1980s and ongoing austerity
today, a case made convincingly for the global North by Dave Broad in the volume. The present
collection is thus a timely contribution to a growing body of critical commodity chain and
production network studies. This literature places commodity production and exchange within
the constellation of social relations that are reproducing uneven geographies of development
along existing and new contours. In what follows, we undertake a thematic discussion of the
implicit dialogue in the volume between feminist and orthodox world-systems approaches. We
conclude by suggesting points for a second dialogue with critical geography.
The challenge of critical commodity chain studies is adeptly addressed by two of the
strongest contributions, authored by Jane Collins and Priti Ramarnurthy. Both authors offer the
reader a conceptualization of the feminist commodity chain as a mode of analysis that grounds
studies in local processes at once constitutive of, and constituted by, global connections. The
complexity of these processes can be daunting, especially when viewed with an eye to their
global dimension. As Ramamurthy has long argued, feminist approaches must eschew a
unilinear understanding of commodity chains as composed solely of investments that flow from
global North to South and commodities that move in the other direction (44). Indeed, analysts
should embrace the "star of lines," as Collins suggests, that traverses the commodity from social
reproduction in its varied dimensions, to the refashioning of gender ideologies, to the conflicts
and complicities between workers, communities and management (37). Such an analysis, to
quote Collins, has "the potential to bring externalities to the center, to create new measures of
value, and to critically engage global processes generating inequality" (ibid.). The challenge for
a feminist analysis is to open up the ways in which difference becomes value to capital, and,
following Ramamurthy, the ways that difference confounds capital's logics.
Understanding the commodity chain as a mode of analysis stands at odds with several
chapters written from a more orthodox world-systems perspective. Dunaway's and Clelland's
contributions, which provide a conceptual backdrop for other chapters, remain committed to the
project of the commodity chain as a mechanism of surplus extraction from the households of
producers and workers at the "bottom" of the chain. This perspective offers important insights
because it focuses commodity chain analysis on the household as the central locus where hidden
value is created through un- or under-paid (often female) household labor, and situates this
process within capitalism's broad tendency to rely upon the invisible and devalued labor of semi-
proletarian households for accumulation. Indeed, terms such as "housewifization" (Dunaway)
and "dark value" (Clelland) aptly highlight how un- and under-paid natural and human resources
that are framed as externalities remain unaccounted for in global production, and provide a
hidden subsidy to commodity chains. For Clelland, echoing structuralist and dependentista
formulations, the extraction of this dark value from semi-proletarian households in the periphery
and its transfer to the core through cheapening prices re-frames the phenomena under discussion
more aptly as "dark-value-extraction chains" (72). Clearly, this speaks to feminist concerns about
the role played by households and social differences (inter alia gender) in capital accumulation,
and the existence of a vast realm of labor and economic exchange mechanisms outside both the
Book Reviews 223

market form and the capitalist firm. Yet, while world-systems theorists conceive these other,
alternative economies as a hidden substratum tapped by capital for surplus extraction and
accumulation, feminist scholars challenge such functionalist interpretations. Indeed, scholars
such as Ramamurthy argue for the appreciation of households and labor marked by difference
from a nuanced perspective. The very possibility for surplus value to be extracted across diverse
contexts and over time suggests the need to consider alternative systems of valuation and
provisioning as defined by far more than their conformity to formal capitalist relations of
production.
A second dimension where WST commodity chain studies could benefit from a more
thorough engagement with the feminist analysis as outlined in Part 1 is the appreciation of the
"constitutive link between production and consumption" (47), both in the sense of the production
and consumption of a commodity along a chain, and the production and consumption of
commodities at all nodes of a commodity chain. The chapter by Kathleen Pickering Sherman
and Andrea Akers achieves precisely this balance. In their discussion of the marketing of
indigenous poverty and culture among Lakota people in South Dakota, the authors focus on the
household as both a site of production and consumption within commodity webs. The circulation
and exchange of these commodities can occur simultaneously through formal and informal
markets as well as non-market mechanisms, including subsistence production and inter-
household sharing, gifting, barter, and public welfare payments. Nicola Yeats' chapter
summarizing her extensive work on global care chains also gestures to the importance of the
modes of proximate and long-distance care and consumption practices of households in the
global South that rely upon members working as nurses and caregivers in the global North.
Finally, we would like to conclude by suggesting the potential for constructive dialogue
between volumes such as this one and work on commodity chains/production networks in
conversation with critical geography (e.g., Bair and Werner 2011; Bair et al. 2013). Let us take
Saniye Dedeoglu's stimulating chapter on Turkish garment production in Istanbul and Turkey's
southeast region as an example. Noting that the two areas of production rely on different kinds of
gendered labor - entire households and immigrants in Istanbul and "factory daughters" in the
southeast - Dedeoglu's work is suggestive of the growing importance of sub-national regional
competition and uneven development to global production. Particular regional contexts and
labor markets - in Turkey, or as we have seen in Mexico and Central America - offer sources for
additional surplus and, in turn, are remaking global patterns of inequality. Gendered strategies of
households are forged in relation to uneven regional development and commodity chain
restructuring, as we can see, for example, with step-wise migration that links intra- and
international mobility. The spatial dimension and territoriality of global commodity chains
remains a fruitful and largely unexplored area for feminist and world-systems scholars alike to
explore the links between social and spatial inequalities that are both the condition for and
outcome of global capitalist production.

Johanna Herrigel
Department of Geography
University of Zurich
[email protected]

Marion Werner
Department of Geography
224Journal of World-Systems Research

University at Buffalo
[email protected]

References
Bair, J. & Werner, M. 2011. "Commodity Chains and the Uneven Geographies of Global
Capitalism: A Disarticulations Perspective." Environment and Planning A 43(5): 988-
997.
Bair, J., Berndt, C., Boeckler, M. & Werner, M. 2013. "Dis/articulating producer markets and
regions: New directions in critical studies of commodity chains." Environment and
Planning A 45(11): 2544-2552.

