Part III
10
Alejandro Colás
The objective of Marxist theory is to explain the past and present of human societies in order to illuminate future possibilities for human emancipation. This basic principle – most eloquently captured in Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’ – is arguably the distinguishing feature of Marxism as a social theory. With the possible exception of feminism, no other modern social theory has explicitly aimed to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between social-scientific analysis and political action, in the way that Marxism has over the past century and a half. One category privileged by Marxism in this endeavour is that of ‘class’. Although Marx and Engels dedicated a comparatively small amount of their work to the elucidation of this concept, it is indisputably one of the pivotal notions in the Marxist understanding of society, history and socio-historical change. More importantly, it is the one category upon which the Marxist project of socialist transformation hinges (Wood 1986).
Taking these two basic assumptions as a given (that Marxist theory is about socialist transformation and that this aim is premised on class politics), the rest of the chapter proposes, first, to evaluate the place of an historical materialist understanding of ‘class’ in the debates on globalisation and second, to identify the potential social and political sources of a reinvigorated socialist internationalism in the new century. In essence, my argument is that the current phase of international capitalist accumulation (‘globalisation’) continues to produce social and political cleavages both among and within specific states and societies. These cleavages take on a class form, in the Marxist sense, and can therefore be seen simultaneously as cause and consequence of the processes associated with globalisation. In other words, ‘globalisation’ is treated here as expressive of the class antagonisms inherent in capitalism, and as such, representative of yet another site of struggle between those who seek to reproduce the existing international capitalist order and those who aim to transform it in the direction of a genuinely democratic, i.e. socialist, international society.
I start from the premise that the idea of globalisation has no independent explanatory power, and that it describes a process of intensified socio-economic and political integration across the world which is derivative of other concepts (capitalism, the system of states, technology, international organisation). From an historical materialist perspective, the processes associated with globalisation should be seen as stemming from transformations in the global reproduction of capitalism. In other words, a Marxist account of globalisation should aim to explain this process with reference to capitalist development: as a consequence, rather than a cause, of changes in the world-wide articulation of capitalism.
Bearing this initial assumption in mind, I suggest that historical materialist analyses of the interaction between class and globalisation throw up two different, though by no means incompatible, results. On the one hand, the perspectives that privilege class as an agent (or subject) of globalisation tend to emphasise the hegemonic role of international or transnational ruling classes in the unfolding of this process. Thus, authors associated with the so-called ‘neo-Gramscian’ school of International Relations (IR), and those concerned with the theorisation of ‘postimperialism’, understand globalisation as a product of strategies devised by transnational ‘historic blocs’ or the ‘corporate international bourgeoisie’ in their collective management of the global capitalist economy.2 On the other hand, those interpretations that focus upon class as an object of globalisation are inclined towards an analysis of the impact of this process upon exploited classes, be these industrial workers, peasants or agricultural day-labourers. From the classic accounts of the ‘new international division of labour’ to the more recent considerations on globalisation and ‘flexible accumulation’, these views highlight the diversification of capitalist relations of production and the concomitant fragmentation of working-class politics arising out of capitalist globalisation (Fröbel et al. 1980).
The argument presented here is critical of both these perspectives. It seeks to emphasise the necessary interaction between the objective and subjective dimensions of class in the process of globalisation. In so doing, it suggests that the phenomena associated with globalisation should be explained with reference to the protracted national and international struggles between capital and labour. These antagonisms, which have arguably always been fought out at the intersection of the domestic and the international, in turn feed back into the ongoing dynamic of class-formation and class-mobilisation on a global scale. Thus, the class politics of globalisation is presented here as a process where the domestic opposition between capital and labour is simultaneously resolved and reproduced at an inter-state level; as 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.3
This understanding of the class politics of globalisation will be elucidated first through a critique of the neo-Gramscian and postimperialist accounts of capitalist globalisation by claiming that their tendency to reify ruling-class agency obscures the centrality of class struggle both domestic and international – in the configuration of hegemonic ‘historic blocs’. Next, I consider those theorists of globalisation that identify in this process a fragmentation and, ultimately, the conceptual extinction of the two antagonistic classes which Marx and Engels claimed defined capitalist society: bourgeois and proletarians. In criticising these perspectives, it will be argued that they conflate these abstract class categories with their concrete expression in actual social relations; or put differently: that they confuse what are contingent expressions of capitalist social relations with the defining structural relation of capitalism – the capital/labour relation. Once such a distinction (between abstract/concrete or structural/contingent) is respected, I maintain, it is all but impossible to do away with the two-class model when analysing global capitalism. Finally, the latter point will be qualified by suggesting that far from representing the triumph of the ‘pristine culture of capitalism’, actually existing global capitalism is still a domain where the overarching logic of capitalist exploitation is imbued, and in some cases forcibly articulated with non-capitalist social hierarchies associated with production, ethnicity, sex, and indeed political authority.4 Contrary to the predominant view of globalisation as a homogenising process, I shall argue with reference primarily to relations of exploitation – that it is actually reinforcing many of the divisive structures and institutions of the international system such as state sovereignty, uneven development, military power and ethnic and religious chauvinisms.
The consequences of all this for socialist strategy are briefly considered at the end of the chapter. To anticipate, my main contention is that the class antagonisms produced by capitalist globalisation can only be successfully harnessed to the project of socialist transformation by making explicit the connection between the abstract, universal nature of capitalist exploitation and its concrete manifestation in particular socio-historical settings. Analyses of globalisation which, by seeing classes as either the hapless victims of this process or the commanding agent of its unfolding, privilege one or the other view of global capitalism, run the risk of obviating the dynamic nature of the system and missing the crucial link between its abstract and concrete expressions. It follows from this that socialist transformation is unlikely to be spurred on by globalisation until an internationalist socialist movement is capable of translating our everyday experiences of alienation and exploitation – both within and without the workplace into collective action against capitalism at the global level.
