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This paper seeks to make links between the last period (roughly three decades) of volatile capitalism and poverty, in order to advance strategic resistance. The merits of classical political-economic theory including the identification of crisis tendencies at the core of capital’s laws of motion, tendencies which are met by countervailing management techniques. Crisis displacement techniques became much more sophisticated since the 1930s freeze of financial markets, crash of trade, Great Depression and interimperial turn to armed aggression. The paper documents the global economy’s vast credit expansion and the use of geographical power to move devaluation to Third World and emerging market sites, which in turn has generated vast increases in poverty in most areas of the South. Extra-market coercion including gendered and environmental superexploitation has intensified in the process. The result is an ‘uneven and combined’ capitalism that concentrates wealth and poverty in more intense ways, geographically, and brings capitalist markets and the non-market spheres of society and nature together in ways adverse to the latter, generating mass poverty. As for resistance, popular movements across the world are divided on strategies and tactics. While there are some crucial sites of national state control by anti-capitalist forces in Latin America, we can consider the options faced by the popular movements in terms of three alternative orientations: ‘autonomism’; ‘global governance’; and ‘decommodification’ of life/nature alongside the ‘deglobalization’ of capital.
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