THE STRUCTURAL CRISIS OF CAPITAL AND HUMAN RIGHTS: PLUTOCRATIC STATES AND ANTICAPITALIST STRUGGLES IN THE AMERICAS
This symposium proposes to debate and analyze, from critical perspectives (Marxist, anticolonialist and others), the contemporary manifestations of the structural crisis of capital in the Americas and their repercussions in terms of human rights, migration, and violence based on race, gender and class/ethnicity. An important axis is the analysis of state plutocracy: regimes in which political power is exercised directly by social segments linked to financial, agroindustrial and extractive capital fractions, in symbiosis with various illegal commercial practices. This socioeconomic configuration—driven by the far right and neoliberalism, though this does not exempt Latin American progressive governments from their responsibilities in managing contemporary barbarism—worsens the precarity of workers’ lives and daily promotes the exclusion of migrants, women, and Black, indigenous and peripheral populations. The systemic responses to overaccumulation and the tendential fall in the rate of profit, which deepen the super-exploitation of labor, the expropriation of territories, biopolitical control, and the incarceration of surplus populations and youth, form the connecting thread that enables dialogue among teachers and researchers from different fields (higher education, research, outreach, social policy) whose work focuses both on the field of social policy and on research into experiences of resistance, popular articulation, and social movements grounded in emancipatory counter-knowledges.
