Neoliberal Globalization and Its Inequalities in Question: Reclassificatory Contributions in the Perspectives of Polanyi, Callon and Quijano

Abstract

Neoliberal globalization has been discussed from the most varied disciplinary and theoretical-political positions. Is it an ideology, a set of public policies, or a particular new form of capitalism, which has emerged after the crisis of state intervention in the national economy, both in the capitalist welfare states and in the socialist states ‒ e.g. USSR. Since the 1990s, neoliberal glo¬balization has been called into question ‒ with greater or lesser criticism ‒ via new sociological categories. These concepts delve into the processes of the constitution of global relations, linked to the mundialization of modern capitalism, with its inequalities, classes, conflicts, discourses, legitimacies, domina¬tions, and quests for emancipation.To account for this interplay of understanding and questioning, in this chapter we approach comparatively the contributions on the thematic made by Karl Polanyi, Michel Callon and Aníbal Quijano. Although prior to 1990, Polanyi's postulations are key to the debates that have erupted since. His argu¬ments focus on the relations between ‘formal’ and ‘substantive’ economics, the ‘great capitalist transformation’, and ‘markets’ as historical institutions. Moreover, we deepen on the analysis of Michel Callon, who explicitly dialogues with Polanyi. He delves into the ‘laws of markets’ to comprehend the configurations of their ‘non-calculable externalities’ and ‒ not only human ‒ ‘calculating agents’. These configurations are constantly performed by the economic sci¬ences themselves. Finally, the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano’s studies on the ‘colo¬niality of power’ are indispensable. In these works, Quijano shows how the world capitalist division of labor and its social classes are intertwined with racial classifications. For this reflection, we consider that the contrasts between productions from the North ‒European‒ and the South ‒Latin American‒ require a “simultaneous approach”, given their “theoretical and epochal crossroads”. This approach places these productions on the same level of analysis, without giving greater legitimacy or hierarchy to one or the other. We consider that they are neither merely original receptions from the South of innovations from the North, nor perspectives which are incommensurable to each other.Also, we deploy this approach based on a common theoretical-analytical problem: social and sociological reclassifications. This problem accounts for the different ways of dividing and qualifying the social and natural world, in permanent transformation and mutual feedback, either from the most diverse social instances, either from sociological proposals themselves. The problem is traversed by multiple processes of reclassification, linked to hierarchies and relations of domination, as well as quests for emancipation from capitalist exploitation.We work on this theoretical-analytical problem along three dimensions. First, the three perspectives give special relevance to a historicization of capitalist relations and their social groups, pointing out tensions between markets and everything outside them. Secondly, to address these tensions, the three authors propose theoretical reclassifications of sociological concepts and diagnoses, which not only describe social reality, but intervene in it, in a performative manner. Finally, this makes possible the authors’ critiques of the liberal and neoliberal conception of capitalism, linked to neoliberal globalization and its inequalities, which are fundamental for our contemporaneity.