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.
Chapter 1. Global capital, national states
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
Chapter 6. Class struggle, states and global circuits of capital
Chapter 7. Historical materialism and the emancipation of labour
Chapter 9. The dialectic of globalisation: a critique of Social Constructivism
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 14. Historical materialism, ideology, and the politics of globalizing capitalism