ABSTRACT
By the 1980s and early 1990s, a growing number of these countries were losing ground. One key factor was the rise of neoliberalism. It pushed these countries to open up their economies to large global consumer firms and destroyed their local commerce and manufacturing. One consequence was the land and water grabs that took off in the 2000s, which recent research has studied in detail. One brutal way of putting it is to say that the natural resources of much of Africa and good parts of Latin America and Asia have long counted more for investors than the people on those lands counted as consumers and as workers. The emphasis was on the making of capitalist relations of production, whether those of early or of advanced capitalism. It is well-known that unlike manufacturing, economies dependent on mining, plantations and imports of all consumer goods do not enable the growth of prosperous working and middle classes.
