Elaboración de cotizaciones para procesos de importación o exportación y

It  is  widely  acknowledged  that  the  meanings  of  key  social  science  concepts  such  as   ‘democracy,’  ‘social  justice,’  and  ‘freedom’  are  ‘essentially  contested.’  Because  of   their  complexity  and  the  multidimensional  phenomena  they  refer  to,  and  particularly   because  of  the  normative  values  they  implicitly  embody,  the  meanings  of  essentially   contested  concepts  are  ambiguous  and  ‘persistently  vague’  so  that  “different  

persons  or  parties  adhere  to  different  views  of  the[ir]  correct  use”  (Gallie  1956,  p.   172).  While  the  resulting  intellectual  confusion  is  sometimes  accidental  (arising   either  from  commentators  themselves  using  such  concepts  inconsistently  or  from  an   assumption  that  everyone  else  understands  and  agrees  with  their  own  definitions),   at  other  times  different  understandings  of  the  meanings  of  key  concepts  arise  as  a   result  of  ‘conceptual  contestation’  (Collier,  Hidalgo  &  Maciuceanu  2006,  p.  212;   emphasis  in  original).  Gallie  (1956,  p.  169)  defines  ‘essentially  contested  concepts’  as   those  concepts  that  “inevitably  involve  endless  disputes  about  their  proper  uses  on   the  part  of  their  users”  and  proposes  seven  criteria  whereby  such  concepts  can  be   identified.    

Essentially  contested  concepts  are:  ‘appraisive’  (evaluative,  thereby  implicitly   embodying  normative  positions);  internally  complex  (comprising  of  ‘component   parts  or  features’  (Ruben  2010,  p.  263)  that  can  be  differently  ranked  in  order  of   importance);  initially  diversely  describable  (so  that  alternative  explanations  exist   from  the  outset  because  of  their  internal  complexity);  ‘open’  (in  the  sense  that  their   meaning  can  change  if  new  situations  develop);  and  recognised  to  have  multiple   interpretations  that  are  used  both  aggressively  and  defensively.  Another  important   feature  of  essentially  contested  concepts  is  that  they  allow  for  interpretive  

contestations  that  enable  their  refinement  through  debate.31  While  the  concepts   ‘globalisation’  and  ‘neoliberalism’  (as  well  as  many  other  key  concepts  relevant  to   this  study)  are,  by  Gallie’s  criteria,  clearly  essentially  contested,  debates  about  the   meaning  of  such  key  concepts  are  not  only  intellectually  interesting  but  have   important  practical  implications  as  they  either  explicitly  or  implicitly  support  the   status  quo  or  they  present  critical  challenges  to  it.32  As  discussed  in  more  detail  in   Chapters  6  and  8,  for  example,  different  definitions  of  contested  concepts  such  as   ‘climate  justice’  and  ‘sustainability’  have  very  real  implications  for  people,  for  the   integrity  of  ecosystems,  and  for  the  fates  of  non-­‐human  life  forms.  

‘Neoliberal  globalisation’:  An  essentially  contested  concept  

In  concrete  terms,  varying  definitions  of  essentially  contested  concepts  are  

distinguished  by  which  of  the  multiple  features  of  the  concepts  they  choose  to  draw   attention  to  and  emphasise,  and  which  of  those  features  they  choose  to  downplay   or,  in  some  cases,  ignore  altogether;  these  differences  have  important  strategic   implications,  as  Gills  (1997)  notes  in  his  critique  of  ‘globalisation  discourse’:  

… among the ‘litany of sins’ of globalisation discourse that we most seek to expose and react to are: its economism; its economic reductionism; its technological determinism; its political cynicism, defeatism and immobilism; its de-socialisation of the subject and re- socialisation of risk; its teleological subtext of inexorable global ‘logic’ driven exclusively by capital accumulation and the market; and its ritual exclusion of factors, causes or goals other than capital accumulation and the market from the priority of values to be pursued by social action. In our view, the upshot of this type of globalisation is to bring about ‘the death of politics’, via ‘the death of our ideals’…. Globalisation discourse involves a serious political risk, i.e. the danger that the insidiously apolitical ‘logic of inevitabilism’ will prevail, and thus obscure the many political

31  _{One  key  underlying  theoretical  academic  debate  about  ‘globalisation’  is,  as  McMichael}  

(2000)  suggests,  the  extent  to  which  it  is  a  conscious  policy  implementation  (a  ‘project’)   as  opposed  to  a  ‘natural’  occurrence  of  the  operations  of  a  ‘free  market’  (a  ‘trend’).  Cahill   (2014)  discusses  the  problematic  and  confusing  definitions  of  ‘neoliberalism’  at  length,   contending  that  both  proponents  of  neoliberalism  (such  as  Friedrich  Hayek  and  Milton   Friedman)  and  many  of  its  critics  (reformists  such  as  Joseph  Stieglitz  and  even  Marxists   such  as  Eric  Hobsbawm  and  David  Harvey)  begin  from  idealist  positions  that  neoliberal   policies  are  the  products  of  neoliberal  ideas  and  think  tanks.  