Before proceeding into a fuller exposition of these arguments, a qualification and a definition are in order. The qualification is that little of what follows is premised on an empirical account of the global constellation of classes under capitalism. Such an empirical analysis would undoubtedly be necessary in order to strengthen the claims made in this chapter, but I proceed unashamedly from the abstract to the concrete; assuming that Marxists must abstract out a problematic before we determine how this is or is not concretised in actual social relations. Second, and following on from this, the next section will offer a brief – and necessarily schematic excursus into Marxist conceptions of class. Here, I shall define the way in which ‘class’ is employed in the rest of the chapter – a usage closest to that expounded by E.P. Thompson in his various writings on the subject (Thompson 1963, 1978a, 1978b).
The Marxist category of class
Although the term ‘class’ had been commonplace in social and political thought long before Marx and Engels first employed it, there is little doubt that it acquired a distinctive meaning in their writings (see Bottomore 1991; Labica and Bensussan 1982). The two central innovations which Marx and Engels brought to bear upon the concept were its historicisation and its association to conflicting social interests. Class divisions had, according to Marx and Engels, been a characteristic of human societies throughout history. The advent of capitalism, however, brought about a specific form of social differentiation: that of modern classes defined through their proprietary relation to the means of production. Furthermore, inherent to these new set of productive relations was the necessary clash of interests between the two major classes – bourgeois and proletarians. This double reworking of the idea of classes within modern civil society was formulated most clearly in the Communist Manifesto. Here Marx and Engels remind us that ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ and that ‘In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank’ (1967: 80). Modern capitalist society, however, marked a break with previous forms of social gradation:
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
(Marx and Engels 1967: 80)
The distinction between these two classes and their respective interests has remained axiomatic to the Marxist understanding of capitalism. Yet this elegant expression of class conflict in modern society begs at least two kinds of question relevant to our discussion of globalisation: first, where do the other classes which have shaped the modern world (peasants, slaves, share-croppers, petty bourgeois, lumpenproletarians, landowners and so forth) fit in?; second, how important is class consciousness to the definition of class? Both these questions have from the outset been at the heart of Marxist debates on class.
An initial appraisal of Marx and Engels’s definition of classes under capitalism reinforces the view espoused in the Communist Manifesto: the dynamics of bourgeois society lead to the absorption of all existing classes into either one of the two antagonistic camps, bourgeois or proletarians. Marx’s major investigations of capitalist society (the three volumes of Capital, Theories of Surplus-Value and the Grundrisse) bear this view out, as does Engels’s work on the subject, The Condition of the English Working-Class.5 At an abstract level, therefore, there is no sustained theorisation by Marx or Engels of the way in which pre-capitalist classes are integrated into and survive under the capitalist mode of production.
It is only when we turn to Marx’s historical and political writings that social classes other than the bourgeoisie and the proletariat find a role in the unfolding of capitalist modernity. Terms like ‘lumpenproletariat’, ‘finance aristocracy’ and ‘petty-bourgeoisie’ are used in Marx’s journalism on France and England to decipher the political developments in these two countries (see Elster 1986: esp. chap. 6). Perhaps more notorious is Marx’s discussion of the peasantry in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Here, Marx identifies a ‘vast mass’ of small-holding peasants as ‘[t]he most numerous class of French society’. They share similar conditions of life and a common mode of production, ‘[b]ut without entering into manifold relations with one another’ (Marx 1977: 105). The upshot of this situation was clear for Marx:
In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes, and put them into hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these smallholding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class.
(Marx 1977: 106)
This celebrated passage opens up the second key problem of the Marxist approach to class, namely that of class consciousness. For while Marx and Engels clearly identified class under capitalism with a collective position vis-à-vis the means of production, they also implied that the existence of a class was conditional upon its capacity to forge cultural and political means of self-representation. The classic formulation of this duality in the Marxist understanding of class was presented in The Poverty of Philosophy where Marx distinguishes between class-in-itself and class-for-itself. Referring to the early history of English working-class combinations, Marx asserts that
Economic conditions had transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, for which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.
(Marx n.d.: 166)
These, therefore, are the ambiguities which Marxist commentators on class have had to deal with. On the one hand, Marx and Engels forcefully argued that class was objectively determined under capitalism through the exploitative relationship between the proprietors of the means of production and those who owned nothing but their labour-power. Moreover, these two classes would gradually draw into their ranks the class remnants of previous modes of production: landowners, peasants, artisans and petty traders. On the other hand, some of Marx’s writings suggest that class becomes subjectively defined through consciousness, and that furthermore, the ‘residual’ classes like the peasantry had a significant role to play in an understanding of modern capitalist society, particularly in its international articulation.6
The way out of this false impasse is simply to reject this artificial duality. Like the associated dichotomies of Marxist thought (base and superstructure, agency and structure, theory and practice) the objective and subjective views of class should not be seen as mutually exclusive, nor put in opposition to each other. Rather, they should be understood in relational terms as constituting different expressions of a single phenomenon which arises out of concrete historical processes. In other words, classes emerge within the context of objective social structures such as the capitalist mode of production; but in order to explain the socio-historical dynamics of any society we must also account for the collective agency of individuals that reproduce these very structures.
