Mark Rupert and Hazel Smith
Has historical materialism (HM) any relevance in an era of globalization? Of what significance is globalization within an historical materialist frame? Is the traditional vocabulary of HM – in which concepts such as ‘class’, ‘state’, and ‘imperialism’ loom large – adequate to understand, and to change, contemporary social conditions? Can there be a socialist project in an era of globalization, and what forms might it take? With an eye towards sites of struggle and transformative potential, this volume addresses the tensions and possibilities of globalizing capitalism – and historical materialist critique – at the dawn of a new century.
Perhaps ironically, during the last decade when liberal capitalism seemed to have attained a kind of global apotheosis, the study of international relations has witnessed a revival of intellectual traditions associated with the legacies of Karl Marx and his many and various interpreters. Entailing practices of critical scholarship, the traditions of historical materialism share a set of family resemblances: they aim at de-reifying the apparently natural, universal, and politically neutral appearances of capitalist social reality, explicitly to re-situate those abstract appearances in relation to the processes and social power relations implicated in their production, and thereby to enable their transformation by the human social agents whose socially productive activity constitutes their condition of existence.
Marx suggested that such a transformation might emerge out of the confluence of capitalism’s endemic crisis tendencies, the polarization of its class structure and the immiseration of the proletariat and, most importantly, the emergence of the latter as a collective agent through the realization of its socially productive power, heretofore developed in distorted and self-limiting form under the conditions of concentrated capitalist production. Traditional interpretations of Marx tended towards mechanical and economistic visions in which the crisis tendencies of capitalism played themselves out ‘behind the backs’ of historical actors. Leninist interpretations re-injected a sense of historical agency into historical materialism, but did so by empowering a vanguard of professional revolutionaries to seize the state and transform social relations in the name of the oppressed. Viewed in the light of either of these interpretations, historical materialism may appear to have been discredited by the apparent robustness of capitalist economies and the failure of the oft-predicted final crisis to arrive, and by the degeneration of the Bolshevik revolution into a profoundly anti-democratic system of one-party rule.
But, as contributors to this volume demonstrate, there are resources within the traditions of historical materialism which counteract these regressive tendencies and which offer hope for a more enabling and participatory form of social organization than either liberal capitalism or Soviet-style bureaucratic socialism. These new historical materialisms share a scepticism towards mechanistic or vanguardist visions of social change. Progressive social change need not automatically follow in train behind economic crisis, nor can such change be enacted or imposed by a revolutionary elite acting in the name of the inert masses of the oppressed. Rather, progressive social change must be produced by historically situated social agents whose actions are enabled and constrained by their social self-understandings. This recognition highlights the practical, material significance of critical analysis. In an era when Soviet-style socialism has collapsed upon itself and liberal capitalism offers itself as the natural, necessary and absolute condition of human social life, the chapters in this volume insist that the potentially emancipatory resources of a renewed and perhaps reconstructed historical materialism are as relevant in today’s world as ever.
Ethics and politics
Historical materialism has an ethical and political content in that it is a theory concerned with explaining the world in order to change it for the better. That change however does not come about automatically or simply because the world can be understood better through the instruments provided by historical materialist analysis. Change comes about through the self-organization and struggle of those social classes marginalized by capitalist social relations and those individuals and groups who are allied with them. What Marx understood as social classes – both in terms of those that benefit and those that are excluded from benefits of the system – are directly and in an everyday way engaged in class struggle with each other. This is a class struggle which is involuntary in the sense that, to secure their very existence, individuals within capitalist social relations must either earn a wage or salary and therefore constantly negotiate with an employer to maintain the means of existence, survival and life or, if they are owners of capital, they must constantly maximize their returns from the labour they employ and win out in the conflict with other owners of capital, again, because if they do not, their very physical survival is threatened. Class struggle is an imperative defining the way human beings relate to each other within systems of capitalist social relations – it is not optional and neither is it a condition of existence from which any individual can escape.