Gavin Fridell. 2013. Alternative Trade: Legacies for the Future. Winnipeg, Manitoba:
Fernwood Publishing. 169 pages, 978-1552665879 Paper ($24.95).

In the 1990s, neoliberalism flourished. The pursuit of free trade was manifest in the founding of
the World Trade Organization; ardent promotion of the Washington Consensus development
policies; and promises that a tide of unfettered globalization could rise all boats. Events at the
turn of the 21st Century, however, revealed widespread contention and doubt that such an agenda
would deliver deeper benefits to a broader global population than the policies that preceded
them. The 1999 protests at the WTO ministerial in Seattle highlighted civil society's concern that
labor unions, the environment, and economically marginalized groups would bear the brunt of
the adjustment costs in the short run, and may not become better off in the long run. Likewise,
the 2000 UN Millennium Development Goals and the 2001 WTO Doha Declaration of
commitment to development underscored the concern that trade liberalization alone may not
improve social wellbeing across the globe.
Two decades later, a burgeoning literature evaluates the successes and failures of the
neoliberal project. Yet, surprisingly few authors compare these 'free trade' outcomes to those
generated by 'interventionist' or 'protectionist' policies that preceded them. Gavin Fridell makes
an invaluable contribution to this conversation. Alternative Trade: Legacies for the Future
addresses the question: How do the social outcomes generated by the 1990s neoliberal turn
compare to the outcomes generated by the trade interventions that preceded it? Fridell draws on
three case studies-the International Coffee Agreement, the Canadian Wheat Board, and the EU-
Caribbean Banana Agreement-to argue that such "alternative" trade interventions were more
socially efficient than the free trade agenda that succeeded them. The book is an excellent
resource for students and scholars of international trade and development.
The introduction and opening chapter argue that the package of theories, historical
narratives, and policies that constitute the widely embraced 'free trade' regime are more fantasy
than reality. Contrary to theoretical models, the market cannot be separated from the state. And
despite their label, free trade politics are not about freely trading but instead about creating new
rules and institutions for the governance of trade. Finally, irrespective of the theoretically based
narrative that competition generates prosperity, many of the world's dominant economies were
built with the aid of protectionist policies. The free trade agenda is not, then, a move away from
Book Reviews 225

government intervention. In fact, 'the entire capitalist economy consists of rules and
regulations .. .imposed and regulated by the state' (4). In the neoliberal era, what is new is that
those rules and regulations more clearly promote private profits for corporations and the interests
of the Global North. The way forward, Fridell argues, is to return to policies that benefit the
world's masses, which largely remain marginalized and vulnerable.
Much of the book focuses on contrasting the intentions and impacts of "free trade"
interventions with those of "alternative trade" models. Alternative trade is the use of state power
to manage markets for broader social, economic, and developmental ends (4). Several such
initiatives, such as price stabilization schemes and international commodity agreements, were
developed following WWII, but their legacies expired in recent decades, with the rise of
neoliberal thinking. Fridell acknowledges that these alternative schemes, like neoliberalism,
promoted capitalist social relations and were often founded on unequal North-South
relationships, limiting the ability of participants to challenge historical power inequalities. Yet,
they remain distinct from the "free trade fantasy" in that they consciously aimed to improve
social wellbeing.
Each of three chapter-long case studies illustrates how pro-poor state interventions in
trade can deliver widespread benefits to commodities producers. The first example is the
International Coffee Agreement (ICA), which limited exports from coffee-producing countries.
From 1962 to 1989, the ICA succeeded in raising and stabilizing the world price for coffee. It
collapsed when U.S. priorities shifted away from Cold War-motivated support for developing
countries. The second example is the Canadian Wheat Board, which emerged in the 1930s and
1940s to protect Plains farmers from price volatility and to lend support for collective action.
Deemed the largest, longest-standing and most successful state trading enterprise, the Wheat
Board increased and stabilized world prices by acting as a single desk seller for wheat. In the
early 2000s the United States protested Canada's intervention in the wheat market, and in 2003
the WTO investigated it for non-discriminatory treatment. By 2008 the Wheat Board was the
only single desk wheat exporter in the world, and in 2012 it lost favor in Parliament and was
dissolved. Fridell's final illustration of alternative trade is the EU-Caribbean banana agreement, a
multilateral quota system that reserved a portion of European Union banana imports for growers
in former colonies. The preferential agreement allowed banana producers in the Windward
Islands and Jamaica to gain higher income than their Latin American counterparts, while
maintaining sustainable and culturally resonant cultivation practices. In 2009 U.S. banana
importers and Latin American growers pressured the EU to lower import duties on Latin
American bananas, subjecting Caribbean farmers to crippling competition.
In each case Fridell highlights the devastating collective action problems facing
commodities producers, illustrates how state trade policies relieved such problems, and describes
how the "free trade fantasy"-a change of tide in ideas about the role of states in markets-led to
the collapse of alternative trade regimes. While the market is needed to direct economies, the
state must limit capitalism's anti-social outcomes. Today, "the greatest torchbearer for
alternative trade" is ALBA (146), the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America.
ALBA was launched by Venezuela and Cuba in 2004 and aims to facilitate socially-oriented
regional trade that results in wealth redistribution and increases in wellbeing of the citizens of its
(now eleven) member states. Alternative trade regimes may have fallen out of favor, but they are
not necessarily gone for good.
Alternative Trade does several things well. First, its defense of pro-poor interventions is
an important and welcome contribution to the literature on economic justice in international
226 Journal of World-Systems Research

