Historical Materialism and Globalisation

Essays on Continuity and Change

Mark Rupert, Hazel Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415263702
• eBook ISBN: 9781134900367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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

Part I Globalization

The relevance of historical materialist approaches

DOI: 10.4324/9781315541402-2

1 Global capital, national states*

Ellen Meiksins Wood

DOI: 10.4324/9781315541402-3

Capitalist economies are all ‘capitalist’, despite their many national diversities, because they share certain common principles or ‘laws of motion’, a certain common ‘logic of process’. In one way or another, they are all subject to the capitalist imperatives of competition, capital accumulation and profit-maximization. All national capitalist economies also exist only in relation to others, and capitalism has from the beginning been tendentially ‘global’. Capitalist principles and processes are now more universal than ever before, and capitalist economies are, as we are constantly reminded, more interconnected and global than ever.

Yet there is no ‘global economy’ abstracted from the particular local, national, and regional economies that constitute it, or from the relations among them, whether among major capitalist powers or between imperialist powers and subaltern states. The general laws of capitalism and global economic forces manifest themselves in specific national and regional forms, and the global dynamics of capitalism continue to be driven by forces within, and relations among, national economies and nation-states. The emergence of capitalism was closely tied to the evolution of the modern nation-state, and that close link has shaped the development and expansion of capitalism ever since. The global economy as we know it today is still constituted by national entities.

My intention here is to explore the contradiction between the global sweep of capitalism and the persistence of national entities by tracing, in very broad strokes, some of the connections between capitalism and the nation-state from the beginning until now. The object of this exercise is not specifically to explicate the contribution that historical materialism can make to an understanding of ‘globalization’, but it should become clear why I believe that the interconnections between the modern state system and the development of global capitalism can be more fruitfully explored from the perspective of historical materialism than from more conventional theoretical vantage points.

For instance, the relations and the contradictions between the global and the national can be clarified by understanding the separation of ‘economic’ and ‘political’ spheres and the relations between them. But that separation is specific to capitalism. The ‘economy’, conceived as a distinct and separate sphere, is a notion that has meaning only under capitalism, where two fundamental and related conditions are met: first, all economic actors are market dependent – that is, dependent on the market for the conditions of their self-reproduction, and hence subject to the specifically ‘economic’ imperatives of competition and accumulation; and second, appropriation takes place not by direct coercive means, through the exercise of political or military power in the hands of the appropriators themselves (as, for example, in feudalism), but by purely economic means, the ‘free’ exchange between capital and labour in which direct producers are compelled by their propertylessness to exchange their labour-power for a wage. The economy as a separate ‘sphere’, in other words, exists only when the market regulates social reproduction and when exploitation is disaggregated into two separate ‘moments’, apportioned between two distinct agencies: the moment of appropriation by capital itself and the moment of enforcement by a separate state power.

The ‘historical’ in historical materialism allows us to explore the conditions and implications of this historically specific separation. Its ‘materialism’ focuses our attention not on some transhistorical economic sphere, but on historically specific material conditions of social reproduction, which not only affect all social spheres but constitute them as distinct spheres in the first place. From that perspective, we can explore a development like globalization not as some ahistorical natural process but as a truly historical one.

Joined at birth?

It is not at all uncommon to insist on the connections between the emergence of capitalism and the rise of the nation-state, or even to define capitalism as a system of nation-states. Typically, the connections are seen through the prism of one or another theory of ‘modernity’ or ‘rationalization’, according to which certain ‘modern’ or ‘rational’ economic, political, and cultural forms have developed more or less in tandem, combining a process of urbanization and commercialization with the formation of a ‘rational’ state. One particularly ingenious account suggests that the emergence of the absolutist state in early modern Europe freed the ‘bourgeois’ commercial economy from the dead hand of feudalism and landlordly power, separating political and economic spheres by concentrating sovereignty in a centralized state. Another influential explanation suggests that the European nation-state, in sharp contrast, say, to Asian empires, laid the foundations for capitalism because the organization of Europe into multiple polities, instead of in one over-arching empire, permitted the development of a trade-based division of labour, without the burden of massive appropriation by an imperial state which syphoned off surpluses that could otherwise have been invested.¹

Let me propose a somewhat different account of the relation between the rise of capitalism and the nation-state. This account will be based on certain presuppositions which can only be stated here baldly, without elaboration, but which have been discussed at greater length elsewhere.² The main presuppositions are these: that capitalism was not simply the natural outcome of certain transhistorical processes like ‘rationalization’, technological progress, urbanization, or the expansion of trade; that its emergence required more than the removal of obstacles to increased trade and growing markets or to the exercise of ‘bourgeois’ rationality; that while certain European, or Western European, conditions, not least the insertion of Europe in a larger and non-European network of international trade, were necessary to its emergence, those same conditions produced diverse effects in various European, and even Western European, cases; and that the necessary conditions for the ‘spontaneous’ or indigenous and self-sustaining development of a capitalist system, with mutually reinforcing agricultural and industrial sectors, existed only in England.³

How, then, do these presuppositions apply to the relation between the rise of capitalism and the nation-state? We can certainly accept that capitalism developed in the distinctive context of the early modern European state, which was not itself created by capitalism – or, more precisely, that capitalism developed in tandem with the process of state formation. But, while there were certain common preconditions, not all European, or even Western European, nation-states developed in the same way. The French absolutist state, for instance, had an economic logic quite distinct from capitalist forms of exploitation or capitalist laws of motion. Notwithstanding France’s ‘bourgeois’ revolution, we cannot take for granted its ‘spontaneous’ evolution into capitalism, in the absence of external pressures from an already existing English capitalism.⁴

The development of capitalism and the nation-state were intertwined in England in a very particular way. But to insist on the particularity of this English relationship is not at all to deny the close connection between capitalism and the nation-state in general. On the contrary, the particular nature of the English relationship only serves to emphasize that close connection. England was not, of course, alone in producing a sovereign territorial state, but it was, in the first instance, alone in producing a capitalist system. At the same time, the process that gave rise to English capitalism was accompanied by the development of a more clearly defined territorial sovereignty than existed elsewhere in Europe. The social transformations that brought about capitalism were the same ones that brought the nation-state to maturity.

