Todd Gordon

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LAW-AND-ORDER POLICIES: POLICING, CLASS STRUGGLE, AND NEOLIBERAL RESTRUCTURING

Emerging as a prominent feature of state policy in many advanced capitalist countries over the last couple of decades, law-and-order policing has been the subject of criticism in both community activist and academic literature. Offering a different perspective than that commonly found in both of those forms of literature, this article provides a political-economic analysis of the emergence of law-and-order policing in the 1980s and 1990s in advanced capitalist countries such as Canada, Britain, and the United States, with a focus on Canada.

Towards an anti-racist Marxist state theory: A Canadian case study

While significant advances have been made in Marxist state theory, there are important gaps that need to be addressed if we hope to reach a more complete understanding of the state and the implications of its power. One of the most glaring weaknesses in Marxist state theory is its near-silence on questions of race and racism, since racism is so central to what the capitalist state does. Using the insights of anti-racist Marxist writings to complement the theoretical developments of Open Marxist theories of the state—and incorporating a historical study of the Canadian state—this article will show that capitalist state power and class relations are developed through, and cannot be abstracted from processes of racialisation.

Canadian Geopolitics in Post-Coup Honduras

On 28 June 2009 moderately left-of-centre Honduran president, Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya, was overthrown in a military coup d’etat. The coup was followed by the systematic repression of anti-coup activists and the eventual election of current president, Porfirio ‘Pepe’ Lobo, amid that repression and in the absence of constitutional democracy. While critical scholarship on the international dynamics of the Honduran coup has discussed evidence of US involvement, Canada also actively intervened politically. Canada’s intervention has been marked by the bold promotion of the interests of Canadian capital operating in Honduras, as part of a wider geopolitical concern of the Canadian state to reproduce a political environment in Latin America amenable to the interests of Canadian investors. Using interviews with Honduran activists organizing against the coup and Canadian capital, as well as Canadian government documents obtained through Access to Information, this article explores the political-economic strategies of Canada’s post-coup intervention in Honduras.

Canada, Empire and Indigenous People in the Americas

This article argues that Canada is an imperial power in the global order, and that more traditional notions of Canada as a rich dependency or arguments that call for a project to defend Canadian sovereignty fail to properly account for this. Central to the Canadian state project, both in its historical and contemporary manifestations, is an agenda of accumulation by dispossession, in which Indigenous nations are a central target. In the period of neoliberalism, Canadian capital, facilitated by the state, is searching out new spaces of accumulation in Canada and abroad, particularly in Latin America, and Indigenous land and labour are crucial to its success. Instead of defending Canadian sovereignty, the Left must respond by developing a sharp anti-imperialist analysis of Canada’s role in the global economy. This article will draw on the policies and strategies of Canada’s mining industry, which is a powerful actor at home and abroad, as one important example of the imperialist dynamics it is tracing.

Post-Coup Honduras: Latin America’s Corridor of Reaction

Abstract This article offers an historical-materialist account of the coup in Honduras on 28 June 2009, which ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. It draws on over two dozen interviews with members of the Frente Nacional de la Resistencia Popular [National Front of Popular Resistance, FNRP], and participation in numerous marches and assemblies over two periods of fieldwork – January 2010, and June–July 2011. The paper steps back in time to provide an historical cartography of the basic material structures of the Honduran economy and its integration into the world market, as well as the geopolitical role it played as a launching pad for Ronald Reagan’s counter-insurgency campaigns against guerrilla forces elsewhere in the region during the 1980s. We show how the defeat of mass guerrilla insurgencies in Guatemala and El Salvador, as well as the triumph over the Sandinista government in Nicaragua by 1990, allowed for the neoliberal pacification of Central America as a whole, including Honduras. We further demonstrate how the centre-leftist Manuel Zelaya, elected to the Honduran presidency in 2006, modestly encroached upon neoliberal orthodoxy and forged geopolitical alliances with left and centre-left governments elsewhere in the region, laying the bases for his violent overthrow. Finally, the paper traces the origins, trajectory, and heterogeneity of the resistance that emerged almost immediately after the coup had been carried out.

Capitalism, Neoliberalism, and Unfree Labour:

The literature on the unfree character of temporary migrant labour has drawn much needed attention to the poor working conditions faced by migrant workers and opened up an important space to challenge those ubiquitous claims by defenders of the current political-economic status quo of the freedom expressed at the core of neoliberalism. However, there is a risk to focusing on legal unfreedom to the exclusion of a broader critique of the logic of capitalist reproduction, the very premise of which is the private ownership of society’s productive wealth and the alienation of the majority of people from that wealth. Unfreedom and coercion are systematic to capitalist market relations, and all wage labour, including that of formally ‘free’, is unfree. This article examines different conceptions of labour unfreedom and concludes with a discussion of unfree labour in the neoliberal context.

Constituting capitalist order: criminality, state violence and market relations

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Canadian capital and secondary imperialism in Latin America

ABSTRACT The last several years have witnessed a renewal of critical scholarship that understands Canada as a secondary imperialist power. While conceptualizations of Canada as a dependency of the United States have lost intellectual ground in the Canadian political economy literature, the rejection of the notion that Canada is imperialist has more recently drawn on the transnationalization thesis found in, inter alia, Robinson and Sklair. This article refutes these central premises. It argues, first, that Canadian capital can be measured as “Canadian.” In turn, because there is a Canadian capitalist class we need to theorize its relationship with the Canadian state. Second, this Canadian capitalist class pursues its interests abroad, with the support of the Canadian state, as a secondary imperialist power within the hierarchical world system. Third, expansion of identifiably Canadian capital abroad is exemplified in Canadian investment trends in mining and finance in Latin America in recent decades.