trade. By comparing the outcomes of alternative trade and free trade interventions, Fridell makes
a strong argument for a return to pro-poor trade policies. He also clarifies that fair trade
certification and other non-state initiatives are unable to match the breadth or reach of alternative
trade policies. In coffee, for example, the ICA impacted all coffee farmers, whereas fair trade
certifications currently reach only around three percent.
Second, Alternative Trade connects its argument and cases to broader literatures in
international political economy. Fridell describes the tenets of neoclassical economics,
neoliberalism, and Keynesianism, connecting his story to the cannon of influential economists,
such as Ricardo, Friedman, Sachs, Stiglitz, and Keynes. He also describes how alternative trade
can be approached through global value chain analysis (Bair, Gereffi, Raynolds), using an agro-
food perspective (Bello), or through the lens of critical agrarian political economy (Bernstein).
This makes the book an excellent point of entree to several key conversations in the field.
Last but certainly not least, Alternative Trade is beautifully written. Every chapter is
pithy and engaging, each page is a valuable contribution worth reading. Even in the penultimate
paragraph of the book, Fridell delivers new historical examples and fresh analysis, leaving the
reader both satisfied and curious to learn more. The tone strikes an appealing middle ground
between activist outrage and objective analysis. Fridell frequently reminds readers of the "long
and tortuous legacies of colonialism and slavery" in Latin America (36) and how indigenous
groups were "violently" stripped of their land in Canada ( 67). Yet, the overall voice is less
activist and more analytical.
Alongside the original contributions and engaging writing were a few distracting
shortcomings. Some claims could have been developed more thoroughly, using specific figures
and additional calculations to bolster a point. In the introduction, for example, Fridell argues that
claims about free trade improving wellbeing are wrong. He shows how changes in the definition
of "poverty" and the size of the world population have facilitated the incorrect conclusion that
poverty has been dramatically slashed through free trade. While this is a move in the right
direction, a discussion of how well the 2008 poverty line adjustment reflects inflation and
increased costs of living, or a note about how to consider figures differently in light of a rapidly
growing population, would have made the point more compelling. Some case study figures
lacked citation. It was disappointing that Fridell glossed over the logic of an interesting
counterfactual-that coffee prices would have been half as high had the International Coffee
Agreement ceased to exist-as such a claim deserves more justification. Finally, the case study
chapters would have benefitted from subheadings or a brief introduction to the principal events.
As it currently reads, the details of coffee prices in a single year appear almost as important as
the founding of the International Coffee Agreement. Readers lacking background knowledge will
struggle to see the main events through the less pivotal details. But these limitations were
superficial and do not suggest inadequate research or compromised scholarship.
Fridell wants readers to know that trade policies can explicitly aim to create a "more
cooperative, socially just world order" (9) and that when they do take on this mission they can
deliver widespread, meaningful benefits to the world's most vulnerable populations, in particular
producers of internationally traded commodities. For scholars and students interested in the
relationship between economic justice and international trade, Alternative Trade: Legacies of the
Future is a well-researched, beautifully written, and original, must-read book.

Elizabeth Bennett
Department of International Affairs
Book Reviews 227

Lewis & Clark College

[email protected]
www.ElizabethAnneBennett.com

Christian Fuchs. 2014. Digital Labour and Karl Marx. New York and London: Routledge.
403 pages, ISBN 978-0415716161 Paper ($43.95).

During my seminars in the sociology department at Binghamton University, one of three

graduate programs in the United States specializing in world-systems analysis, it was not unusual
to hear criticisms of Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and the wider idea of "cognitive capitalism."
They were dismissed as "Eurocentric" and chastised for ignoring older debates. They were seen
as recapitulating the dominant ideology, dismissed as "a marxified version of Tom Friedman."
Case closed. Move on to more rigorous scholarship.
Unfortunately , the Marxist scholarship on the high technology sectors of contemporary
capitalism makes a relatively short reading list: George Caffentzis' (2013) efforts to expand
Marx's theory of machines (139-203) and his related critique of cognitive capitalism (66-81, 95-
126); Nick Dyer-Witheford's (1999) attempt to take autonomist Marxism in a different
direction than Hardt and Negri; critical political economy of media and communications
(McChesney 2008; Mosco 2009); and, the socialist feminism of Ursula Huws (2014) and studies
of the workplace culture of the so-called "creative class" (Ross 2009; Boltanski & Chiapello
2005). While these works each make important contributions, none of them put forward a
systemic theorization of contemporary capitalism that is as broad as that offered by Hardt, Negri,
and the larger cognitive capitalism school.
Christian Fuchs steps into this void with Digital Labour and Karl Marx. In this ambitious
text , Fuchs seeks to affirm Marxist tradition, demonstrate the continuing relevancy of the labor
theory of value, and renew the struggle for communism. Despite some problems, Digital Labour
and Karl Marx is compelling reading for anyone interested in contemporary capitalism.
The book is organized in three sections. The first positions the book in existing literature,
providing both theoretical background and a critique of theories of information society. Fuchs
presents a non-dogmatic Marxism that incorporates elements of Frankfurt School, autonomist
Marxism, the feminism of Maria Mies, Claudia Von Werlhof, and Veronika Bennholdt-
Thomsen. While he does not dismiss either theories of information society or cultural studies, he
provides a trenchant critique of both bodies of literature, exposing their implicit celebration of
neoliberalism and their often-superficial engagement with Marx. Instead, Fuchs calls for "an
institutional revolution that buries prejudices against Karl Marx ... [W]e are living in a world with
multidimensional global inequalities. Interpreting and changing this world requires us to think
about class, crisis, critique and capitalism" (73).
As part of this effort to demonstrate the utility of Marxism to the study of contemporary
media, Fuchs puts forward his signature theoretical contribution, what he calls "internet
prosumer commodification." Here, he returns to the idea of the "audience commodity," which
Dallas Smythe ( 1977) first advanced to expand the study of mass media beyond the ideology
critique and apprehend the role of media in processes of capital accumulation. Traditional mass
media formats, radio and television, produce and sell air time for advertisements. The unpaid
labor of media consumption, objectified as the "audience commodity," is their primary product.
228 Journal of World-Systems Research

