This work by the distinguished Mexican theorist Adrian Sotelo Valencia explores new dimensions of super-exploitation in a context of the structural crisis of capitalism and imperialism. Steeped in a new generation of radical dependency theory and informed by the legacy of his own mentor, the famous Brazilian Marxist Ruy Mauro Marini, Sotelo rigorously examines prevailing theoretical debates regarding the expansion of super-exploitation in advanced capitalism. Building upon a Marinist framework, he goes beyond Marini to identify new forms of super-exploitation that shape the growing precarity of work. Sotelo demonstrates the inextricable link between reliance upon fictitious capital and the intensification of super-exploitation. Poignant contrasts are drawn between US capitalism and Mexico that reveal the nefarious new forms of imperialist dependency.

One of the central claims of dependency theory - the nearly dominate framework adopted by the entire discipline of development studies since the 1960s - was that the yoke of imperial powers, especially the United States, weighed so heavily as to preclude the possibility of nations in the Third World becoming peer competitors on the global market. But what does the growing economic might of regional superpowers like Brazil mean for these views?

This book analyses the processes, mutations and trends currently characterising the world of work that are bound up within the deep contradictions of a global capitalist system troubled by systemic crisis. This is a work that illustrates the paradigmatic transition from social and labour relations based on job security, comprehensive collective agreements and guaranteed social rights, towards new social relations that find their technical, political and organizational roots in job insecurity, work rotation and monumental social insecurity.