One of the strongest formulations of this view of class lies in E.P. Thompson’s historical elaborations of class formation, most notably in his seminal The Making of the English Working-Class. It is in his polemical The Poverty of Theory, however, that Thompson defines class most succinctly:
Classes arise because men and women, in determinative productive relations, identify their antagonistic interests, and come to struggle, to think and to value in class ways: thus the process of class formation is a process of self-making, although under conditions which are ‘given’.
(Thompson 1978a: 9)
Clearly, Thompson’s interpretation of class represents one among several other approaches to the subject within the Marxist tradition – both classical and contemporary. Moreover, his conception of class has been subjected to searching critiques from some of the foremost Marxist theorists of our time (compare Anderson 1983; Katznelson and Zolberg 1986; Kaye and McClelland 1990). Yet neither of these considerations fundamentally undermines the validity of adopting Thompson’s understanding of class for the purposes of this chapter. Although a full analysis of the writings on class produced by Lenin, Lukács, Kautsky, Gramsci or Luxemburg, and the more recent reformulations of the concept by ‘analytical Marxists’, would undoubtedly provide a more comprehensive picture of Marxist debates on the subject, such an undertaking is beyond the scope and expertise of this chapter. As regards the contemporary critiques, their broad acceptance of Thompson’s key premises would suggest a greater consensus than might at first appear. Even Perry Anderson’s famous and characteristically pointed attack of Thompson’s excessively ‘voluntarist and subjectivist definition of class’ can be said to rest more on a difference in emphasis over what exactly it means to ‘[t]hink, to struggle and to act in class ways’ than on a substantive disagreement about the objective determination of classes within specific social structures such as capitalism.7 In short, the basic tenet of the Thompsonian understanding of class – that class emerges out of historically determined relations of production which generate an antagonism of interests and values between different social groups – appears as the most suitable starting-point for a Marxist interpretation of class and globalisation.
Class as an agent of globalisation
Allowing for the imprecision and analytical superficiality of the term,8 globalisation can be said to refer to at least four contemporary phenomena:
1. The alleged exponential increase over the past thirty years in cross-border financial, trade and capital flows in relation to total output (within OECD economies, at least).
2. The accompanying retreat of state intervention into and/or regulation of these flows.
3. The increasing transfer of responsibilities previously allocated to national states onto multilateral agencies or international organisations in the management of the world’s (socio-economic and political) affairs – what is often defined as ‘global governance’.
4. The growing homogenisation of political, economic and cultural norms and practices across significant sectors of the world population.
To their credit, from the 1970s onwards many Marxist and Marxisant scholars pioneered the recognition and analysis of all or part of these new developments in international relations. Furthermore, they did so by deliberately employing notions of class in an intellectual climate that was actively hostile to the deployment of this category. This section critically evaluates two such approaches – ‘postimperialism’ and neo-Gramscian ‘transnational historical materialism’ – with a view to delineating my own perspective on class and globalisation in contrast to theirs.
In essence, the two approaches under review sought to explain developments in the global political economy since the 1970s with reference to the international self-organisation of the capitalist ruling class. Though separated in time by almost twenty years and in method by their different conceptions of Marxism, the theory of postimperialism and neo-Gramscian transnational historical materialism shared a common analytical concern with the new institutions of global capitalism such as multinational corporations, multilateral agencies and transnational pressure groups. Moreover, in explaining the rise and development of these new phenomena, the theorists attached to both these ‘schools’ emphasised the central role of transnational ruling-class coalitions in sustaining the global material and ideological domination of capital.
I shall shortly raise two interconnected shortcomings of both these analyses of class and globalisation. Before doing so, however, it is important to highlight some of the differences between the two approaches, thereby further elucidating their contributions. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that some of the writings considered do not explicitly couch their analyses in terms of globalisation as such – I have assumed that their problematic could reasonably be framed within the contemporary debates on the subject.9
In the first place, while theorists of postimperialism were more narrowly concerned with the role of multinational corporations in capitalist development and the attendant transformation in class relations, the neo-Gramscians expressly underline the threefold interaction between production, political institutions and ideology in the construction of historical ‘world orders’. Thus, for Becker and Sklar, ‘[Postimperialism] begins with the observation that global corporations function to promote the integration of diverse national interests on a new transnational basis’ (1987: 6). Out of this process there emerged a novel configuration of international class forces, where imperialist domination from the metropole was superseded by a new coalition of interests between, on the one hand, a national ‘managerial bourgeoisie’ comprising private managers and public functionaries in the less developed countries, and, on the other hand, a transnational ‘corporate bourgeoisie’ attached to the major multinational corporations from the advanced capitalist states. This partnership was sustained primarily through the harmony of interests arising out of the local managerial bourgeoisie’s need for foreign direct investment and the corporate bourgeoisie’s willingness to accept conditions imposed by the host administration – what Sklar dubbed the ‘corporate doctrine of domicile’ (1987: 29).10 All this resulted in the emergence of a ‘worldwide corporate and managerial bourgeoisie as a class in formation that now comprises three overlapping entities [“corporate bourgeoisie”, “managerial bourgeoisie” and the “corporate international bourgeoisie” – a composite of the latter two]’ (1987: 31).