Fuchs expands the concept to apprehend the nature of contemporary unpaid consumption
work on the Internet. He appropriates the notion of the "prosumer," first coined to celebrate the
blurring of consumption and production as a form of economic and political self-determination.
For Fuchs, prosumpution connotes "the outscoring [of] work to users and consumers, who work
without payment ... The exchange value of the social media prosumer commodity is the money
value that the operators obtain from their clients. Its use value is the multitude of personal data
and usage behavior. .. " (99, 103). The shared use of the accumulation strategy by all Internet
firms signals the near-complete real subsumpution of social relations by capital. "Social media
and the mobile Internet make the audience commodity ubiquitous and the factory not limited to
your living and your workplace-the factory is also in all in-between spaces ... the entire planet
today is a capitalist factory" (111 ).
Fuchs details this "planetary factory" in the second section of the book, a series of case
studies that trace "the international division of digital labour," detailing the global value chain
that makes "internet prosumer commodification" possible. He begins with the mining of the
minerals that are essential to the production of information and communications technologies
(ICTs ). Here, he focuses on the Democratic Republic of Congo and the various forms of unpaid
labor-outright slavery, corvee labor, and peonage slavery-that characterize this link in the
value chain. He moves next to industrial production of ICTs in China's sprawling factory
complexes, discusses Indian software engineers, and then pivots to Silicon Valley, where he
details both the hyper-exploitation of largely undocumented workers in the ICT manufacturing
industry and "a highly paid and highly stressed labour aristocracy that enjoys relative surplus
wages at the expense of transforming its life time into work time for Google" (232).
The final two cases focus more on the circulation of commodities: (I) the call centers
which organize the transactions and (2) use of social media. Fuchs defines the former as a
"Taylorized and housewifized" form of labor. As Taylorized work, it is deskilled and subject to
aggressive surveillance. As housewifized work, it takes on the precarious conditions that
characterize housework. It is unprotected, always available, and socially devalued. The final case
study reviews and further elaborates the earlier section that theoretically defined "internet
prosumer commodification." Here, Fuchs makes the distinction between digital labor and digital
work, as the analysis blurs into the discussion in the final section of the book concerning the
nature of contemporary working class struggle.
As a whole, the international division of digital labor represents "the history and
articulation of forms of exploitation" (296). Fuchs argues against the staged history shared by
Orthodox Marxists and liberals. Instead, he describes an articulating network of distinct modes
of production: "The emergence of a new mode of production does not necessarily abolish, but
rather sublates (aufheben) older modes of production" (164). As a result, "a variety of modes of
production and organizations of the productive ... are articulated, including slavery in mineral
extraction, military forms of Taylorist industrialism in hardware assemblage, an informational
organization of the productive forces of capitalism that articulates a highly paid knowledge
labour aristocracy, precarious service workers, imperialistically exploited knowledge workers"
(295-296). While this framework avoids restricting capitalism to wage labor, it also leads Fuchs
to stop short of commenting on the systemic totality of historical capitalism. Fuchs sees slavery
in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Google's labor aristocracy as somehow articulating
with each other, but, absent any historical attention to processes of uneven development or core-
periphery differentiation, he never asks why.
Book Reviews 229

The lack of historical depth becomes problematic in the final section of the book, where
Fuchs reviews the various claims made about ICT and social movements in the context of
Occupy Wall Street (OWS). In contrast to "societal holism that ignores media and technology,
technological reductionism that ignores society and dualism that ignores causality," Fuchs
advances a dialectical view of social media. He concludes that "social media in a contradictory
society ... are likely to have contradictory character: they do not necessarily and automatically
support/amplify or dampen/limit rebellions but rather pose contradictory potential that stand in
contradiction to influences by the state, ideology and capitalism" (331, 333). In short, he offers
measured advice that "one should avoid both overstressing and underestimating the role of media
technologies in contemporary social movements" (341 ).
For such an ambitious book, this conclusion is unsatisfying. After advocating return of
Marxism, a renewal of the revolutionary spirit, and detailing "the international division of digital
labour," Fuchs' concluding question is limited to the role of social media in OWS. While Fuchs
acknowledges the similarities OWS shares with other contemporary movements and justifies his
case selection on the basis of his language skills, his concluding case study does not begin to
address the rich questions his text raises. For example, his reflection on OWS does not address
the main political problem introduced in the opening sections of the text: the way the commodity
form obscures the connections between global workers laboring in different moments of the
international division of digital labor.
The asymmetry between the soaring ambitious of the first two sections and the
inadequate conclusion speaks to a larger problem. Fuchs puts too many ingredients in the pot.
Much is left uncooked. While the broad scope of the study is admirable, the overall effect is
limited by poor execution. Digital Labour and Karl Marx suffers from inelegant prose and poor
editing that suggests hurried writing. Paragraphs run on for pages despite clear shifts in
emphasis. Identical blocks reappear throughout the book. Abrupt and unclear transitions limit the
overall coherence of the argument. These types of mistakes will limit the appeal of the work and
provide an easy out for unsympathetic readers.
More importantly, they impede the flow of the book with unnecessary clutter. Better
editing and a tightened argument would have created more space to explore some of the wider
ramifications that his study raises. His treatment of ecological issues is particularly wanting. In
the concluding section, he acknowledges this shortcoming (29 5-296). This discussion, however,
mentions only e-waste-the disposals of ICTs-and ignores a litany of other issues, such as the
limited supply of rare minerals used to make ICTs, pollution caused by their production, and the
energy and water used to operate them. Throughout the text, Fuchs asserts that the productivity
gains of capitalist development have conquered scarcity and made global communism a material
possibility. The world-ecological contradictions of contemporary capitalism-and the dream of
digital communism, for that matter-remain unexplored.
Digital Labour and Karl Marx is an important book. It takes on important questions:
What is the organization and the class composition of digital labor? Are the current struggles of
digital workers revolutionary? Fuchs offers the closest approximation of the axial division of
labor as it relates to the high technology sectors of contemporary capitalism. This contribution
alone makes the Digital Labour and Karl Marx an important work, despite its flaws.

