Author Archives: Johanna Bockman

About Johanna Bockman

is associate professor of sociology and global affairs at George Mason University. She specializes in economic sociology, sociology of globalization, and East European Studies. She is author of Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Stanford). She is currently writing a book on the 1980s debt crisis from the perspectives of the socialist and Third Worlds. She also runs a blog “Sociology in My Neighborhood” about gentrification in Washington, DC, and is the president of the District of Columbia Sociological Society.

Socialist Globalization against Capitalist Neocolonialism: The Economic Ideas behind the New International Economic Order

This is one entry in a roundtable on the NIEO, featuring posts by scholars who contributed to Humanity’s recent special issue on the topic. Be sure to read other posts by Kevin O’Sullivan and Patrick Sharma. My article focuses on the economic ideas behind the NIEO, specifically the ideas of the staff working for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Their ideas are rather surprising. They wrote about the need for markets, liberalization of trade, structural adjustment, export-oriented production, and increased financial flows. In our discussions at the Continue reading →

Socialist Globalization against Capitalist Neocolonialism: The Economic Ideas behind the New International Economic Order

This conference must also establish in plain terms the right of all peoples to unrestricted freedom of trade, and the obligation of all states signatories of the agreement emanating from the conference to refrain from restraining trade in any manner, direct or indirect. —Ernesto Che Guevara, speech delivered March 25, 1964, at the plenary session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development1 Much globalization scholarship assumes that the United States and other advanced industrialized capitalist countries are the primary agents of globalization. Meanwhile, Continue reading → Continue reading →