If class struggle is an imperative of capitalist social organization, it can take many different forms, be played out in many ways and take place in many different fora. Someone turning up late for work may not regard themselves engaged in class struggle but, unless their pay is docked, this person is retrieving their time and labour for their own purposes, not their employer’s – this is a minor form of class struggle. A collective fight to maintain social protections – for instance in the fight to keep a minimum wage, to maintain welfare benefits for the elderly and the vulnerable – these also take resources from the owners of capital and redirect them towards those who work to produce that capital. This is also class struggle. And then there are the great conscious political struggles which have sometimes been informed by historical materialist theorizing and sometimes not. These include the great anti-colonial struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the battles for the vote and the eight-hour day – and the fights for democracy and freedom and the struggle against poverty which continue worldwide. These are never ‘just’ economic conflicts but are fundamentally about the rights of people to have control over their own lives – to live a quality of life which is independent and dignified and free from oppression and poverty.
In the same way, those who own and control capital are engaged in everyday struggles for control of capital as well as the big, important and highly visible political and social conflicts of interest – between the owners and managers of capital and those who work to create capital, and among and between the owners and managers of capital themselves. Such struggles can be over the right to exclude small workplaces from the application of the minimum wage, the right to fire workers because of the insufficient ‘profitability’ of industries, such as in the airline industries after the 11 September bombing of New York and Washington D.C. in 2001, or perhaps the larger more overtly political issues – such as the right to decide who should be the political leaders of great nations (through funding political campaigns, access to high-level social and political networks and influence and sometimes straightforward bribery). These are also never just ‘economic’ battles. They are about struggles over the social division of the potential benefits that flow from capitalist organization of society – about who should have what and why – about, in other words, the politics of social existence.
There is no inevitability about the ‘positive’ outcome of class struggle. In the same way there is no sense here that historical materialist approaches can do more than help explain the world by providing a framework for analysis of empirical material. Historical materialist approaches do not obviate the need for painstaking empirical research. Nor does historical materialism offer glib or fundamentalist analysis that ignores the multivariate cleavages in contemporary society along lines of race, class, religion, age, gender, sexuality and geographical origin. Historical materialist approaches are informed by theories based on Marx’s analysis of the modern world but they need not conflate Marx’s theoretical enterprise with the task of carefully analysing historically constructed social and political life with all its complexity, multiplicity of tensions, and lack of linearity.
This book sets out to offer some explanations of this contested phenomenon called globalization, accepting that globalization in some way provides a short-hand marker to denote the breadth and depth of twenty-first-century international relations. But this, although an important purpose of the book, is not primary. Its primary aim is to show the pertinence and relevance of historical materialism as a theory of international relations – including that of contemporary international relations or globalization. The first of the three related objectives of the book, therefore, is to establish the relevance of historical materialist approaches to today’s international social, political, economic and cultural life – to help explain this globalizing world. The second is to explain what is understood by historical materialist theories and how they can be used to make sense of, and change, the world in which we live. The third is to critically interpret and intervene in the politics of globalization. The book concludes with a historical materialist interpretation of the ideology and politics of what many contributors understand as ‘globalizing capitalism’.
Relevance
The first part of the book demonstrates the relevance of historical materialist approaches to the study of globalization and international relations more generally. This part contains reference to some of the traditions of Marxian inquiry that have sought to understand ‘globalizing capitalism’ – its dynamics and trajectory (or, more accurately, its possible trajectories) and investigates how some of these traditions of thought can be used to help us understand contemporary international relations – or ‘globalization’. The concept of imperialism is reworked and dissected. An emphasis is placed right from the beginning on how historical materialist approaches help explain the world but also encourage its transformation.
In assessing the relevance of historical materialism to the era of globalization, contributors remind us of the continuities which relate contemporary global processes, and indeed possible future worlds, to the history of capitalism as an expansive form of social organization. Understanding historical materialism to imply a focus ‘not on some transhistorical “economic” sphere, but on historically specific material conditions of social reproduction’ (p. 18), Ellen Wood argues that processes often called ‘globalization’ are not qualitatively new but represent instead the universalization of capitalist social relations. To the extent that territorial states (which existed prior to the eighteenth-century emergence of capitalist production in England) have been internalized, transformed and brought to maturity within capitalism’s characteristic structural separation of the ‘economic’ from the ‘political’ (see also the chapter by Hannes Lacher in this volume), such states have become integral to the capitalist organization of social life. While acknowledging the increasing interconnectedness of international economic life, Wood argues that there is no reason to believe that globalizing capitalism entails the supersession of the territorial state by some supranational sovereign authority, nor of the national economic spaces which these political entities have organized. Indeed, capitalist globalization is likely to continue historical processes of uneven development, competition and rivalry across national states and national capitals. Contrary to those who argue for the emergence of a transnational capitalist ruling class and a nascent global state apparatus (compare, e.g., William Robinson’s chapter in this volume), Wood suggests that market-mediated economic relations readily outdistance the social organization of political rule, so that globalizing capitalism is increasingly reliant on nation-states for the political mediation of local spaces. As ‘a global system organized nationally’ (p.37) globalizing capitalism is likely to generate an intensification of the contradiction between economic expansionism and the territorially defined forms of political authority upon which capitalism depends for social stability and political reproduction. In the spaces opened up by this contradiction, Wood reminds us, there is room for opposition and cause for hope.
