These panels include a series of papers that draw upon innovative research that has emerged in recent years out of the Centre for Research as Practical Criticism (CICP), based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the work of the independent scholar Juan Iñigo Carrera in particular. This research has only recently started to appear in English – not least with the 2016 publication of The New International Division of Labour (Charnock & Starosta, eds, Palgrave Macmillan). The panels begin by revisiting the debate over the new international division of labour (NIDL) that dominated discussions in international political economy and development studies until the early 1990s. We submit that a revised NIDL thesis can shed fresh light on the specificities of capitalist development in various parts of the world today. Taken together, the papers develop a novel value-theoretical approach to understanding the NIDL, and one that rests upon the distinction between the global economic content that determines the constitution and dynamics of the NIDL and the evolving national political forms that mediate its development. More specifically, the panellists together argue that uneven national development is an expression of the underlying essential unity of the production of relative surplus-value on a world scale. The argument is illustrated through papers addressing several international case studies, including Argentina, Ecuador, Ireland, and Venezuela.
