In the books nal two chapters, on the relationships between Latin Ameri-cas societies in movements and their respective countries governments, Zibechibrings us face to face with what this cooptation can look like. Even in cases likeBolivia, where movements have been incredibly successful at achieving repre-sentation within government while maintaining a degree of autonomy, thereremains a constant risk that the relationship will lead to the remarginalization ofthe movements members. This is not to say that Latin Americas pink tide2

governments are a bad thing, but Zibechi certainly believes, and effectivelydemonstrates, that they present challenges and dangers for the continuation ofthe societies in movement that made them possible.

Territories in Resistance represents a valuable addition to the whirlwind ofdiscussion about social movements that has been taking place in recentmonths. It alternately serves as an introductory guide to Latin Americas socialmovements, a grassroots roadmap for English-language activists, and a sophis-ticated theoretical resource for scholars. And for those who have been puzzlingover the future prospects of OWS, understanding Latin Americas societiesin movement will shine new light on their views of what social protest canlook like.

Ethan Earle spent three years in Argentina working for The Working World, anon-prot that supports worker-run cooperatives, before coming to New Yorkto open the organizations third branch. He holds a masters degree in interna-tional relations from FLACSO-San Andrs. He currently works as a projectmanager at the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung-New York Ofce. He can be reachedat earle@rosalux-nyc.org.

Notes

1. From the Spanish fbricas recuperadas, a movement in which workers occupy, recuperate, and reopen theirfactories under worker self-management.

2. A term used broadly to describe the rise of a number of left governments throughout Latin America inthe twenty-rst century.

Cox, Ronald W., ed. Corporate Power and Globalization in US Foreign Policy. London and New York:Routledge, 2012. 232 pp. US$130.00 (hardcover).

While Americans are notably unaware of the rest of the world, it is increas-ingly important that we change this, as Americans need to become aware of whatis going on in the world and how it affects the U.S. Arguably, this is nowheremore important than in understanding changes in the global economy, and whatthis means for the future provision of jobs in our society.

This important new bookinnovatively edited by Ronald W. Cox, who alsocontributed the introduction, the lead article, and joined others in three

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164 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY

co-written onesis a major contribution to understanding changes in the globaleconomy. Instead of focusing just on economic developments, Cox and hiscoauthors present their arguments in the context of the interaction betweenglobal capital (particularly U.S.-based, but not limited to such) and the U.S. stateas exemplied by the U.S. foreign policy: A decade into the new millennium,the fusion of corporate and state power is the essential dening feature of USforeign policy (p. 1).

Cox argues that this fusion is a threat to democracy in the U.S.:

For over 30 years, the political and economic ascendency of sectors of transna-tional capital has pushed political discourse in the US steadily to the right of thepolitical spectrum. . . . the extent to which both parties operate within a corporateframework often gets lost in the stridency of contemporary partisanship. BothDemocratic and Republican Presidents have endorsed escalating militarybudgets, deregulation of global nancial markets, and massive federal bailoutsof US-based nancial institutions deemed to big to fail. Shouting matchesoccur with some frequency within the corporate boundaries of permissibledissent, but only in a manner that never challenges the policies of military expan-sionism and unsurpassed corporate welfare. Corporate largesse has been focusedoverwhelmingly on Wall Street, which is a starting point for understanding theoutlines of a corporatist US state that has taken shape after three decades of aright turn. The dening features of US corporatism are a commitment to transnationalcapital accumulation, global nancial deregulation, and a steady expansion of USEmpire. A Wall Street-Treasury complex rests side-by-side with a military-industrial complex in a structure of plutocracy that fundamentally threatens thestability of US democratic institutions (emphases added-1).

Cox and chapter editors overwhelmingly support this sweeping claim byproviding in-depth examinations of the relationships between the state andcorporate power. Cox focuses on changes in corporate activities in response to themid-1960s to mid-1980s declining rate of prot crisis for U.S.-based corpora-tions, which, he argues, forced them to shift from a nation-based productionsystem to a globally focused transnational one.This is themost important chapterin the book, and I think is very crucial to understanding the larger issue of howtransnational capital is changing the economic infrastructure of this country.

Quickly, Cox identies several related processes. He argues that corpora-tions began acquiring competitor rms through intensied merger and acqui-sition processes, and then shed everything but core sectors of the corporation.Through these processes, corporations began restructuring operations so as tobecome based on global supply chains, where they controlled the top (andmost protable) layers of such, such as design, branding, marketing, and distri-bution of nished product. To make a global supply chain-based developmentprocess work, however, requires easy access to any country they want to invest inor to national corporations with which they want to contract for productionprocesses.

This is why corporate lobbies like the Business Roundtable were created (in1972) in the U.S., and they took on the role of lobbying and interacting with

Book Reviews 165

government ofcials so as to get changes in various lawsespecially related tofree tradepassed through Congress and signed by various presidents.