Like a number of contributors to this volume, Bob Sutcliffe believes tendencies towards globalization to have been overstated, and he too questions the representation of globalization as a fundamental discontinuity in social life. Deploying metaphors of spirals and contradictions, Sutcliffe argues that – at its best historical materialist analysis leads one to ‘think about change as something complex and many sided, and yet not totally random or chaotic’ (p.43). For Sutcliffe, globalization is not entirely new, nor is it simply a recurrence of long-established patterns. Previous eras of international capitalist expansion – the era of inter-imperialist rivalry preceding the First World War, and the neo-colonial intensification of North-South relations of inequality following the Second World War – have been the objects of sustained historical materialist analysis and, Sutcliffe implies, it would be as serious an error to neglect the hard-won insights of previous generations of Marxian theorists as it would be to accept them uncritically as a template for understanding our own historical situation. Spiral-like, capitalism is again entering a phase of intensified international activity which retains some of the marks and contradictions of previous episodes of imperialist expansion: ‘Conflict between national capitals remains important, and so does the exploitation, domination and marginalization of many countries within the globalizing capitalist structure’ (p.57). Recalling the classical Marxist thesis that capitalism generates its own gravediggers, Sutcliffe notes emergent forces of transnational resistance which may even now be coalescing around these spirals and contradictions.
Insistent that historical materialists (of all people) must not shy away from looking history in the face, Michael Cox situates contemporary Marxian analysis in the wake of the Cold War and asks it to account for itself. With the tone of an old friend and sympathetic critic, Cox broadly surveys Marxian and related radical theory as it attempts to come to grips with the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’, globalizing capitalism and its contradictions, and the question of US hegemonic power. Absent the emergence of a unified working class as history’s universal emancipatory subject, and with the taint of Soviet-style socialism’s ignominious collapse, the greatest challenge for radical theory in the current period, Cox concludes, is not so much the critical analysis of emergent tendencies in a contemporary capitalist world, but rather the formulation of a coherent vision of an alternative possible world.
Elided from most contemporary discussions of globalization, Fred Halliday notes at the outset of his chapter, are the crucial terms capitalism and imperialism. ‘That this process is conducted for profit, with the aim of both subjugating and incorporating, is the central dynamic, and secret, of the modern epoch’ (p. 76). As does Sutcliffe, Halliday argues strongly for historical continuities in the expansion of capitalism and suggests that a critical re-reading of historical materialist theories of imperialism and neo-colonialism can teach us much about the hierarchical and exploitative character of processes which may fashionably be subsumed, and obscured, under the rubric of globalization. Most importantly, understanding contemporary processes in terms of capitalist expansion and domination holds out the possibility for political movements of transnational resistance: ‘the task, common to both developed and developing countries, is that of bringing the processes of contemporary capitalism under democratic control, and of realising the emancipatory potential within advanced and subordinated capitalism alike’ (p.88).