Though the neo-Gramscian approach was also concerned with the process of transnational class formation, its major theorists sought to escape a reductionist explanation of this phenomenon. For the neo-Gramscians transnational class formation was the outcome of processes far more complex than the simple convergence of interests between multinational corporations and specific fractions of the third world bourgeoisie. In fact, transnational historical materialism has to date paid little attention to the articulation of class relations outside OECD countries and has focused instead on the class alliances forged in the heartlands of capitalism. Thus, Kees van der Pijl’s path-breaking work The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (1984), his more recent Transnational Classes and International Relations (1998a), and Stephen Gill’s (1990) study on the Trilateral Commission aimed to demonstrate the existence of an institutionalised international ruling class within the advanced capitalist states: what one could inelegantly call an ‘international bourgeoisie-for-itself’.
The strategy deployed by the neo-Gramscians in this endeavour has varied considerably. At one extreme, van der Pijl’s early work made little reference to the Gramscian categories later developed by his ‘Italian School’ colleagues, and focused instead on the more orthodox Marxist analysis of class fractions in the history of trans-Atlantic ruling-class coalitions from 1917 to 1971. Taking his cue from the second and third volumes of Marx’s Capital, van der Pijl (1984) argued that, at different periods during this century, distinctive fractions of an Atlantic ruling class could be identified with two different conceptions of capital: money-capital and productive-capital. While the fraction emanating from the former tended towards a liberal internationalist view of the Atlantic economy – one geared towards the generation of profits through the circulation of money capital and therefore pre-disposed towards US hegemony in an open international economy – the latter fraction was associated with continental industrial capitalism and therefore more inclined towards nationally based, demand-side policies aimed at extracting surplus-value through the valorisation of productive capital. At the other end of the neo-Gramscian spectrum Robert W. Cox expanded both the geographical and conceptual reach of transnational historical materialism by embracing notions of ‘world order’ and ‘state power’. Though insisting on its emergence out of concrete ‘social relations of production’, Cox argued that class was articulated internationally through the medium of a hegemonic world order (e.g. Pax Britannica or Pax Americana):
In such an order, production in particular countries becomes connected through the mechanisms of a world economy and linked into world systems of production. The social classes of a dominant country find allies within other countries. The historic bloc underpinning particular states become connected through the mutual interests and ideological perspectives of social classes in different countries, and global classes begin to form.
(Cox 1987: 7)
At one level, this formulation of the role of classes in the international system appears to be very similar to that presented by Becker and Sklar. The crucial difference (underplayed by Cox in the previous passage), however, lies in the emphasis placed by Cox and the neo-Gramscians on the concept of hegemony represented by specific historic blocs. For although the theorists of postimperialism make passing references to cultural and educational forms of transnational socialisation, the neo-Gramscians adopt this label precisely through their extrapolation onto the international arena of the Italian communist’s reflections on the role of culture (understood in the broadest sense) in sustaining an antisocialist hegemony in his own country. Thus, for transnational historical materialism, world orders are maintained not only through the dull compulsion of the market and the coercive powers of the state, but also by way of the consent elicited through ideological and institutional forms such as transnational foundations, think-tanks, pressure-groups and multilateral agencies. It is in this sense that institutions emanating from civil society such as the Trilateral Commission or the Davos World Forum become organic representations of a transnational ruling class (Gill 1990; van der Pijl 1998a: chap. 4).
This necessarily sketchy survey of the postimperialist and neo-Gramscian analyses of class in international relations will have hopefully demonstrated their almost exclusive focus on the agency of ruling classes in twentieth-century international relations. Despite their differing methods and conclusions, my claim has been that these two theories offer one avenue for exploring the interface between class and globalisation. It is a perspective that interprets globalisation as a process consciously engineered by international ruling classes, either through the convergence of interests mediated through multinational corporations (postimperialism) or through the more complex ideological and institutional mechanisms that characterise hegemonic world orders (transnational historical materialism). In this respect, they both privilege the subjective role of class in the process of globalisation, and are thus open to the charge of underestimating the centrality of objective relations of production in the global reproduction of class antagonisms. Such a ‘charge’ can be substantiated with reference to two assumptions inherent in the postimperalist and neo-Gramscian analyses.
First and foremost, both these perspectives treat class, and especially the ruling class, as a virtually autonomous entity that is free to determine the historical conditions of its own development. Consequently, they both overlook one of the central tenets of the Marxist conception of class, namely the mutual constitution of classes in the process of exploitation. Postimperialists assume that the interests of the corporate international class will eventually be satisfied simply by virtue of this group being at the summit of the hierarchy of the multinational corporation. Similarly, transnational historical materialists derive their notion of hegemonic world orders through reading back into history moments of apparent stability in the international system. In both cases, there is little or no space for class struggle in the construction of either corporate international class nor hegemonic historic blocs, nor indeed for the possibility of counter-hegemonic blocs seizing the ‘historical day’ (e.g. through revolutions). Yet such ruling-class coalitions emerge in the process of confrontation with exploited classes which may, or may not, be resolved through the ‘doctrine of domicile’ or the establishment of a hegemonic world order, but which are certainly the product of crises generated by such a clash of class interests. In other words, in as far as we can speak of the rise of an international ruling class and its attendant hegemonic institutions, these phenomena must be explained as a dynamic response to the resistance and contestation displayed by the exploited classes; a resistance that often produces favourable results for the exploited classes.