In short, it was this combination of multinational corporations and the U.S.state that worked together for the benet of these corporate projects. This, inturn, resulted in a greater accumulation of prots by these corporations that, inaddition to nancially beneting investors and upper levels of management, andto varying degrees, was invested in obtaining the best political system thatmoney could buy. So calls for deregulation of the economy were not calls tocut the links between politicians and the corporationsas is often suggestedbut were calls to support the links between politicians and the corporations forthe benet of the corporations (and their political allies), and were calls againstany limitations on these corporatepolitical relationships that might benet the largerAmerican citizenry. This clarity, alone, makes this collection important.

The rest of the book is used to support this understanding.After an excellent analysis of China by Cox and Sylvain Lee perhaps most

interesting is Coxs and G. Nelson Bass chapter on The Foreign Policy ofOrganized Labor in the Context of Globalization. They review the literatureon the American Federation of LaborCongress of Industrial Organizations(AFLCIO) foreign policy, and conclude that the foreign arms of the AFLCIO have a historical track-record of subservience to US foreign policy goals inthe developing world (p. 65). However, they specically focus on the activitiesof the Solidarity Center since its founding in 1997, examining a series of nan-cial reports covering the years 20032010. They seek to see if the SolidarityCenters activities have changed from the old days.

They begin discussing the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), aU.S. government-created and funded organization that implausibly claims to beindependent, and yet has taken over some activities previously conducted bythe Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Solidarity Center is one of the fourcore institutes of the NED. Cox and Bass examine the funding of SolidarityCenters activities through the NED, focusing on Europe, Middle East andNorth Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia and specically China,and look to see if and how the funding has shifted across 20032010. Basically,they decide that the Solidarity Center has acted similarly since 1997 to theAFLCIOs regional institutes before 1997, and provide four specic conclu-sions to their study:

1. . . . there is a close relationship between the location of the Solidarity Centerfunding programs, and the geostrategic objectives of the US national securitybureaucracy, especially where the US has committed military troops or isengaged in military activities (such as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Iraq,Afghanistan, and Pakistan), where the countries have been given a dispro-portionately high amount of US military aid (e.g., Egypt), or where the UShas maintained important US military bases (Bahrain). . . .

2. . . . the Solidarity Center closely tracks the efforts of the NED to workwith political coalitions favorable to US objectives, which has included

166 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY

destabilization against popularly elected leaders in the developing world,including Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti.

3. The Solidarity Center leaders have obscured what the center is doing aroundthe world, keeping AFLCIO union members ignorant of their internationalactivities, and this is similar to the general divide in the U.S. labor movementbetween leaders and members.

4. There are situations where the Solidarity Center has done good work. Ininstances in which the Solidarity Center is not tied down by their linkages toUS geostrategic interests, and in cases where funding activities are being ledby progressives within the Solidarity Center who want to pursue independentorganizing and solidarity campaigns with foreign unions, there has been roomfor alternative approaches (7677).

In short, the leadership of the AFLCIO often functions as a surrogate partnerin US geostrategic and economic objectives . . . (77).

Following this, they have Daniel Skidmore-Hess examine the DemocraticParty, provide a chapter on The Military-Industrial Complex in a GlobalizedContext by David N. Gibbs, consider Financialization, Corporate Power, andSouth African Subimperialism by Patrick Bond, include William Avils exami-nation of democracy-promoting activities, review the Group of 20 summits bySusanne Soederberg, and conclude with a chapter by Cox, Daniel Skidmore-Hess, and Cathy Skidmore-Hess.

In short, Cox and associates provide what they said they wanted to accom-plish: by examining the relationships between corporate power and the state,they are able to explain changes in the global economy and have shown howthese have been supported by the U.S. foreign policy.

How to tie this interesting collection together? First of all, Cox is to becongratulated for assembling such an excellent set of materials. They all illumi-nate the points made in the rst chapter by Cox himself, and then deepen theanalysis in different parts of the whole, again creating an excellent synergy.This is an excellent collection and deserves wide consideration and usageandhopefully Routledge will drastically drop its $130 price when it brings thiscollection out in paperback.

All of that being true, I do not think the analysis goes far enough. AlthoughI cannot fairly call this an economistic analysis, it denitely focuses much moreon the economic side of things rather than the political, of which I initially hadbeen led to expect.

I want to focus my comments on the political aspect. There were hints ofmore on the political side, which unfortunately never got developed. ThomasFerguson, who wrote the preface to the collection, included a very interestingchart on the U.S. use of force or covert action over the history of the country,with an exploding increase after World War II, and yet there is no follow-up tothis in the collection. Cox, himself, in the introduction suggested more. The

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CoxBass chapter on the foreign policy of the AFLCIOin reality, the foreignpolicy leadership of the AFLCIOmakes a real contribution, but it does notreally t in with the rest of the book.

