Popular Sovereignty in a Digital Age: Lessons for the Global South and Working Classes - Softcover

Aaron Schneider

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1438498845 ISBN 13: 9781438498843

Publisher: SUNY Press, 2025

Synopsis

In the evolution of global capitalism and geopolitics, digitalization presents a new and yet unresolved chapter. In the lead up to digitalization, neoliberalism weakened the welfare states of the Global North and the developmental states of the Global South where they existed. Neoliberalism also disorganized working classes, as Left parties and labor organization declined across the globe. Into this deregulated and unchecked context, digitalization proceeded, and technology companies inserted themselves into multiple sectors, making use of first mover advantage and monopolistic practices to drive out smaller and less advanced firms. We can now characterize a landscape in which states have been weakened, working classes disorganized, and rival firms greatly handicapped, allowing big tech to operate as all-powerful quasi-monopolies. They enjoy unprecedented concentration of wealth, power, and advantage. Worryingly, deregulated technology now penetrates many areas of life with surveillance and control, setting us on a path towards anti-democratic, neo-imperial, and exclusionary futures. Aaron Schneider offers a popular and sovereign alternative, with particular focus on labor and the Global South.

About this title

About the Author

Aaron Schneider is Leo Block Chair, Professor of International Studies at the University of Denver. He is the author of China, Latin America, and the Global Economy: Economic, Historical, and National Issues; Renew Orleans? Globalized Development and Worker Resistance after Hurricane Katrina; and State-Building and Tax Regimes in Central America, among other books.

Edition details

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1438498845
• ISBN 13: 9781438498843
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304