The insistence upon the centrality of relations of production in the formation and reproduction of classes is important because it underlines a second and related shortcoming in the postimperialist and neo-Gramscian analyses, namely their assumption that the international self-organisation of classes expresses a higher, and therefore determinate, stage of capitalist globalisation. Again, this is an unqualified generalisation which is aimed at identifying commonalities among the texts in question, and not at imposing some purported homogeneity in their formulations and conclusions. Nonetheless, it can be said that both postimperialism and transnational historical materialism tend to overemphasise the institutional and ideological self-representation of the ruling class on a global scale at the expense of the constitution of these classes within local contexts. On this account, national class fractions become subordinated to the more powerful and globally organised transnational class fractions. In his contribution to this volume, for example, William Robinson insists that ‘[t]he capturing of local states by agents of global capitalism resolves the institutional contradiction … between transnational capital and national states, that is, local state practices are increasingly harmonized with global capitalism’ (Robinson, this volume: 221). The approach adopted here, on the contrary, suggests that if we start from the premise that classes are constituted internationally through the process of exploitation and not exclusively through their capacity of global self-expression, the relationship between the local and the global becomes much more dynamic, thus allowing for instances where the bourgeoisie mediates its interests on a global scale through inter-state institutions, and in defence of very particular local privileges. From this perspective, many of the policies adopted by what Robinson calls ‘The new managers of the neo-liberal national states, from Clinton and Blair, to Cardoso and Mbeki’ could actually be seen as defending local, national class interests through the multilateral institutions of global class rule such as the IMF and the World Bank. The emphasis here, therefore, is upon the need for the capitalist class to guarantee its own reproduction through the exploitation of the working class – an objective it pursues both at the national and the international level, but which it need not necessarily resolve through its organisation as a global transnational class-for-itself as Robinson suggests.
Class as an object of globalisation
I have thus far concentrated on class analyses of globalisation that focus on the ruling class as the key agent in this process. The critical overview offered above argued that postimperialist and neo-Gramscian accounts of class and globalisation are flawed, first, because they obscure the primacy of social relations of production in the constitution of antagonistic classes, and, second, because they consequently reify the power of a putative international ruling class in designing a world after its own image.
I now turn to a set of writings on the post-war international organisation of production which again, without always invoking the concept, are essentially about globalisation. These analyses claim that the crisis of the long post-war boom during the 1970s ushered in a radical shift in the methods and sites of global capitalist exploitation and accumulation. In contrast to the perspectives analysed in the previous section, the class-based theories of globalisation presented on the one hand by Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye (on the new international division of labour), and, on the other, by authors inspired by the so-called ‘Regulation School’ such as Hoogvelt (on ‘flexible accumulation’), are explicitly concerned with the international dimensions of class-formation within the sphere of production. Moreover, they emphasise the effects of global restructuring upon exploited classes. It is in these two senses that I take these theories to represent an approach to globalisation that sees class as the object (albeit not always the passive one) of this process.
Perhaps the most influential analysis of the effects on labour of the post-1973 crisis is that of Fröbel et al. on the ‘new international division of labour’ (1980). Through a rich empirical investigation into the international relocation of German industrial capital to the so-called newly industrialising countries during the 1970s, Fröbel and his colleagues argued that the world economy was experiencing a qualitative shift in the mechanisms of capital valorisation and accumulation. Productive capital was being relocated from the core of the capitalist world economy to its periphery, thereby generating export-oriented capitalist development in several peripheral economies and fostering structural unemployment in the heartlands of the system. This global shift was predicated upon three interconnected preconditions: the availability of a world-wide ‘reserve army of labour’ – chiefly though not exclusively originating from Latin America, Asia and Africa; the development of technological innovations which introduced greater flexibility at all stages of the production process; and the consequent horizontal (geographical) and vertical (social) fragmentation of capital and labour.
The relevant conclusions of this study with regard to class and globalisation were somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, Fröbel et al. recognised that this relocation of capital was reproducing an industrial working class in the periphery which might eventually ally itself politically with the proletariat of the advanced capitalist states. On the other hand, the authors of the study insisted that the new international division of labour was intensifying the relations of dependent development between core and periphery in the world-capitalist economy. In the absence of a clear response within Fröbel et al.’s own book, it may be justified to turn to one of their contemporary followers who has in recent years reformulated the new international division of labour thesis in the context of globalisation. For A. Sivanandan ‘Capital is still dependent on exploiting workers for profit, only now the brunt of that exploitation has shifted to the underdeveloped countries of the Third World, and the increasing intensity of exploitation there more than compensates for its comparative loss at the centre’ (1990: 181).
Although Sivanandan’s statement is conceptually and empirically contestable,11 it does raise a central question as to the relationship between class and globalisation, namely: have the processes associated with globalisation fragmented classes vertically and horizontally in such a way as to render the categories of capital and labour redundant in the analysis of global capitalism? My own answer to this question is negative, although I shall endeavour to qualify it in the closing section of this chapter. But for our purposes it might be interesting to pause briefly on two perspectives that answer affirmatively.
The first of these is defended from the ambit of development studies by Ankie Hoogvelt. In her study on Globalisation and the Postcolonial World (1997), Hoogvelt argues that under post-Fordist conditions of ‘flexible accumulation’ capital-labour relations have altered beyond the recognition of any Marxist theory:
Under conditions of flexible production two things happen: capital fragments into a thousand splinters of production capacity blurring the distinction between ownership of working capital and labour, and the output of labour is paid at the point of delivery … Thus the casualisation of labour, through part-time employment, if-and-when contracts, through self-employment and piecemeal work and so on, are all social changes that are being brought into place almost everywhere in the world. […] The point is that there is an historical trend towards forms of production organisation in which capital no longer needs to pay for the reproduction of labour power.