References
230 Journal of World-Systems Research

Boltanski, L. & E. Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London and New York:
Verso.
Caffentzis, G. In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and Value in Crisis of Capitalism.
Oakland: PM Press.
Dyer-Witheford, N. 1999. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology
Capitalism. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Huws, U. 2014. Labor in the Digital Economy: Cybertariat Comes of Age. New York: Monthly
Review Press.
McChesney, R. 2008. The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas.
New York: Monthly Review Press.
Mosco, V. 2009. The Political Economy of Communications. London and Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Ross, A. 2009. It's Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. New York:
NYU Press.
Smythe, D. 1997. "Communications: The Blindspot of Western Marxism." Canadian Journal of
Political and Social Theory 1(3): 1-27

Brendan McQuade
Department of International Studies
DePaul University
[email protected]

Boaventura de Sousa Santos. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against

Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. 292 pages, 978-1612055459 Paper ($32.95).

Many critical theorists have tried to deal with the formidable task of establishing the parameters
for a critical theory of the present time that would take into account the historical and analytical
limits of marxism. Nevertheless, in the wide terrain of a global academic left, very few scholars
have accepted the challenge of proposing the epistemological basis for a global, anti-colonial,
anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal critical theory for the current moment. Boaventura de Sousa
Santos, in his Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide faces exactly this great
task.
In this challenging and inspiring book, Sousa Santos brings together many of the issues
that he tackled in his scholarly work, dating back to the late 1980s. Sousa Santos - probably the
most important sociologist in the Portuguese speaking world - is a uniquely productive critical
thinker, having dealt with issues such as the epistemology of modern sciences, social movements
of the Global South, multiculturalism, the production of law in the practices of slum dwellers,
and anti-hegemonic forms of knowledge production, among many others. Somehow, all these
topics come together in Epistemologies of the South. In this book, Sousa Santos presents a long
critique of hegemonic western epistemology - including the limits of critical projects that
emanated from the western experience and perspective, such as marxism - and provides a few
parameters, both analytical and conceptual, for an anti-hegemonic ecology of knowledges that
would avoid one of the key consequences of the domination of western epistemology: the
extermination of alternative forms of knowing and living.
The book develops three critical insights: there is no global justice without global
cognitive justice; the understanding of the world exceeds the western, hegemonic understanding
Book Reviews 231

of the world; and the emancipatory transformation of the world may follow narratives that are
not contemplated by the western, critical tradition. It is easy to notice that Sousa Santos aims to
provide a synthesis of different post-marxist critical discourses, particularly Postcolonial Theory,
Critical Race Theory, and Feminist Theory. But he also wants to establish analytical ground-
rules for a diversity of yet un-thought of critical perspectives, as long as they challenge a broadly
defined dominant western epistemology - which encompasses neoliberal economics,
conventional conceptions of modern science, and a traditional marxism that remains blind to
forms of domination other than that defined by class struggle. These are great and critical
questions, which are by themselves a sign of the importance of this intellectual project.
Nevertheless, Sousa Santos is only partially successful in providing helpful and clear answers;
this is partly due to the lack of connection between the empirical cases that inspire the work and
the concepts proposed, but also to the unnecessary, confusing, and unproductive conceptual
inflations that characterize the book.
From the very beginning of the book, Sousa Santos has to deal with a central
contradiction: the work intends to speak from the practices of anti-systemic movements from the
global South; these practices would provide the experiential and political basis for a diversity of
knowledges that would challenge western 1 epistemic and political projects. Nevertheless, the
author acknowledges that due to its language and structure, the primary audience of the book is
critical scholars trained in the western tradition. This is thematized - far from reaching a final
solution - in the two manifestos that open the book: one for "good living", the other "for
Intellectual-Activists." I would like to argue that the book has limitations on both fronts alluded
to in the manifestos, despite its critical importance for expanding the horizon of our
contemporary critical discourses.
First, regarding the connection with the experiences of the global South, it is important to
note that Sousa Santos was one of the most important intellectual voices associated with the
World Social Forum (seep. 42). For any scholar or activist familiar with the critical discourses
that circulated in the Forum, many of Sousa Santos' themes will sound familiar, particularly his
insistence on the dialogue between different forms of knowledge, his search for a non-sectorial
critical language, and a serious concern for methods to bridge antagonisms between clashing
perspectives and procedures. This is certainly a positive aspect of the book, but it also raises at
least two problems. First, the alternative epistemologies that define the political imagination of
the book are treated at a very high level of abstraction. There is a shocking lack of attention to
the pragmatics of knowledge production and their associated political struggles in the history of
real communities and social movements. Sousa Santos is, of course, familiar with many of these
stories, and some of his edited works published in Portuguese address these issues. But it is
unclear how the plethora of concepts proposed by Sousa Santos in this book connects with those
dynamics.
In this sense, the book seems to propose a particular type of standpoint theory - actually,
a method for the composition of a diversity of critical standpoints. But each one of those
perspectives and voices is slightly swept under the rug of Sousa Santos' conceptual profusion.
Also, it is unclear how the book speaks to the key phenomenon in global contestation in the last
five years: the emergence of a global wave of protest and the diversity of movements, politics,
philosophies, and pragmatics associated with them. In this sense, the book reads as at least a
decade old. Finally, it seems to suffer from an extreme tendency to divide the world between

