Modern history

Historical Materialism and Globalisation

Historical Materialism and Globalisation

Now that Soviet style socialism has collapsed upon itself and liberal capitalism offers itself as the natural, necessary and absolute condition of human social life on a worldwide scale, this book insists that the potentially emancipatory resources of a renewed, and perhaps reconstructed, historical materialism are more relevant in today's world than ever before. Rather than viewing global capitalism as an eluctable natural force, these essays seek to show how a dialectic of power and resistance is at work in the contemporary global political economy, producing and contesting new realities and creating conditions in which new forms of collective self determination become thinkable and materially possible. It will be vital, topical reading for anyone interested in international relations, international political economy, sociology and political theory.

Editors’ introduction

Part I. Globalization: the relevance of historical materialist approaches

Chapter 1. Global capital, national states

Chapter 2. How many capitalisms? Historical materialism in the debates about imperialism and globalization

Chapter 3. The search for relevance: historical materialism after the Cold War

Chapter 4. The pertinence of imperialism

Chapter 5. A flexible Marxism for flexible times: globalization and historical materialism

Part II. Historical materialism as a theory of globalization

Chapter 6. Class struggle, states and global circuits of capital

Chapter 7. Historical materialism and the emancipation of labour

Chapter 8. Making sense of the international system: the promises and pitfalls of contemporary Marxist theories of international relations

Chapter 9. The dialectic of globalisation: a critique of Social Constructivism

Part III. Historical materialism and the politics of globalization

Chapter 10. The class politics of globalisation

Chapter 11. Capitalist globalization and the transnationalization of the state

Chapter 12. Historical materialism, globalization, and law: competing conceptions of property

Chapter 13. The politics of ‘regulated liberalism’: a historical materialist approach to European integration

Chapter 14. Historical materialism, ideology, and the politics of globalizing capitalism

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