The structural crisis of contemporary capitalism has deepened in the third decade of the 21st century, given the persistence and worsening of its inherent contradictions, with no signs of resolution in the medium term. Prolonged low economic growth, sustained indebtedness—both public and private—widespread inflation, increasing social inequality, the worsening climate crisis (with another health crisis of pandemic proportions looming), and geopolitical disputes that are increasingly taking on threatening warlike dimensions—including the genocide in Gaza—constitute a picture of civilizational crisis. These processes express not only the internal tensions of global capital in its current phase, but also its structural incapacity to guarantee dignified and sustainable living conditions and social reproduction on a planetary scale.

Particularly on the geopolitical front, the crisis exacerbates the decline of US global hegemony in the face of the rise of rival powers—primarily China—that challenge the economic and institutional unipolarity that emerged after the end of the Cold War. This reconfiguration is reflected in the loss of US industrial share and that of its allied powers in Europe and Japan, increasing technological competition, and the questioning of the dollar's dominance as the international reserve currency. In response, the United States seeks to preserve its primacy through containment strategies, tariff sanctions, and technological control, as well as by reinforcing its influence over Latin America and the Caribbean through financial and diplomatic mechanisms, and even direct intervention, as seen in the Caribbean region. For its part, China promotes the Belt and Road Initiative, the internationalization of the yuan, and the strengthening of alternative organizations such as the expanded BRICS, shaping a multipolar economic and political architecture. This dispute transcends the economic sphere and redefines energy supply routes, investment flows, and strategic alliances in the Global South.

Particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, this crisis takes on an even deeper character, reactivating the historical mechanisms of dependency, dispossession, and subordination that structure the region's peripheral integration into the global economy. This underscores the subordinate position that Latin America and the Caribbean continue to occupy in the international division of labor and in contemporary geopolitical struggles, where tensions between global powers are projected onto their territories, economies, and development models.

The current crisis cannot be understood as a temporary episode or a circumstantial deviation in the course of global capitalism, but rather as the prolonged manifestation of its structural contradictions. From the 2008 financial crisis to the present, the world economy has been experiencing a phase of stagnation characterized by low growth, excessive debt, and social precarity. The expansion of fictitious capital and speculative mechanisms has postponed the most acute effects of overaccumulation. But this process, far from correcting the system's flaws, reproduces, on an expanded scale, structural inequalities and the inherent instability (given the potential bursting of new financial bubbles) of global capitalist accumulation.

At the same time, the climate and environmental crisis exposes the natural and social limitations of this model. The logic of unlimited accumulation clashes head-on with the material conditions of life and the sustainability of ecosystems, while the "energy transition" driven by the major powers reproduces, under a new guise, the unequal relations between the Global North and South. In the name of the green economy, processes of territorial dispossession, extractivism, and technological subordination are being revived, disproportionately impacting dependent countries. Thus, the ecological crisis is not an external phenomenon to the logic of capitalist reproduction, but rather a central dimension of the civilizational crisis of capital, which combines labor exploitation, environmental depredation, and imperialist domination.

From a Latin American and Caribbean perspective, this crisis translates into a worsening of historical mechanisms of dependency and external vulnerability. The region is trapped between the pressure of international financial markets, the burden of sovereign debt, and the persistence of primary-export and/or assembly-based (maquiladora) production models. Economic growth rests on fragile foundations, determined by the volatility of commodity prices and the concentration of wealth. Added to this are the devastating social effects of the pandemic, the rise in informal employment, and gender inequality, which deepen the structural inequality of our economies. Faced with this reality, Latin America and the Caribbean perpetuate their subordinate position in the international division of labor, confirming the continued relevance of the categories of dependency, unequal development, and value transfers as key analytical frameworks for understanding the contemporary crisis.

The labor dimension of the crisis is expressed in the widespread precariousness and flexibilization of work. The region is witnessing the deregulation of labor relations, the outsourcing of processes, project-based or part-time contracts, and piece-rate payment schemes, all of which weaken collective bargaining. These trends combine with historical gaps in informality, occupational segmentation, and various inequalities, producing increasingly heterogeneous, unstable, and low-wage labor markets.

In parallel, the economic and social deterioration exacerbated by the crisis of recent decades has led to a resurgence of authoritarian and neoconservative right-wing movements in various countries. In the United States and Europe, the rise of far-right political projects—neoliberal in orientation but with nationalist and xenophobic features—demonstrates a reactionary drift that channels social discontent toward authoritarian solutions. In Latin America, this trend manifests itself in the advance of far-right movements that combine anti-statist and anti-politics rhetoric with punitive authoritarianism, contempt for social rights, and subordination to the interests of global financial and extractive capital. Such expressions do not arise outside the capitalist system in crisis, but rather as part of its reconfiguration; they constitute a regressive political response to the crisis of accumulation and legitimacy of contemporary capitalism.

In short, the contemporary capitalist crisis constitutes an organic and civilizational crisis that permeates all levels of social reproduction: economic, political, ecological, and cultural. It is not, therefore, a mere dysfunction of the system, but rather the historical manifestation of its structural limitations and its inability to sustain the conditions for life on the planet. From Latin America and the Caribbean, this crisis reactivates forms of dependency, subordination, and dispossession, while simultaneously opening the possibility of rethinking alternative projects for development and social emancipation from the Global South. In this sense, the struggle over the meaning of social emancipation—which includes an ecological, economic, or political alternative—becomes a strategic battleground: its orientation will determine whether humanity deepens the barbarity of capital or succeeds in building new forms of social organization based on justice, equality, and the sustainability of life.

The study of the structural crisis of contemporary capitalism and its manifestations in Latin America and the Caribbean is of paramount theoretical and social importance. In the current context, characterized by global economic stagnation, the financialization of economies, deepening inequalities, and the worsening ecological crisis, it becomes essential to problematize the foundations of the prevailing accumulation model and its effects on peripheral social formations. Understanding this crisis not as a temporary episode, but as an organic expression of capital's internal contradictions, requires recovering critical traditions of Latin American thought that allow us to situate the analysis within a historical and structural perspective.

From a theoretical standpoint, the theme uniting the Working Group is situated within contemporary debates on the crisis of capitalist development, the role of the state in the periphery, and the dynamics of global power. Faced with the exhaustion of neoliberal paradigms and the limitations of developmentalist and decolonial approaches, it is necessary to revise the analytical categories of critical thought—dependency, unequal development, imperialism, center-periphery, fictitious capital—in light of recent transformations in global capitalism, such as the digitalization of production, the energy transition, and the multipolar geopolitical recomposition. This theoretical exercise not only contributes to updating the critique of political economy but also to rethinking the epistemological foundations of the social sciences from the perspective of the Global South.

On a social and intellectual level, the relevance of this topic lies in the need to understand the new forms of economic, technological, and political subordination affecting Latin American and Caribbean societies. The persistence of extractive and/or exploitative models, chronic indebtedness, precarious employment, and wealth concentration reflect the continuity of a dependent structure, now exacerbated by the mechanisms of fictitious capital and the disputes among global powers. Analyzing these dynamics illuminates the region's contemporary challenges and opens new avenues of thought aimed at building autonomous, democratic, and sustainable development alternatives.

Finally, the intellectual relevance of this topic lies in its capacity to articulate a critical reflection on the civilizational crisis of capital with Latin American debates about the region's future. In a global scenario marked by instability, the rise of the far right, and the threat of environmental crisis, the production of situated and critical knowledge becomes an urgent task. This project, therefore, seeks to contribute to the renewal of Latin American social thought, strengthening a perspective that combines theoretical rigor, historical commitment, and an emancipatory vision.