Mark Laffey and Kathryn Dean are likewise concerned with the ability of historical materialism to inform emancipatory political practices across an emergent global social formation, but underscore the dangers of responding to globalization with a reassertion of economistic forms of Marxian analysis. Such analysis not only reproduces conceptually capitalism’s systemic tendency towards the domination of social life by the economic, it also marginalizes those forms of subjectivity and of struggle which are not reducible to the class categories of European modernity. Arguing for ‘a flexible Marxism for flexible times’, Laffey and Dean suggest that many contemporary Marxists have been unduly scornful of the work of Louis Althusser and have neglected his insights on crucial questions of subjectivity, ideology and the conditions of meaningful social action. Viewed in terms of a dialectically interpreted and revivified Althusserian conceptual field, capitalism and its economizing project appear dually threatened: on the one hand, by its own complex sets of contradictory logics and practices, distributed across various relatively autonomous aspects of the capitalist whole; and on the other by capitalism’s articulation with various pre-capitalist or non-capitalist relations, identities and practices within concrete social formations. In both instances, difference becomes crucial to transformative agency. Indeed, central to Laffey and Dean’s interpretation of globalization are the manifold tensions which must emerge between the economizing logic of capitalism and a world of cultural multiplicities. The flexible Marxism championed by Laffey and Dean ‘offers hope of generating a critical theory that is attentive to the quite proper concerns of political economy without at the same time being blind to the importance and relatively autonomous causal power of difference’ (p. 103). Transformative political possibilities, they remind us in good dialectical fashion, are crucially related to the ways in which we understand ourselves in relation to the world around us.
Theories
Drawing upon Marxian categories and insights, contributors to the next part of the book consciously seek to develop historical materialism as a theory of international relations. In his contribution to this volume, Peter Burnham criticizes those – such as practitioners of neo-Gramscian international studies – who, he argues, would reduce class to ‘just another “interest” in a methodology characterised by Weberian factor analysis’ (p. 113). Rather than reaffirming a Marxist-Leninist world-view with its deterministic methodology and statist political commitments, Burnham prescribes a return to Marxian conceptual fundamentals of class, labour, and struggle in order to reconstruct an ‘open Marxism’.
Class struggle … lies at the heart of Marx’s account of accumulation as capital must not only extract surplus from labour daily in the production process but must also ensure the successful reproduction of the total social circuit of capital through its three principal forms [the commodity-form, money-form and productive form of capital].
(p. 114)
On this view, capital is a process of self-expanding value in which, if it is to be successfully consummated in accumulation, must assume different forms as it completes its circuit. It is the pervasiveness of class struggle (more or less self-conscious), and the possibility of interruption at any point throughout this circuit, which creates real, if also open-ended, possibilities of systemic crisis and social transformation. Likewise, the state is understood as a relation in process: ‘National states exist as political “nodes” or “moments” in the global flow of capital and their development is therefore part of the antagonistic and crisis-ridden development of capitalist society’ (p. 123). States attempt to facilitate accumulation by channelling class struggle into non-class forms, and managing the circuits of capital. Globalization, then, signifies a ‘deepening’ of international circuits of capital and corresponding challenges to political management of those increasingly complex circuits and their manifold contradictions.
In a wide-ranging historical survey of the emergence of Western philosophy, Kees van der Pijl suggests that Marx’s revolutionary dialectical synthesis of materialism/idealism was often reduced by various followers and interpreters to a naturalistic and scientistic materialism unable to animate a transformative politics: ‘the actual labour movement, if it adhered to an explicit philosophical position at all, more often adopted naturalistic materialism than Marx’s historical materialism because manual labour in combination with experimental natural science was conducive to that perspective’ (p. 143). As globalizing capitalism transforms the social organization of production such that manual and mental labour are increasingly integrated in the ‘collective worker’ through the world-wide socialization of labour, van der Pijl suggests that the dialectical preconditions of human emancipation may be nearer than ever to realization.
Hannes Lacher both celebrates and criticizes the revival of historical materialist international studies which has taken place in recent years. In particular, he highlights the difficulties of Marxian scholarship – classical theories of imperialism as well as contemporary theories of the capitalist state – in providing an adequate account of the interstate system. While acknowledging that capitalist geopolitics are qualitatively different from absolutist or feudal geopolitics, Lacher offers a powerful theoretical and historical argument against the thesis that the modern state – and, by extension, the system of states – was born out of the very historical processes which gave rise to capitalism. Drawing on the work of Robert Brenner and Ellen Wood, among others, he argues instead that the emergence of a system of states, a process driven by the historically distinct politico-economic imperatives of absolutist rule, preceded the emergence of capitalist production relations and cannot adequately be understood as their product. Following the emergence of capitalist production relations in England, however, the dynamics of absolutist geopolitics were transformed and the system of territorial states was ‘internalized’ within, and became integral to, a distinctly capitalist system of social relations: ‘Territoriality became exclusive with respect to political space only, while the privatization of appropriative power [in the hands of a capitalist class] allowed for the organization of surplus extraction across boundaries through the productive employment of contractually secured labour’ (p. 159). This insight generates a plethora of challenges for Marxian international studies, which is on this view obliged to untangle the complex and contradictory ways in which capitalist processes and relations have been shaped by the historical fact that capitalism’s ‘political space is fractured by sovereign territoriality’ (p. 160). Concurring with other contributors to this volume who emphasize inter-imperialist rivalry, Lacher argues that this structural disjuncture puts states in the position of rivalry:
Whereas the state domestically stands apart from the competition between individual capitals, and seeks to regulate the economy through universal forms of governance like the rule of law and money, in the international sphere it is or can itself be a competitor seeking to promote the interests of its capital with political and economic means.
