Global Capitalism and the Caribbean's New Precariat

• In Event: 345 - Section on Political Economy of the World-System Paper Session. Global Class Relations and the New "Precariate"

Abstract

While much of the Caribbean in recent decades has made tremendous progress in its healthcare indexes, is awash in emigrant remittances, and remains an attractive location for many global industries, rising transnational inequalities can also be seen in the shifting makeup of social forces active in the region. This is noticeable not only among transnational capitalists, new middle strata, exported labor, and proletarian fractions whose labor power is incorporated into transnational value chains, but also through the expanding numbers of people that are underemployed and whose productive formal labor is not required by the global economy. Pushed to the margins and surviving a precarious existence, many live off the scraps of capitalist overproduction or from time to time find temporary low wage work while regularly forced to hustle to make ends meet. With people's labor productivity and access to formal work now determined increasingly by transnationally oriented capital, rather than local capital or domestically geared statist developmental policies, this requires we re-conceptualize the existence of those with no job security in class society. This paper will look in particular how such dynamics are occurring within major population centers of the Caribbean basin such as in Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.

Author

• Jeb Sprague, University of California-Santa Barbara