Chapter 3: Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy: The Death Knell of Global Neoliberal Capitalism¹

The world is being transformed into a single mode of production and a single global system and bringing about the integration of different countries and regions into a new global economy and society (Robinson, 2004, 2014, 2016a,b). As William I. Robinson notes, the revolution in computer and information technology and other technological advances has helped emergent transnational capital to achieve major gains in productivity and to restructure, “flexibilize,” and shed labor worldwide. This, in turn has undercut wages and the social wage and facilitated a transfer of income to capital and to high consumption sectors around the world that provided new globalized flexible market segments fueling growth. A new capital-labor relation emerged that was based on the deregulation, informalization, deunionization, and the subordination of labor worldwide. More and more workers have swelled the ranks of the “precariat”—a proletariat existing in permanently precarious conditions of instability and uncertainty. In saying this, we need to recognize that capitalist-produced social control over the workingclass remains in the hands of a single powerful state—what Robinson (2004, 2014, 2016a,b) calls the core institution of the transnational state that serves the interests of the transnationalist capitalist class. This transnational capitalist class (TCC), according to Robinson, constitutes a polyarchy of hegemonic elites which trade and capital have brought into increasingly interconnected relationships and who operate objectively as a class both spatially and politically within the global corporate structure. This corporate structure has congealed around the expansion of transnational capital owned by the world bourgeoisie. Robinson here is referring to transnational alliances of owners of the global corporations and private financial institutions who control the worldwide means of production and manage—through the consolidation of the transnational corporate-policy networks— global rather than national circuits of production.