(pp. 160–1)
However, in contrast to some contributors – such as Wood, whose chapter strongly suggests that the states system is likely to remain into the indefinite future as the problematic political infrastructure of economically universalizing capitalism – Lacher views the persistence of territorially based rule as very much an open question in the era of globalization.
In response to the rise of ‘social constructivism’ as the newest (counter-) orthodoxy within international relations, Benno Teschke and Christian Heine argue that constructivists’ criticisms of historical materialism are based on a systematic misreading of Marxian theory, neglecting its relational ontology and erroneously subsuming it ‘under the deductive-nomological protocols of the natural sciences’ (p. 165). Launching their own critique, Teschke and Heine point towards contradictions and lacunae in the Weberian epistemology which underlies constructivism and undermines its attempts to understand neoliberal restructuring and globalization: ‘We criticised this [constructivist] account because it treated “social purpose” as a domestic black box, failed to relate globalisation to capitalist crisis, and underspecified the fundamental relation between states and markets under capitalism’ (p. 175). A dialectical vision of historical materialism, the authors maintain, provides for a more compelling and politically empowering interpretation of neoliberalism and globalization insofar as it represents these as problematic and contestable responses to a crisis of capitalist profitability which had its onset in the 1970s. Further, they argue that globalization should not be understood in terms of the diminution of state power or the effacement of politics: ‘neoliberalism is a conscious state policy that is not to be confused with the self-cancellation of the state’ (p. 182). Political struggles and correlations of social forces, which account for unevenness in the patterns of neoliberal restructuring, remain central to the processes of capitalist globalization.
Politics
The theoretical traditions identified by contributors to this book provide vocabularies for the political analysis of the globalizing world in which we live. Taking a brief from the famous Marxian thesis which understands historical materialism as being engaged in social critique as part of a political project of changing the world, contributors explore how the politics of globalization are being played out in today’s world. Rather than viewing global capitalism as an ineluctable natural force, contributors 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.
According to Alejandro Colás, globalization should be understood as integrally related to ‘the class antagonisms inherent in capitalism’ (p. 191). The politics of globalization necessarily entails, as both cause and consequence, struggles between capital and labour – ‘a process whereby the very policies and strategies developed by capitalists and workers in response to globalisation, themselves throw up new expressions of international class antagonisms’ (p. 192). Along with Burnham, Colás is strongly critical of neo-Gramscian interpretations of globalization, which he taxes with a top-down perspective which largely abstracts from the social relations of production, and hence reifies transnational ruling class agency and obscures the ongoing contestation of class power, especially as it unfolds unevenly across various local contexts. At the most abstract level, Colás argues that class must be seen as neither the subject of globalization (as in interpretations which emphasize ruling class agency), nor as its object (as in narratives stressing intensified subjugation and exploitation of global workers), but rather – as simultaneously the subject and object of these fundamental and contradictory political processes. Interpreting concrete class struggles, however, challenges Marxists to account for the ways in which capitalist social relations have been articulated with other, non-capitalist forms of social organization. ‘It is this complex interface between the universality of capitalist social relations and their specific manifestation in different socio-historical contexts, which arguably defines international class-formation and reproduction’ (p.205). A viable socialist politics for the new century, Colás suggests, can only be constructed on such a basis.