(Hoogvelt 1997: 112)
In a similar vein, though from a different angle, Robert W. Cox argues that ‘Recent developments in the late twentieth century suggest … a movement toward the unification of capital on a world scale, while industrial workers and other subordinate classes have become fragmented and divided’ (1987: 358). Despite initially grounding his analysis of class on the sound basis of relations of production, Cox inexplicably shifts to a definition of class based on arbitrary technocratic and occupational categories. Thus, on his account, the ruling class becomes fragmented into ‘(1) Those who control big corporations operating on a world scale, (2) Those who control big nation-based enterprises and industrial groups, and (3) Locally based petty capitalists’ (1987: 358). The exploited classes are further divided into ‘a middle stratum of scientific, technical, and supervisory personnel’, ‘established workers’, ‘nonestablished workers’, ‘new industrial labor forces in the industrializing Third World countries’ and ‘peasants and marginals’ (1987: 368).
For all their differences, what these arguments amount to is the idea that globalisation as it was defined earlier in this chapter has fragmented capital and labour in such a way as to make them irrelevant in the analysis of contemporary society. The division of labour both within specific production chains and between different sites of production, so the argument runs, has made capital unaccountable to any law of expanded reproduction and labour far too splintered to combat its own exploitation in any significant form.
There are two counter-arguments to be made here which will hopefully feed into the claims made in the next and concluding section of this chapter. First, assuming for the moment that the empirical basis of Hoogvelt’s analysis of a ‘flexible regime of accumulation’ reflects the experience of the majority workers in the world economy, the fact remains that no amount of casualisation will do away with the fundamental antagonism between capital and labour. On the contrary, the kind of flexible and deregulated relations of exploitation that Hoogvelt holds to represent the end of the capital-labour relation, in fact reveal the clash of interests between direct producers and appropriators in the starkest light: the capitalist is here simply being allowed to revert to the extraction of absolute as opposed to relative surplus-value; but it is good surplus-value all the same!
Second, Cox’s descriptive taxonomy of social classes operating under global capitalism raises the issue once again as to the explanatory value of the Marxist understanding of class. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels remind us that ‘Capital is … not a personal, it is a social power’ (1967: 91). Though class certainly arises in the context of inter-personal relations inside and outside the workplace, these everyday experiences are in significant ways expressions of a wider set of social structures predicated upon a mode of production that divides society into one collectivity made up of individuals that can only offer to sell their labour-power as a means of subsistence, and another collectivity which, through its ownership or control of the means of production, lives off the surplus labour of others. In essence, these two groups are what Marx and Engels called the working class and the bourgeoisie, respectively. Social theorists have divided society in an infinite number of other ways, as do Cox and Hoogvelt; the point is whether such alternative gradations explain anything about the dynamics of contemporary capitalist society. My claim thus far has been that they don’t, primarily because they take contingent divisions among capitalists and workers as expressions of structural, and therefore necessary, relations of exploitation. Presented as descriptions of the complex forms taken by social relations of production across the world, such exercises in the subdivision and fracturation of capital and labour are empirically useful and relevant. Once such taxonomies are abstracted out and granted theoretical purchase, however, they explain very little about the nature of contemporary capitalism and the class antagonisms it engenders. A Marxist understanding of class, on the other hand, does explain the dynamics of contemporary capitalist society because it is able to identify the source of an irremovable condition for the existence of this mode of production: the generation of the very surplus-value that nourishes its own reproduction. The international expansion of capitalism and the current process of globalisation which it has spurred have certainly transformed the mechanisms of surplus-value extraction and capitalist accumulation, thereby conditioning the social structures and processes in most societies across the world. But such a global reproduction has not altered the fundamental exploitative relations of production that characterise capitalism. Indeed, in many parts of the world, precapitalist forms of exploitation coexist and are often articulated with global capitalism. In the last section of this chapter I shall offer some general reflections on class and globalisation which I hope address further this productive tension between capital’s abstract ‘laws of motion’ and its concrete historical manifestation in different social formations across the world.
Conclusions: class, globalisation and the persistence of non-capitalist relations
There can be little doubt that the forms of global capitalist reproduction have undergone significant changes since the end of the long post-war boom. Clearly, technological innovations in the accumulation and circulation of capital, the extended reach of institutions of ‘global governance’, the development of export-based economies in the once peripheral regions of world capitalism, and not least the absence of viable alternatives to capitalism since the collapse of communism have, among other factors, affected the global organisation of capitalism. As David Harvey has lucidly argued:
We need some way, therefore, to represent all the shifting and churning that has gone on since the first major post-war recession of 1973, which does not lose sight of the fact that the basic rules of the capitalist mode of production continue to operate as invariant shaping forces of historical-geographical development.
(Harvey 1990: 121)
This chapter has defended the view that it is through an analysis of class struggles within capitalism that we can explain the ongoing processes of globalisation. Thus, I have argued that it is the abstract (though, of course, no less real) confrontation between capital and labour that holds the key to an analysis of capitalism on a world scale. The difficulties for Marxists, however, emerge in the process of providing a concrete account of such class struggles. And it is here that I would revert to the claim flagged in the introduction to the effect that capitalism has historically reproduced itself in articulation with other non-capitalist modes of production. Far from ‘creating a world after its own image’ as Marx and Engels once predicted, the global expansion of capitalism has tested the adaptive mechanisms of capital so as to produce what Eric Wolf (1982: chap. 10) called a ‘differentiated’ mode of production. The implications of all this for the interface between class and globalisation are twofold.