32  _{Another  way  of  conceiving  ‘essentially  contested  concepts’  is  to  think  of  them  as}  

‘boundary  concepts’  (de  Lucia  2014)  whose  meaning  is  of  vital  importance  because  it   informs  possible  actions  that  influence  future  trajectories  (as  is  discussed  in  more  detail   in  Chapters  6,  7  and  8).  

alternatives to neoliberal globalisation that do actually exist and may yet be politically attainable. This logic of inevitabilism rests on deeply flawed arguments that mistake technological determinism for social explanation, and present recent politically and ideologically generated trends as deep inexorable structural changes.

(Gills 1997, pp. 12 – 13)

Also  representative  of  the  arguments  made  by  many  critical  theorists  (for  example,   Bieler  &  Morton  2003;  Cahill  2014;  Carroll  &  Jarvis  2015;  Cox  with  Sinclair  1996),   Douglas  (1997,  pp.  173  –  174)  emphasises  that  it  is  only  by  critically  interrogating  the   meaning  of  concepts  such  as  ‘globalisation,’  and  arguing  for  alternative  meanings,   that  those  concerned  about  their  practical  implications  “…can  guard  against  their   exclusive  inclusion  into  the  political  projects  of  social  groups  of  whatever  kind.”  With   respect  to  the  ‘globalisation’  phenomenon,  Douglas  (1997,  p.  174)  points  out  that   “by  internalising  the  discourse  of  ‘the  global’,  and  its  associated  myths,  we  all   become  ‘vectors’  ensuring  the  transmission  of  the  new  normalcy.”  One  way  of   avoiding  the  pitfall  of  becoming  a  ‘transmission  vector’  confirming  the  inevitability  of   the  status  quo  is  to  think  of  what  is  usually  referred  to  as  ‘neoliberal  globalisation’  as   being  a  process,  a  part  of  an  incomplete  project  that  manifests  as  a  variety  of  

regulatory  experiments  which  are  path-­‐dependent  and  necessarily  evolve  “unevenly   across  places,  territories  and  scales”  (Brenner,  Peck  &  Theodore  2010,  p.  331;  see   also  Peck  2013)  and  are  therefore  open  to  contestation.  Brenner,  Peck  and  Theodore   (ibid.,  p.  329)  usefully  describe  the  neoliberalisation  process  as    

…one among several tendencies of regulatory change that have been unleashed across the global capitalist system since the 1970s: it prioritizes market-based, market-oriented, or market-disciplinary responses to regulatory problems; it strives to intensify commodification in all realms of social life; and it often mobilizes speculative financial instruments to open up new areas for capitalist profit-making.

Despite  the  difficulties  of  disentangling  what  has  really  changed  from  the   ideologically-­‐charged  claims  about  what  has  changed  in  this  current  phase  of   capitalist  expansion  (Cahill  2014),  it  is  necessary  to  briefly  outline  some  of  the  most   important  empirically-­‐observable  changes  (the  ‘what’)  relevant  to  the  issues  being   analysed  before  discussing  different  views  of  both  the  origins  of  these  changes  (the   ‘how’  and  ‘why’)  and  their  possible  implications  for  both  the  theory  and  practice  of  

ecosocialist  challenges  to  them.  Even  descriptive  accounts  are,  however,  biased:  as   noted  previously,  the  selection  of  ‘facts’  to  focus  one’s  attention  on  is  itself  a  

subjective  exercise.  Given  that  ecosocialists  aim  to  address  the  ecological,  economic   and  political  crises  within  the  context  of  a  coherent,  interlinked  and  social  justice   framework,  the  ‘facts’  of  what  has  changed  outlined  below  (and  analysed  in  more   detail  in  Chapter  4)  are  selected  accordingly:  I  focus  on  those  changes  that  transfer   more  power  from  people  living  and  working  in  specific  places  (the  ‘local’)  to  global   elites  comprising  the  transnational  capitalist  class  (TCC)  and  its  allies  and  institutions   (the  ‘national’  and  the  ‘global’).  

Post-­‐1970s  changes  in  the  global  political  economy  and