GLOBAL SPACES FOR THE EXPANSION OF TRANSNATIONAL CAPITAL AND SPECIFIC ZONES OF INTENSE ACCUMULATION AND INTENSE SOCIAL CONFLICT (ZEIA|ZEICS) IN THE AMERICAN CONTINENT.
Within CLACSO’s Working Group “Borders, Regionalization, and Globalization,” we have been developing for the past 10 years the Collective Project on Global Spaces for the Expansion of Transnational Capital in the American Continent, for which we undertook the task of analyzing the theoretical perspective of global capitalism developed by William I. Robinson. We consider that in the current process of expansion of transnational capital, since the end of the twentieth century, globalized production requires global spaces of accumulation in various regions of the planet, whose creation and development have been driven by the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) and the decentralized apparatuses of an emerging Transnational State (TS); and these global spaces exceed national spaces, subordinating them to transnational accumulation (Orozco, Sandoval, and Robinson).
Thus, the national sovereignty of these states is subjected to the supremacy of transnational bodies. But within the Global Spaces, which are not homogeneous, an uneven and combined geographic development process occurs, and it is in this process that a spatial fix (Harvey) takes place in portions of the territory for the deployment and execution of the industrial production process and/or the extraction of surpluses, the exploitation of territories. We have called these Specific Zones of Intense Accumulation (ZEIA), and they are a fundamental part of the expansion of transnational capital (Sandoval). These ZEIA are configured through infrastructure: legal, physical, and security-related.
The intense tension arising from the conflicts created within the ZEIA due to the establishment of infrastructure by the governments of the countries where such zones are created — which may lie within a single country or span the territories of two or more countries — and the advance of capital in the mentioned territories, on the one hand; and the struggles and resistance faced from populations, communities, neighborhoods, and others, or a combination of these, on the other, also turns these ZEIA into Specific Zones of Intense Social Conflict (ZEICS), where the class struggle of a global character is clearly expressed at the local and regional levels. Of course, this social conflict has a political component (Sandoval and Orozco).
In this symposium we will undertake the task of analyzing and discussing how the creation of Global Spaces and ZEIA|ZEICS takes place in our Continent. Colleagues interested in presenting their work are invited to send an abstract to the symposium coordinators.