First, analytically, it presents Marxists with the challenge of considering how capital grafts its own logic of exploitation upon pre-existing institutions and social structures such as sovereign political communities, households, ethnic, religious or caste hierarchies and, most notably, sexual differentiation. For an investigation into the actual historical formation of classes on a world scale reveals how class is experienced in the Thompsonian sense (i.e. both objectively and subjectively) in conjunction with other social hierarchies. At one important level, these hierarchies are all subsumed under the single logic of capitalist surplus value extraction: that defined by the social relation between direct producers and appropriators. Yet the way this determinant social relation is experienced on a quotidian basis is filtered through manifold historical and cultural legacies, many of which are international in nature. 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.
Such an intricate social crystallisation of class is by no means static. The dynamic nature of capitalism allows for a transformation of these hierarchies through the collective organisation of classes in ways which often reinforce the capitalist ideal of a free exchange between capital and labour. Thus, for example, it is only through the collective struggle of black and female workers against racial and sexual discrimination in the workplace that something closer to a pristine and unencumbered capitalist exploitation obtains today in most advanced capitalist countries. But in many other regions of the world, global capitalism is either unable to destroy the ‘natural economy’ or only too capable of accommodating non-capitalist forms of oppression and exploitation in ways that complicate the identification of classes along the capital-labour axis. Again, it is precisely these heterogeneous variations in class formation and reproduction that call for the distinction between the abstract definition of classes within the structure of a given mode of production and their concrete expression in contingent socio-historical settings.
The basic point emerging out of all these consideration is as follows: capitalism has historically articulated itself internationally in myriad ways, producing variegated expressions of the overarching antagonism between capital and labour. This antagonism has been mediated through the institutions of the sovereign state and through pre-capitalist hierarchies of sex, ethnicity, caste, colour and so forth. In as much as the processes of globalisation are a reflection of the class antagonisms arising out of such complex social hierarchies, they often reinforce, rather than undermine, these divisions. Contrary to most views of class and globalisation that highlight the radical break in modes of capitalist exploitation, I posit a continuity, indeed a persistence of the old, pre-capitalist modes of exploitation within global capitalism.
The second and final implication of viewing capitalism as a ‘differentiated’ or ‘articulated’ mode of production, even under conditions of globalisation, concerns the formulation of viable socialist alternatives. I start from the premise that socialist politics involves the self-organisation of exploited classes for the purposes of transcending capitalism and constructing viable, genuinely democratic socio-economic and political structures. I also assume that such a project must necessarily be international in scope and organisation, and therefore draw on the rich tradition of socialist internationalism. The foregoing discussion on class and globalisation has suggested that the Marxist notion of class, both in-itself and for-itsef, today pervades most social relations across the world. Yet it plainly does so in complex and contradictory ways that only a socialist movement conscious of the interaction between the universal and the particular expressions of class antagonism would be capable of translating into a real alternative to capitalism. What this means is that neither the views on class and globalisation that objectify exploited classes in such a way as to render them simple victims of history, nor those views that take as given the subjective power of transnational ruling classes, can offer comprehensive and feasible socialist alternatives to capitalism. Moreover, we would do well to avoid seizing on any and every single movement that contests the existing world order as representing a socialist alternative. Exploited classes do resist and organise against their perceived oppressors, but neither do they necessarily offer alternatives attractive to socialists (e.g. the various religious fundamentalist attacks on ‘globalisation’), nor do they necessarily represent a systematic confrontation with capitalism (e.g. the EZLN’s (Zapatista National Liberation Army’s) confused programme against ‘global neo-liberalism’). Such perspectives ‘from below’ often fail to theorise the intricate nature of capitalist power structures ‘from above’. On the other hand, socialist analyses of world politics that place all their emphasis on allegedly hegemonic institutions like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also miss the crucial, and often conflictive, link between these organisations and other seemingly subordinate entities such as states and classes.
A viable world-wide socialist alternative must therefore strive to bridge this gap between an exclusive focus on localised forms of resistance and views that reify global hegemonic orders. It must develop a class analysis of world politics premised on the complex and variegated reproduction of capitalism through the mediation of states and the attendant oppressive ideologies such as racism and sexism. Such an analysis would speak to the concerns of socialist organisations – trade unions, political parties, and other groups – that are daily combating the global articulation of capitalism. It would also hopefully seek to reformulate the basic tenets of socialist internationalism which as a theoretical principle and a political practice, for the better part of this century, grappled with the very concerns that globalisation theorists now seem to be so enchanted by.
Notes
1. I am indebted to Hannes Lacher, Shirin Rai, Mark Rupert, Hazel Smith and Benno Teschke for their extensive comments and penetrating criticisms of an earlier version of this chapter. I have ignored some of their insights at my own peril.
2. See the essays collected in Gill (1993). Individual works associated with this approach include Cox (1987); Gill (1990); Holman (1996); Overbeek (1996); Robinson (1996); Rupert (1995); van der Pijl (1998a, 1998b). For critical overviews of the neo-Gramscian approach see Burnham (1992) and Scherrer (1998). For the programmatic statements of ‘postimperialism’ see Becker et al. (1987).
3. This understanding of class and globalisation bears a strong resemblance to that expounded by Burnham (1994: 221–31).
4. In this chapter, the term ‘articulation’ is used in the sense developed by the so-called ‘articulation of modes of production’ approach. Representative texts include: Althusser and Balibar (1970); Rey (1973); and the essays in Wolpe (1980). For a comprehensive survey of this approach see Foster-Carter (1978).