1
Or "northern" - the author moves back and forth between the two adjectives, as well as between "southern" and
"non-western."
232 Journal of World-Systems Research

good (the South, the non-West) and evil (the North within the North, the hegemonic Western
epistemology), as well as from a hurry in proposing bridges between antagonistic Southern forms
of knowledge and politics, without a more careful analysis of real practices of negotiation.
Regarding the Intellectual-Activist dimension of the book, most readers will notice that
Sousa Santos has a very peculiar writing and analytical style. The main trace of such a style is
the constant need to coin new concepts, some of which, such as his analytical pair "sociology of
emergences" and "sociology of absences," are of great value. But many of the concepts seem
more like unnecessary reaffirmations of the originality and the importance of the project than
solutions to intellectual problems (such as the romantic concept of a "baroque ethos" in chapter
1, or the oppressed as the "wagerer" in chapter 3). Others sound like easy metaphorical
replacements for truly hard problems (such as the concept of "sfumato" as the basis for a baroque
subjectivity). Overall, the book would gain a lot from a clearer dialogue with other contemporary
works that have addressed similar questions, particularly because it would probably lead to a
more clearly defined quest for conceptual invention.
But the book has clear contributions to a critical theory of the present times, and I would
like to argue that most of them are present in the last two chapters. In those chapters, Sousa
Santos delineates the parameters for an ecology of knowledges against the risk of epistemicide
imposed by dominant western epistemology ( or the "monoculture of scientific knowledge," in
Sousa Santos' expansive vocabulary). This is a pragmatic theory of the possibility of the
horizontal coexistence of non-dominant forms of knowledge and life, in which knowledge is
evaluated according to its capacity for critical intervention in the world. Sousa Santos
acknowledges that the creation of such a world requires mechanisms of translation between
different cultural practices and vocabularies - an issue he deals with in chapter 8. This is also the
part of the book in which Sousa Santos' formulations gain some empirical treatment, as in his
brief analysis of the clash of "scientific" and "traditional" forms of irrigation in Indonesia. These
two chapters prove Sousa Santos treads the center of critical theory today, especially given the
breadth of his concerns and his personal and political history of effective interchange with
Southern social movements.

Jose H. Bortoluci
Department of Sociology
University of Michigan
[email protected]

Jeb Sprague. 2012. Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti. New York:
Monthly Review Press. 400 pages, ISBN 978-1583673003 Paper ($21.55).

Haiti continues to command attention among international policy makers and scholars. In the
latter category is Jeb Sprague, whose book, Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in
Haiti, examines (paramilitary) violence in Haiti from the Duvalier era (1957-1986) to 2004, with
cursory coverage of events thereafter. The main argument of the book is that paramilitarism is
the means by which Haiti's dominant classes have sought to crush the Haitian masses in their
struggle for democracy and social justice, which is global in scope but elicits different responses
from local elites. As a tactic, pararnilitarism-variously defined as the creation and/or toleration
of irregular armed groups by state authorities-contrasts sharply with polyarchy, which is
Book Reviews 233

contrived to contain democracy within firm institutional limits that protect established privileges
while giving the popular classes a (illusory?) say in governing. Sprague does not deny that
violence has been used by all the contending groups in Haiti's fractious politics, but he argues
that " ... it was the popular classes-and those organizing in their interests-who have been and
continue to be the primary targets of political violence" (14).
The primary focus of the book is, once again, the period between 1990 and 2004, during
which the Lavalas (Haitian Kreyol for flood) movement led by Jean-Bertrand Aristide alternated
between moments of triumph and defeat by paramilitary forces and their sponsors, but, according
to Sprague, the groundwork for the use of paramilitary violence as a political instrument was laid
in the 1960s under Fran9ois (Papa Doc) Duvalier. Thus, Sprague identifies four phases (or what
he calls waves) of paramilitary violence in the recent history of Haiti: 1960s-1986, 1986-1990,
1991-1994, and late 2000-2004. In each of these phases, Haiti's dominant classes, which include
large landholders (grandons), big business owners and state elites, use a combination of state
terror and paramilitary violence to keep the masses in check. They were aided by foreign forces,
which, at various times, included the United States, the Dominican Republic, France, even
Canada. Sprague examines in exhaustive detail the 2004 ouster of Aristide from power. Using
the Freedom oflnformation Act, Sprague was able to gain access to U.S. government documents
that brought him tantalizingly close to uncovering the role of international actors in Haiti's latest
political denouement. Sprague sheds much light on what many Haitian specialists suspected-
namely, that the so-called rebels, including Guy Phillipe, Jodel Chamblain, Ravix Remissanthe
and consorts, who helped to topple Aristide in 2004 were, in essence, mercenaries bought and
paid for by Haiti's bourgeoisie and narco-traffickers, with Dominican and U.S. officials turning a
blind eye to their activities, if not supporting them outright.
One important revelation of Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti is the
alleged infiltration of the Haitian National Police by nefarious elements from the defunct Haitian
army. U.S. officials encouraged their integration in the name of stability and reconciliation, but,
according to Sprague, they turned out to be real fifth columns, who thwarted attempts by the
Lavalas government to defend itself against its enemies. This would explain the ease with which
"rebels" were able to occupy the national palace in Port-au-Prince on December 7, 2001, and just
as easily sneak their way out of the capital to sanctuaries in the Central Plateau and the
Dominican Republic. Sprague's investigative and conjectural skills are admirably displayed in
his analysis of Dany Toussaint and Youri Latortue, two figures emblematic of Haiti's Byzantine
politics. Although Sprague never quite accuses Toussaint of the murder of Haiti's most famous
journalist (Jean Leopold Dominique), his narrative strongly points in this direction.
Haiti is often painted as the "ugly duckling" of Latin America and the Caribbean, that is
to say, outside of the mainstream of regional politics. A real strength of Paramilitarism and the
Assault on Democracy in Haiti is its framing of Haitian events in a comparative perspective.
Sprague demonstrates keen insight when he draws a parallel between paramilitary activity in
Haiti and the contra campaign in Nicaragua in the 1980s. In both cases the U.S. ran roughshod
over democracy by supporting violent paramilitary forces-some possibly with narco-trafficking
connections, in clear contravention of U.S. law and long-term American security interests. A
more recent example of the U.S. sacrificing democratic principles on the altar of Realpolitik was
the 2009 coup against the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras.
Sprague is relentless in his determination to dispel the notion of Haitian particularism through
what is essentially a comparative method, even while paying close attention to the details of the
case. In so doing, Sprague nicely interweaves the global and the local. Furthermore, one cannot
234Journal of World-Systems Research

