Adrian Sotelo Valencia - Böcker

This book analyses the processes, mutations and trends currently characterising the world of work that are bound up within the deep contradictions of a global capitalist system troubled by systemic crisis. This is a work that illustrates the paradigmatic transition from social and labour relations based on job security, comprehensive collective agreements and guaranteed social rights, towards new social relations that find their technical, political and organizational roots in job insecurity, work rotation and monumental social insecurity.

One of the central claims of dependency theory - the nearly dominate framework adopted by the entire discipline of development studies since the 1960s - was that the yoke of imperial powers, especially the United States, weighed so heavily as to preclude the possibility of nations in the Third World becoming peer competitors on the global market. But what does the growing economic might of regional superpowers like Brazil mean for these views?

This book analyses the processes, mutations and trends currently characterising the world of work that are bound up within the deep contradictions of a global capitalist system troubled by systemic crisis, where the old Fordist and Keynesian state order has been substituted by a minimal, pro-business neoliberal State founded on the intensive restructuring of economic and productive systems and work organisation, characterised by labour deregulation, flexibility, super-exploitation and social precariousness. This is a work that illustrates the paradigmatic transition from social and labour relations based on job security, comprehensive collective agreements and guaranteed social rights, towards new social relations that find their technical, political and organizational roots in job insecurity, work rotation and monumental social insecurity, generally expressed in the systemic and growing loss of social and labour rights by workers the world over.First published in Spanish by the Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales de la UNAM and Editorial Miguel Ángel de Porrúa as Los rumbos del trabajo. Superexplotación y precariedad social en el siglo XXI, Mexico, 2012.

Does the growing economic might of regional superpowers like Brazil mean that dependency theory of the 1960s was all wrong? The answer to this and many other enigmas of development is found in Sub-Imperialism Revisited, a theoretically rigorous study by the brilliant Mexican analyst Adrián Sotelo Valencia. In analysing the 21st Century conditions of Latin America, Sotelo systematically explores the concept of "sub-imperialism" as advanced in the pioneering work of Ruy Mauro Marini. Himself a former student of Marini, Sotelo elucidates the explanatory power of a fully Marxist conception of imperialism and underdevelopment while providing considerable insight into opposing conceptions of dependency. This timely book ultimately enables readers to appreciate why radical dependency theory remains more relevant today than ever.

This work by the distinguished Mexican theorist Adrián Sotelo Valencia explores new dimensions of super-exploitation in a context of the structural crisis of capitalism and imperialism. Steeped in a new generation of radical dependency theory and informed by the legacy of his own mentor, the famous Brazilian Marxist Ruy Mauro Marini, Sotelo rigorously examines prevailing theoretical debates regarding the expansion of super-exploitation in advanced capitalism. Building upon a Marinist framework, he goes beyond Marini to identify new forms of super-exploitation that shape the growing precarity of work. Sotelo demonstrates the inextricable link between reliance upon fictitious capital and the intensification of super-exploitation. Poignant contrasts are drawn between US capitalism and Mexico that reveal the nefarious new forms of imperialist dependency.

In this latest work by the prolific Mexican theorist Adrián Sotelo Valencia, the COVID-19 pandemic is shown to have merely exacerbated the profound world capitalist crisis rooted in the 1970s structural exhaustion of the third industrial revolution. Sotelo explains how the current 4.0 revolution whose articulating axis is the development and expansion of artificial intelligence, Big Data, algorithms, 3D printing, the Internet of Things, and digital platforms constitutes a global strategy of capital and the state aimed at detaining the global capitalist crisis. The Digital Revolution heralds a new international division of labour with severe repercussions for labour, especially in dependent countries like Mexico. The foreword by Andrés Piqueras of the Universidad Jaume I de Castellón underlines the urgency to heed this insightful analysis.