From my perspective, what would have helped is a specic recognition thatthe U.S. has an empire, and that its elites have consciously sought to dominate theworld since the end of World War II. Obviously, there was some limitation onthat by the existence of the Soviet Union until 1991, but the collapse of itsempire and then the USSR itself removed that impediment. From 1991 to atleast until 2003, when Bush and his cronies decided to invade Iraq, the U.S.achieved its long-sought dream of uncontested global hegemony. (Unfortu-nately, some people forgot to tell the Iraqi [and later, the Afghani] resistanceforces.)

The will to dominate and create a global empire at very least must be givenequal shift with corporate powerand I argue that it is actually primary in thepoliticaleconomic relationship; it explains much more than just an unsatisedlust for prot. The latter simply cannot explain why the U.S. government hasbeen willing to spend over $10 trillion on its military since 1981 (dataassembled by this author from the annual Economic Report of the President),and then use it around the world, whether through direct invasion; covertactivities, including but not limited to the CIA; drone attacks; and fauxdemocracy promoting efforts, etc. And, as a former sergeant in the U.S.Marine Corps (19691973), I do not think we should collapse our understand-ing of the military-industrial complex into that of a sophisticated interestgroup or collection of interest groups: the U.S. military is trained to kill, andis used to do just that. The invasions of Afghanistan and particularly Iraq makethat extremely obvious, but this understanding was unfortunately not devel-oped in this collection.

This lust for empire is also not just a product of forces within the U.S.government: the CoxBass chapter demonstrates this in regard to the AFLCIOs foreign policy. My own work on Labors foreign policy, along with thatof others, clearly establishes that the AFLCIO foreign policy program origi-nates from within the labor movement, and as I showed in a December 2010article in Working USA, it is based on an ideological conception that believesthat the U.S. should dominate the worldand Labors foreign policy leaderswork, either alone or together with the U.S. government, to make thathappen. A corporate power explanation simply cannot adequately explainthis.

Nonetheless, this is an excellent collection that should help everyone beginto understand changes in the U.S. and global economies, and U.S. foreign policyduring this period of globalization. It is easily the best, well-rounded analysis Ihave read from this perspective. I hope Professor Cox will ll out the under-standing in future work.

Kim Scipes, PhD, is an associate professor of sociology at Purdue UniversityNorth Central in Westville, IN, and a long-time activist in the labor movement.

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168 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY

He also serves as the elected chair of the Chicago Chapter of the NationalWriters Union, UAW #1981. His latest book is AFLCIOs Secret War againstDeveloping Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? (Lexington Books, 2010 hard-back and 2011 paperback). He can be reached at kscipes@pnc.edu, or throughhis website, http://faculty.pnc.edu/kscipes.

Kennard, Matt. Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, andCriminals to Fight the War on Terror. New York and London: Verso, 2012. 260 pp. US$26.95(hardcover).

Matt Kennards recently released book Irregular Army is an exhaustivelyresearched account of the U.S. military force degradation since the invasion ofAfghanistan over eleven years ago. While many have chosen to take moralistic,or abstractly political, approaches to the wars of the twenty-rst century,Kennard joins an important, and all too small, tradition of military analysis fromthe position of logistical capacity and strategic effects, in the tradition of a writerlike Jeremy Scahill. The central narrative of the text centers on the U.S. militaryrecruitment and the loosening of requirements for the enlistment of soldiers tobe cannon-fodder for American military adventurism. Through this narrative,however, a series of themes begin to present themselves that are, on many levels,more compelling and central to the question of the U.S. military overextensionthan the specics of the personal stories, which are the basis for the highlyanecdotal style through which Kennard weaves this story.

Since the beginning of war in Iraq, military recruiting numbers havedecreased signicantly, at a time when more troops were needed to maintain twoseparate occupations in highly volatile regions of the world. The body of the textbegins with Kennard traveling to the Tampa area to interview a former soldierwho had recently returned from overseas deployment in Iraq, and who is anopen and practicing neo-Nazi. From this opening, Kennard begins to discuss theloosening of military restrictions on the displaying of racist tattoos, and thedistribution of racist literature and paraphernalia within military units, as well asthe intentional effort that numerous neo-Nazi organizations have made to enlist,both for weapons training and recruitment purposes. Similarly, Kennard out-lines the process by which the limiting of restrictions on tattoos, which alsocovered gang-related tattoos, created a dynamic resulting in the recruitment ofmembers of street gangs, who have been found to be organizing within themilitary, running illegal drugs into bases and guns out of bases and on to thestreets.

Restrictions were also loosened on the entrance of felons into the ranks ofthe military, through the expansion of a waiver system, which allows those withfelony records to enlist under certain circumstances. The loosening of theserequirements has led to issues in the bases around the U.S. and the world, fromthe murder of soldiers over gang rivalries to racist attacks, the photographing ofa squad of soldiers in front of an SS ag in Afghanistan, to the slaughter of a

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