5. Like most generalisations about Marx and Engels’s work, this statement requires some nuancing. For reasons of space, I cannot go into the vexed issue of the status of land-owners and ground-rent under capitalism.
6. In his correspondence with the Russian socialist Vera Zasulich, for example, Marx emphasises that the investigation of the capitalist system carried out in Capital was premised on the historical experience of Western Europe, thereby suggesting that a ‘late Marx’ may have come to re-evaluate the place of the peasantry in the project of socialist transformation (see Shanin 1983).
7. There is no space here to justify fully this contentious reading of the Thompson-Anderson dispute. In essence, however, my claim is that Anderson mistakenly ascribes to Thompson’s definition of class the need of a fully fledged, for-itself consciousness, whereas for Thompson, to ‘act, think and struggle in class ways’ can mean, as his study of eighteenth-century English ‘class struggle without class’ suggests, that collectivities often formulate their objective class position in a language and form different to the for-themselves working-class movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The real difference between Anderson and Thompson’s definition of class has been neatly summarised by Ellen Wood: ‘Where Thompson’s critics see structures as against processes, or structures that undergo processes, Thompson sees structured processes’ (1995: 79).
8. See the contributions by Halliday and Sutcliffe in this volume for the argument that, in describing very similar phenomena, the term ‘imperialism’ displays greater theoretical purchase than ‘globalisation’.
9. Some of the more recent neo-Gramscian work, for example by Gill (1993), Overbeek (1996) and others, does explicitly address globalisation.
10. [M]eaning that individual subsidiaries of an international business group may operate in accordance with the requirements of divergent and conflicting policies pursued by the governments of their respective host states […] Positing a mutuality of interest, the doctrine of domicile justifies transnational corporate expansion while it also legitimizes large-scale foreign investments in the eyes of the host country.
(Sklar 1987: 29)
11. The rate of exploitation is arguably higher in advanced capitalist economies than in the less developed ones, while it is at the very least a matter of debate whether most Third World countries have historically suffered from ‘underdevelopment’ as opposed to ‘maldevelopment’, or even the absence of a sustained capitalist development.
Bibliography
· Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1970) Reading Capital, London: New Left Books.
· Anderson, P (1983) Arguments within English Marxism, London: New Left Books.
· Becker, D. et al. (eds) (1987) Post-imperialism: International Capitalism and Development in the Late Twentieth Century, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
· Becker, D. and Sklar, R. (1987) ‘Why Postimperialism?’, in Becker et al. (eds), Postimperialism.
· Bottomore, T. (ed.) (1991) A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Oxford: Blackwell.
· Burnham, P. (1991) ‘Neo-Gramscian Hegemony and the International Order’, Capital & Class, 45, Autumn: 73–93.
· Burnham, P. (1994) ‘Open Marxism and Vulgar International Political Economy’, Review of International Political Economy, 1, Summer: 221–231.
· Cox, R. (1987) Power, Production and World Order, New York: Columbia University Press.
· Elster, J. (ed.) (1986) Karl Marx: A Reader, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
· Foster-Carter, A. (1978) ‘The Modes of Production Controversy’, New Left Review, 107: 47–77.
· Fröbel, F. et al. (1980) The New International Division of Labour, trans. P. Burgess , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
· Gill, S. (1990) American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
· Gill, S. (ed.) (1993) Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
· Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Blackwell.
· Holman, O. (1996) Integrating Southern Europe, London: Routledge.
· Hoogvelt, A. (1997) Globalisation and the Postcolonial World, London: Macmillan.
· Katznelson, A. and Zolberg, A. (eds) (1986) Working-Class Formation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
· Kaye, H. and McClelland, K. (1990) E.P Thompson: Critical Perspectives, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
· Labica, H. and Bensussan, G. (1982) Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
· Marx, K. (1977) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
· Marx, K. (n.d.) The Poverty of Philosophy, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
· Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1967) The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
· Overbeek, H. (1996) Neo-Liberalism and Global Hegemony: Concepts of Control in the Global Political Economy, London: Routledge.
· Rey, P.-P. (1973) Les alliances de classes, Paris: François Maspero.
· Robinson, W. (1996) Promoting Polyarchy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
· Rupert, M. (1995) Producing Hegemony, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
· Scherrer, C. (1998) ‘Neo-gramscianische Interpretationen internationler Beziehungen’, in U. Hirschfeld (ed.), Gramsci-Perspektiven, Hamburg: Argument.
· Shanin, T. (ed.) (1983) Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries’ of Capitalism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
· Sivanandan, A. (1990) Communities of Resistance, London: Verso.
· Sklar, R. (1987) ‘Postimperialism: A Class Analysis of Multinational Corporate Expansion’, in Becker et al. (eds), Postimperialism.
· Thompson, E.P. (1963) The Making of the English Working-Class, London: Victor Gollancz.
· Thompson, E.P. (1978a) The Poverty of Theory, London: Merlin Press.
· Thompson, E.P. (1978b) ‘Eighteenth-century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?’, Social History, 3, May: 133–165.
· van der Pijl, K. (1984) The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class, London: Verso.
· van der Pijl, K. (1998a) Transnational Classes and International Relations, London: Routledge.
· van der Pijl, K. (1998b) ‘Internationale Klassenverhältnise’, in M. Bader et al. (eds), Die Viederent-deckung der Klassen, Hamburg: Argument.
· Wolf, E. (1982) Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
· Wolpe, H. (ed.) (1980) The Articulation of Modes of Production, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
· Wood, E.M. (1986) The Retreat From Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism, London: Verso.
· Wood, E.M. (1995) Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.