but be impressed with the risks that Sprague must have been willing to take while collecting data
for his book, as some of the personalities who are the objects of his inquiry undoubtedly have
blood on their hands. Overall, Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti makes a
valuable contribution to Haitian scholarship and global studies.
Still, there is much to be critiqued in Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in
Haiti. For a book in which paramilitarism is left, front and center, there is little serious
discussion of the concept in the text. Instead, Sprague devotes two and a half pages to
paramilitarism in the appendix. It would have been far better to have a substantive expose of
paramilitarism as an analytical construct in chapter I. Sprague fails to draw an important
distinction between paramilitarism, which suggests the presence of a main cachee (hidden hand)
behind military activity aimed at achieving political objectives, and banditry, which is much less
well-organized and amorphous in its aims. A strong argument can be made that banditry, rather
than paramilitarism, has been a much greater problem in Haiti, and that, in fact, it is the
propensity of Haitian society to descend into banditry or disorder that is fodder for
paramilitarism. In sum, Sprague may be rightly accused of misconstruing the proverbial tree for
the forest. As these lines are being written, a new "paramilitary" group is causing headache to
the rightist government of Michel Martelly and the United Nations in the town of Petit-Goave
and the surrounding hills.
Banditry in the Haitian context stems from socio-economic exclusion, which creates a
large pool of potential recruits for a variety of causes, some obviously political, others, perhaps
most, not. Banditry is also a product of the existential precariousness of even "elite" Haitians,
who, for a fistful of gourdes (the Haitian currency) or an exit visa, can be pressed into the most
sordid of activities. At the height of his popularity between 1991 and 1994, the well-known
paramilitary leader Emmanuel (Toto) Constant was a CIA informant, whose monthly emolument
was a paltry 300 U.S. dollars, in exchange for which Mr. Constant probably tortured and killed
scores of his countrymen. Banditry and its concomitants (paramilitarism and urban gangs) is also
a classic sign of state failure, as it entails the erosion of monopolistic control over the means of
violence. Evidence of state failure are legion in Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in
Haiti, as when Sprague, speaking of "rebel" activity in 2002, concedes that "The FLRN
campaign was carried out primarily by a few hundred paramilitaries against a resource-starved
state reliant on a tiny police force, a segment of which was disloyal and corrupt" (168). If this is
not a definition of a failed state, one is at a loss as to what is. Yet, almost nonchalantly and in
spite of his obvious familiarity with the literature, which he quotes on page 46 but omits in the
notes section, Sprague pulls back and veers in a different (i.e., conspiratorial) direction. Sprague
may be unaware of this, but there is not in the Haitian language (Kreyol) an expression of
contrition equivalent to I am sorry in English. Haitian culture, not least political culture, lacks
readily available mechanisms of conflict resolution. Thus conflicts, no matter how banal at their
core, tend to escalate, until peace is imposed either by a strongman or an occupying force. To put
it bluntly, Sprague makes too selective an analytical use of institutions, which he confines to
class. Similarly, Sprague has a binary and biased view of a Haiti divided between good actors
(Lavalas) and bad actors (everyone else). He fails to appreciate the role of macro-level
institutions-broadly construed to include formal structures, such as the state, and the informal
rules and norms embedded in culture-in the Haitian miasma, which the Lavalas interregnum
aggravated rather than dissipated. (Without substantiation, Sprague estimates the number of
people killed by Lavalas supporters to be precisely between thirty and forty from 200 Ito 2004.)
Book Reviews 235

Paramilitarism is an effect of the debility of Haitian institutions, not a cause of Haiti's

misfortune. The failure of democracy in Haiti has structural roots as well, and is not merely the
product of elite malfeasance or agency. In the end, an institutional and more ideologically neutral
perspective would have served Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti well.

Jean-Germain Gros
Department of Political Science
University of Missouri-St. Louis
[email protected]

Jocelyn Viterna. 2013. Women in War: The Micro-Processes of Mobilization in El Salvador.

New York: Oxford University Press. 288 pages, ISBN 978-0199843657 Paper ($24.95).

Women often feature in the literature on war as either empowered warriors or war's ultimate
victims. In this rich and powerful book, Jocelyn Viterna considers guerrilla warfare in El
Salvador through women's experiences and contributions and explodes this dichotomy. Her
nuanced approach is ideal for research on leftist guerrilla conflicts-quests for liberation that
combine exhilaration and empowerment with brutal, heartrending violence. She captures the
breadth of experience so effectively in part because the complicated and cross-cutting insights
are arrived at through close attention to women's own narrations of life in wartime. Along the
way, we gain insight into the daily functioning of a guerrilla army.
Viterna rejects approaches to activism that treat the rank-and-file as a uniform category.
Among other problems, such approaches obscure the obvious point that macro-level factors
affect only some people, but fail to mobilize others (often the majority); also, for women, some
are profoundly empowered by the experience whereas others revert to traditional gender norms
postwar. She thus cracks open the homogenous category of woman guerrilla and looks carefully
within, finding important and very telling differences. These insights are enhanced by her
inclusion of interviews with unmobilized women and mobilized men.
Viterna is generous in the use of absorbing personal narratives to illustrate her findings
on the micro-processes of insurrection. Based upon two years in the field, during which she
collected over 230 formal interviews along with ethnographic analysis and archival research, this
rare book cuts across many literatures in its insights and will be of interest to researchers of
social movements, politics, war and insurrection as well as gender and Latin America.
Why do women become guerrillas? What experiences do women have in the guerrilla?
And how do these impact women's postwar lives? Working through the paths to mobilization
for women who served as camp followers, cooks, medics, radio specialists, and combatants, we
learn much along the way, including women's various motivations for participation, their
accomplishments, and their tragedies. We also gain new insights into the relation between their
roles, experiences, and identities during war and their trajectories in the post-war period.
One key finding is the importance of women's participation to guerrilla success. As she
puts it, "Women were ... the backbone of the FMLN [Farabundo Marti National Liberation
Front], especially in the second half of the war" (145). She relates this to gendered stratification
and higher survival rates in the guerrilla, both of which Viterna links to education. Early in the
war, the campesino (peasant) population from which the FMLN drew most of its recruits was
largely illiterate. Women were primarily assigned as cooks and sometimes as combatants. Over
the course of the war, women came to be viewed as a relatively scarce resource for commanders,
236 Journal of World-Systems Research

