ABSTRACT
Individualisation processes and the pluralisation of life forms under conditions of globalisation were instead declared the order of the day. It is the global dialectic of capitalist modernity that Latin American decolonial theorists would later conceptualise as modernity/coloniality, directly connecting modernity's 'dark side' to the European colonial expansion into the Americas. Like other apparent contradictions, social conditions, labour relations and phenomena emerged as a result of colonial and imperial rule; they entered Marxian theory as anomalies to the capitalist mode of production. In fact, Europe's colonial expansion in the sixteenth century is given considerable explanatory power in the emergence of global capitalism: Modern industry has established the world-market, to which the discovery of America paved the way. the approaches dovetail well with postcolonial, de-colonial and Third World feminist perspectives, in that they formulate their critique of Marxian political economy in terms of the "blind spots" of the conventional definition of capitalism.