In contrast to a number of contributors to this volume whose attitudes towards the concept of globalization range from ambivalence to outright hostility, William Robinson embraces it as ‘a concept useful intellectually and enabling politically’, for it is this concept which enables historical materialist critique of a political process Robinson describes as ‘the transnationalization of the state’ (p.210). On this view, globalization represents an ‘epochal shift’ in which the displacement of pre-capitalist relations is completed and capitalist commodification is universalized, national circuits of accumulation are subsumed within global circuits, a transnational capitalist class emerges and the nation-state is tendentially transformed, superseded by and incorporated within a transnational state (TNS) as the political aspect of capitalist social organization. Deploying Gramscian concepts much maligned by some of our contributors, Robinson suggests that ‘The TNS comprises those institutions and practices in global society that maintain, defend, and advance the emergent hegemony of a global bourgeoisie and its project of constructing a new global capitalist historical bloc’ (p.215). Patterns of nation-state based political accommodation between capitalist and popular classes, and the constraints on accumulation which these have represented, have been increasingly vitiated by the transnational reorganization of capitalist power, displaced by the hegemonic project of the Washington Consensus. Robinson cautions his readers that there is nothing inevitable in these tendencies. Increasingly global, capitalism is nonetheless a deeply contradictory system and, like all hegemonic projects, the emergent TNS is both contestable and contested. To do so effectively, working and popular classes will need to extend their own political horizons, mobilize on a transnational scale, and construct ‘alliances, networks, direct actions and organizations’ capable of challenging the power of global capital.
Applying in an original and unorthodox way some core insights of historical materialism to the analysis of law, Claire Cutler argues that the law is a human social product and, having been produced in an historical context of capitalist dominance, is not class-neutral. Legal rules are a crucial constituent of property relations and privatized class power, and also form the ‘legal culture’ of a transnational bloc advancing a globalizing neoliberal agenda under the guise of naturalized representations of property, market, and capital. ‘The globalization of the rule of law is an integral aspect of neoliberal discipline, which is expanding the private sphere of capital accumulation, while constraining potentially democratizing influences’ (p.236). Cutler, too, adopts some of Gramsci’s, insights in her analysis of capitalist globalization and transformations of international law, insisting that legal norms are also terrains of struggle fraught with implications for class-based power. ‘The law can be used by the disenfranchised and dispossessed as a powerful instrument of change once the mythology of its inherent objectivity and neutrality is displaced by the sort of critical analysis provided by historical materialism’ (p.251).
Class, state and the law are here discussed not as reflective of some trans-historical conceptual vacuum but are analysed as part of the recursive social relationships in which they are born and which they help to shape. Illustrating the thesis of this volume that globalization entails real social relations for real people which are often both oppressive and unequal but yet contain germs of emancipatory promise, this part includes an analysis of the contradictory nature of empirical reality for the electorate of the member states of the European Union.
Hazel Smith approaches the politics of European integration through a historical materialist lens. In particular, she focuses on the ways in which the language of individual rights embodied in the Amsterdam treaty of 1997 partakes of the contradictory character of liberal capitalist democracies. While the language of rights represents persons as abstractly equal individuals – the very representations which Marx attacked in his early critique of ‘political emancipation’ and his subsequent analyses of the appearances of contractual market relations – these representations are deeply problematic and potentially double-edged in the context of privatized capitalist powers ensconced in the economic sphere. European integration, and the promotion of liberal democracy, which now attends it, entail
the contradictory normative project inherent to a capitalist logic which limits individual rights to a politics which is about facilitating capitalist exchange and, at the same time, provides what philosophers sometimes call ‘the conditions of possibility’ for emancipation through the collective exercise of those rights.
(p.266)
To the extent that globalization represents the universalization of capitalist production relations and its associated political forms, struggles over the effective meaning and scope of ‘rights’ may become important terrains of struggle.
Like Laffey and Dean, Scott Solomon and Mark Rupert affirm the value of historical materialist analyses of globalization but are sceptical that the political processes involved can adequately be understood in terms of traditional Marxian categories of class. Drawing on neo-Gramscian insights regarding the mediation of political struggle through ideology, and the practical significance of social self-understandings and identities, Solomon and Rupert argue that
the class-based relations of production under capitalism create the possibility of particular kinds of agency, but these possibilities can only be realized through the political practices of concretely situated social actors, practices which must negotiate the tensions and possibilities – the multiple social identities, powers, and forms of agency – resident within popular common sense.
(p.293)
On this view, central to the politics of globalization will be struggles to counterpose visions of globalization/solidarity to dominant narratives of globalization/competitiveness. While there are indications that such struggles are under way, Solomon and Rupert suggest that
If such projects are to forge a unified resistance to globalizing capitalism, they must find ways to articulate class-based identities with other social identities and powers already resident and active within the popular common sense of working people in various parts of the world.