and a particularly valuable one as they were significantly more likely than men to be literate.
Compared to men, many more young women had spent time in a refugee camp, where they had
access to education. This skill set was particularly valuable to the FMLN in the second half of
the war, as its forces were split into hundreds of smaller and more mobile units. Each squadron
needed its own radio operator and medic-both job assignments that required training and
literacy, and thus jobs that women were better able to fill. Women also had higher survival rates,
and were for therefore a more stable presence in this quickly changing context, contributing in
turn to military efficiency in terms of institutional memory and job specific experience.
But someone still had to make the tortillas. Given women's valued contributions in the
more skilled assignments, how to ensure that women would still be willing to occupy low-status
tasks? Here, Viterna turns to the notion of ability-based assignments, which she finds was
broadly accepted in the guerrilla. That is, men and women alike were assigned work based on
ability, which meant an internalization of the blame for a job assignment that one did not prefer.
This discourse merged into more essentialist notions, as Viterna reports that it was widely
believed that women were "made for" the kitchen and men were unable to learn tortilla-making.
Notably, while their experiences in the guerrilla encouraged many women to view themselves as
capable of many of the things men could do, the guerrilla experience did not encourage women
to question the overall gendered division of labor in guerrilla camps and beyond. Those instances
in which women did contribute significantly to battle did not reliably prompt them to question
gender roles more generally: "In short, the FMLN was remarkably successful at narrating
women's new roles in ways that left the broader gender order unchallenged" (150).
Identity-based analysis runs throughout Viterna's study. Among other key findings,
Viterna makes an intriguing link between identity, mobilization, and rape. She argues that men
and women alike often joined the guerrilla in order to protect identities particularly salient to
them. A common thread informing young women's mobilization in the FMLN is that this would
protect their sexual purity, which was intricately linked to their identity as good young women
(53-4). Rape was a prevalent theme throughout Viterna's interviews (112). The FMLN
represented itself as respecting women's bodies, providing an arena of safety in contrast to
young women's other options: staying home and facing rape by the Armed Forces or fleeing to a
refugee camp and risking (what was perceived to be) certain rape by Honduran forces. She notes:
"Understanding that the purpose of participation-even radical participation like guerrilla
warfare-may be to protect rather than to challenge traditional identities will help scholars limit
which kinds of identity changes they expect to find through activism" (20 I).
The 1992 Peace Accords ended twelve years of displacement and conflict, and the
guerrilla demobilized, turning in their weapons and receiving resources to start a new life. A
startling example of the radical shift this entailed are the numerous anecdotes that Viterna
gathered regarding demobilized guerrillas' struggle with money-many were so young when
they went into refugees camps and then the guerrilla that they had never seen or used money.
One can imagine, in this context, the great challenges involved in acclimating to a market system
and learning how to earn a living.
Given such challenges, what happened to these women activists in the postwar period?
Viterna finds the record mixed. Some women successfully capitalized on their experiences and
capabilities honed in war to remain social activists, challenging gender expectations and
transforming their own lives and the lives of others. But many other women did not remain
politically engaged and readily settled into traditional gender roles. Remaining with a micro-
Book Reviews 237

level of analysis allows Viterna to shed light on how social movements stratify participants and
the consequences of that stratification (173 ).
Women found ways to move from mobilization in war to activism in peace, and Viterna
finds two paths to postwar leadership (185). "Politicized Repopulators" are women guerrilla who
demobilized to refugee camps in the early to mid-1980s and then became leaders in the postwar
repopulation process. These women typically had been activists pre-war and then moved to
guerrilla camps, retaining ties and their status as trustworthy activists in the demobilization
process. This background positioned them as effective liaisons between leaders in the FMLN and
civil society (189). "Well-Connected Demobilizers" were women transitioning from high-status
guerrilla positions who had been stationed close to FMLN command centers. Their proximity to
FLMN leaders is crucial, Viterna finds. Being well-connected with the leadership translated into
postwar leadership positions.
In contrast, Viterna found that the ex-guerrilla women who were politically inactive in
the postwar era had been either in low-prestige guerrilla positions or had been combatants (193).
Viterna encapsulates the counter-intuitive nature of her findings through the cases of Rebeca and
Roxana. Rebeca actively chose guerrilla life and became a combatant. To stay in the guerrilla,
she gave up her two month old baby to be raised elsewhere. Roxana reluctantly mobilized into
the guerrilla for lack of alternatives-it was a means of survival in the face of the brutally
repressive armed forces in the countryside. In the guerrilla, she took on the feminized job of
nurse, and once she gave birth, Roxana transferred to a guerrilla position where she could see her
child regularly. Previous scholarship might lead us to expect that Rebeca would be the more
likely of the two to emerge from the war as a feminist activist. Yet the opposite was the case,
with Roxana becoming the prominent feminist activist and Rebeca accepting highly traditional
gender roles in the home.
Viterna readily achieves her two goals in writing this book. First, she brings to life the
lived experiences of Salvadoran women in the civil conflict of the 1980s. Second, she
convincingly demonstrates the importance of micro-level mobilization processes. Social
movements and guerrilla armies alike depend upon their ability to attract and retain members,
and understanding this gendered process is key to understanding movement success.

Lorraine Bayard de Volo

Women and Gender Studies
University of Colorado Boulder
[email protected]
http:/ /wgst. col orado. edu/faculty /bayard-de- vo lo

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