As Marx pointed out long ago, precapitalist modes of production were characterized by a unity of economic and political power, specifically in the sense that exploitation was carried out by ‘extra-economic’ means – that is, by means of political, judicial, and/or military power, or what has been called ‘politically constituted property’.⁵ This unity – which cannot be effectively accommodated by a conceptual framework that takes as given the separation of the economic and the political, or their existence as distinct spheres – existed in a very wide variety of forms. For instance, many ancient empires employed state power to collect tribute from subject peoples, including their own peasants, and imperial office was the principal means of acquiring great wealth.

What was notable about precapitalist forms in Europe was the emergence of a fragmented state power, the ‘parcellized sovereignty’ of Western feudalism, which created a distinctive kind of extra-economic power, the power of feudal lordship. The fragmented military, political, and judicial powers of the state became the means by which individual lords extracted surpluses from peasants. At the same time, political parcellization was matched by economic fragmentation. Internal trade, for example, even when it extended beyond very local peasant markets, was less like modern capitalist forms of trade in an integrated competitive market than like traditional forms of international commerce, a series of separate local markets joined together by a carrying trade conducted by merchants ‘buying cheap’ in one market and ‘selling dear’ in another, or an ‘infinite succession of arbitrage operations between separate, distinct, and discrete markets’.⁶

The feudal ruling class was eventually compelled to consolidate its fragmented political power in the face of peasant resistance and the plainly untenable disorder of aristocratic conflict. Parcellized sovereignty gave way to more centralized monarchies in some parts of Europe. But if feudalism was a precondition of capitalism, and if capitalism, with its separation of political and economic spheres, emerged in conjunction with a process of feudal centralization, the process of state formation took different forms in different places, and capitalism was only one of several outcomes of the transition from feudalism.

One effect was absolutism, which, instead of producing a capitalist economy, reproduced the unity of political and economic power at the level of the central state, while never completely overcoming the parcellization of feudalism. The most notable example is the absolutist state in France, regarded by many as the prototype of the emerging ‘modern’ nation-state. Formed in a process of state centralization that elevated one among many feudal powers to a position of monarchical dominance, French absolutism remained in many ways rooted in its feudal past.⁷

On the one hand, the bureaucracy that is supposed to be the mark of the French state’s modernity represented a structure of offices used by office-holders as a kind of private property, a means of appropriating peasant-produced surpluses, what has been called a kind of centralized feudal rent, in the form of taxation. This was a mode of appropriation very different, in its means and in its rules for reproduction, from capitalist exploitation – depending, for example, on direct coercion to squeeze more surpluses out of the direct producers, instead of on intensifying exploitation by enhancing labour productivity.

On the other hand, the absolutist state never completely displaced other forms of politically constituted property. It always lived side-by-side, and in tension, with other, more fragmented forms, the remnants of feudal parcellized sovereignty. Aristocrats, the church, and municipalities clung to their old autonomous powers, military, political, or judicial. Even when these powers were fatally weakened by state centralization and hence no longer represented a fragment of parcellized sovereignty, they often continued to serve as a fiercely protected (occasionally revived or even invented) source of income for their possessors. At the same time, the central state, competing for the same peasant-produced surpluses, typically co-opted many potential competitors by giving them state office, exchanging one kind of politically constituted property for another. But the remnants of aristocratic privilege and municipal jurisdiction, together with the tensions among various forms of politically constituted property, remained to the end just as much a part of French absolutism as was the centralizing monarchy.

Elsewhere in Europe, the fragmentation of property and polity were even more marked, and everywhere, these fragmented forms of politically constituted property, like the centralized version, represented a mode of appropriation antithetical to capitalism. They were inimical to capitalism in yet another sense too: they fragmented not only the state but the economy. Instead of a national market, there were separate local and municipal markets (not to mention internal trade barriers) characterized not by capitalist competition but by the old forms of trade, not the appropriation of surplus value created in production but commercial profit-taking in the sphere of circulation. To put it another way, the parcellization of sovereignty and the parcellization of markets were two sides of the same coin, rooted in the same property relations.

The fragmentation of both economy and polity was overcome first and most completely in England. From the outset – certainly from the Norman Conquest – the English state (the emphasis here is on England, not on other parts of what would become the ‘United Kingdom’) was more unified than others in Europe, without the same parcellized sovereignty. For instance, when France still had its regional ‘estates’, England had a unitary national parliament, and when France (even up until the Revolution) had some 360 local law codes, England had a more nationally unified legal system, especially its ‘common law’ adjudicated by royal courts, which had become the preferred and dominant legal system very early in the development of the English state. But this unity was not simply a matter of political or legal unification. Its corollary was a degree of economic unification unlike any other in history, already in the seventeenth century constituting something like a national economy, an integrated and increasingly competitive national market centred on London.

Both political and economic unity can be traced to the same source. The centralization of the state in England was not based on a feudal unity of economic and political power. The state did not represent a private resource for office-holders in the way or on the scale that it did in France, nor did t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Editors’ introduction
• Part I Globalization: the relevance of historical materialist approaches
• Part II Historical materialism as a theory of globalization
• Part III Historical materialism and the politics of globalization
• Index