(p.297)
Historical materialism as theory of globalization
That the contributors to this volume do not speak in a single voice should not surprise anyone familiar with the rich, complex and contradictory intellectual and political history of the Marxian tradition. It was never our aim to resolve the ambiguities, tensions and conflicts within historical materialism, or to produce a new party line on globalization. Rather we have sought to give voice to various currents within the tradition in order to demonstrate its continued vitality.
What we have in common is a view that historical materialism is relevant for both the theoretical understanding of globalization and for providing political analysis of how change might be possible within the limits and possibilities provided by globalizing capitalist social relations. Marxist concepts such as class, state and imperialism have not yet lost their ability to help frame the world and in some ways may be more pertinent than ever. There is more tentativeness, however, and less optimism, about the ability of historical materialist approaches to help challenge and, therefore, change social conditions. The bankruptcy of those actually existing socialisms and the lack of examples of democratic socialism as an end state have not helped. The Gramscian aphorism ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’ is apposite here however. Given that there are many examples of democratic socialist practice world-wide, in various stages of revolutions, in solidarity struggles and in various collective enterprises world-wide, the next step for a further volume of historical materialist theorizing is perhaps to analyse the sites of political and social struggle where transformative practices and processes can be observed.
This volume identifies sites of struggle and transformative potential and addresses the tensions and possibilities of globalizing capitalism and historical materialist critique. Rather than foreclose the development of historical materialist thought, we have sought here its re-opening.
Acknowledgements and genesis
The editors of this volume first discussed at the Toronto International Studies Association in 1997 the possibilities of bringing together established scholars with younger scholars of Marx. We were particularly aware of the fine new work emerging from younger scholars in the discipline of international relations and wanted to find ways around which these scholars could be supported to form a ‘critical mass’ in the discipline. We were also aware of how difficult it had been, especially during the period of the Cold War, for serious historical materialist scholarship to be heard or published and how personally difficult it had been for those lone individuals who had braved what was at best marginalization and at worst what was often close to hostility when they had attempted to pursue any form of historical materialist intellectual agenda. Almost paradoxically, the end of the Cold War allowed space for the resurgence of such theorizing – partly because with the defeat of the Communist experiments, there appeared to be no possible threat from an ‘academic’ Marxism. Into this space climbed this project. Here Hazel Smith would like to thank all the scholars involved in the London School of Economics historical materialist working group, led by Justin Rosenberg, all of them provided inspiration and confirmation that the historical materialist project was necessary, essential and timely. This book is also conceived of partly as a homage to those who have struggled to maintain a hearing for historical materialist approaches set out in this volume many of whom we are proud to say are represented as contributors to this volume. It is of course invidious to pick out individuals but we do want to express special appreciation to Ellen Wood, whose work the word ‘path-breaking’ seemed designed for, and who has set standards for scholarly and political inquiry which she would with characteristic modesty be surprised to hear are standards which many would want to emulate but few could surpass.
Much of this volume has had to be put together while one of the editors was based in Pyongyang for a year with the United Nations, with all the attendant problems of communication (insufficient electricity sometimes none at all – not enough voltage for faxes, no internet, no reliable postal service, etc.) and the other was coping with all the unfortunately now normal demands of modern academic life, which leave little time for ‘research’. This book has been possible, in the end, however, because of the outstanding commitment of its contributors. They have not only submitted work that is of the highest scholarly standards but have submitted to the editing process with immense patience and forbearance.
We were very fortunate to secure support from Professor Richard Higgott of the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at the University of Warwick, which resulted in generous financial backing such as to fund a workshop on historical materialism and globalization, at Warwick, in April 1999. The International Studies Association also financially supported the project. We are very grateful for all this support.
We hope it is not too much of a cliché to finish by saying that what we all share – editors and contributors – is a vision of scholarly work which involves a commitment to do our best to try to make the world intelligible, to explain and to understand, at the same time, never forgetting that ‘the point is to change the world’. This book is not conceived as a ‘threat’ to conventional or ruling ideas about what constitutes good theory for understanding and explaining contemporary international relations and, most particularly, the phenomenon of globalization but as a challenge to those theories.