World-Historical Trajectory and Contour of Struggles against Exploitation in the Global South in Longue Durée

• In Event: Labor and Labor Movements Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 8: State Power, Class Formation, and Historical Political Economy

Abstract

This study explores the world-historical trajectory and contour of ‘struggles against exploitation’ in the global South during the long twentieth century. This study develops a more comprehensive concept of labor unrest, focusing on exploitation as the primary theme. The idea of struggles against exploitation thus explains major social movements, popular protests, and labor unrest that mobilize people to demand an end to their capitalist exploitation, absolute or relative poverty, material hardship, economic grievances, and dispossession. Based on the empirical investigation of protest events related to struggles against exploitation in the global South reported in The New York Times between 1870 and 2020, this study examines the following research questions: 1) Did popular struggles against exploitation appear in clusters of time? 2) Could the wave of struggles be distinguished by the zone of the world-economy, region, and country? 3) What were the global dynamics making the long-term waves of struggles on a world scale? One of the most striking findings is the identification of four greater waves of struggles against exploitation in the global South: 1918-22, 1928-38, 1945-66, and 1980-90, while the overall frequency of popular struggles has declined since the mid-twentieth century. The core clusters of struggles against exploitation in the capitalist world-economy shifted from upper-tier semiperipheral regions to core-contenders of the semiperiphery after the long 1950s protest wave. The regional clusters of struggles also shifted from Latin America to Eastern Europe during the 1980s. In conclusion, the temporal and spatial epicenters of popular struggles against exploitation in the global South changed during the long twentieth century due to the logic and characteristics of each phase of the regional and global political process and the long-term dynamics of capitalist accumulation in the capitalist world-economy.

Author

• Chungse Jung, Hartwick College