Global Capitalism and Transnational Class Formation

Jason Struna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367739317
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317615071
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The global capitalism perspective is a unique research program focused on understanding relatively recent developments in worldwide social, economic, and political practices related to globalization. At its core, it seeks to contextualize the rearticulation of nation-states and broad geographic regions into highly interdependent networks of production and distribution, and in so doing explain consequent changes in social relations within and between countries in the contemporary era. The present volume contributes to this effort by focusing on social class formation across borders via the processes and actors that make globalized capitalism possible.

The essays presented here offer a wide range of emphases in terms of the particular lenses and evidence they use. They cover such topics as the emergence of a transnational capitalist class-based fascist regime responding to the structural crises of global capitalism as well as the links between global class formation and the US racial project as it relates to electoral politics and demographic changes in the US South.

This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

INTRODUCTION

Global Capitalism and Transnational Class Formation

J. STRUNA

University of California Riverside, CA, USA

Overview of the Global Capitalism Perspective

The global capitalism perspective, as it has been called by critics and contributors alike (Arrighi, 2001; Carroll and Sapinski, 2010; Chase-Dunn et al., 2005; Dicken, 2007; Embong, 2000; Harris, 2006, 2009; Moore, 2001; Robinson, 2001, 2004; Silver, 2003; Sklair, 2001, 2010; Sprague, 2009), is an emergent research program focused on theorizing and analyzing capitalist practices in the era of transnational corporations as well as the attendant social structures that make globalized capitalism possible.

While it has tended to focus on the ‘commanding heights’ (Robinson, 1996) of global social structures insofar as researchers in the field assess the formation of the transnational capitalist class (Carroll, 2010; Robinson, 2004, 2012; Sklair, 2001), a transnational state apparatus (Robinson, 2004; Robinson and Harris, 2000), elite policy networks and corporate board interlocks (Carroll and Carson, 2003; Staples, 2006), the global culture-ideology of consumerism (Sklair, 2001; Sklair and Struna, 2013, this issue), and statist globalization (Harris, 2009) the perspective is also moving in novel directions in the assessment of globalization and ‘transnational class formation from below’ (cf., Carroll, 2013; Robinson, 2006; Sklair, 2010; Struna, 2009). As the following contributions suggest, global capitalism researchers are exploring specific modalities of ideological diffusion (Sklair and Struna, 2013, this issue), patterns of governance, exploitation, and response to crisis (Patterson, 2013, this issue; Robinson, 2013, this issue), concentrations of wealth (Peetz et al., 2013, this issue) and specific policy networks attempting to make subaltern resistance actionable in the contemporary period (Carroll, 2013, this issue).

Although there is diversity of opinion within the perspective on issues ranging from the sources of class formation—from the stricter materialist perspective advanced by Robinson (2004) locating the core of the labor–capital relation in the production process proper, to the more flexible, although no less critical position on dominant class formation based on elite membership networks and communities advanced by Sklair (2001)—to debates about the precise delineation of particular epochs of capitalist history, to name a few (e.g. see Harris’s contribution to this volume relative to Robinson’s (2004) periodization), there exists enough affinity among those who contribute to the perspective to call it a distinct research program.

For example, researchers in the perspective share a number of theoretical influences that range in some combination from works deriving from Gramscian political economy and the Italian school (Cox, 1994; Gill, 1993; Gill and Law, 1989; Gramsci, 2005 [1929–1935]; Poulantzas, 1975), to early work on economic globalization and transnational corporations (Bornschier and Chase-Dunn, 1985; Dunning, 1973; Hymer, 1976; Palloix, 1977), to world-systems or affiliated theories (Amin, 1978; Braudel, 1979; Chase-Dunn and Rubinson, 1977; Wallerstein, 1979). And, they tend to focus on transnational corporations both as the primary institutional actors responsible for the realization of transnational capitalist class interests, and as the impetus for policy changes worldwide in the contemporary (post-1970s) era. In so doing, the global capitalism school diverges on the mean from the antecedent perspectives by assessing particular political, ideological, and economic transformations associated with transnational corporations—as opposed to general tendencies of integration characterized by world-system formation throughout capitalist history, or the continued assessment of nation-state-based patterns of accumulation characterized by other perspectives on international political economy.

To be clear, the common ground shared by members of the global capitalism school includes first, the premise that a transnational capitalist class linked to transnational corporations is dominant or ascendant economically, socially, and politically within most nation-states in the Global North and the Global South. Second, that the transnational capitalist class has consequently transformed or is transforming relations among elite groups by advancing a transnational orientation toward the accumulation of wealth and the execution of power at multiple institutional and political levels including states, transnational economic and political forums, local governments, financial and productive transnational corporations, media and cultural outlets, and policy/educational foundations. Third, that as a result of these transformations in elite attitudes and practices toward transnational structures of accumulation, subordinate social formations in local and global contexts are being articulated into global civil society in novel, complicated, and contested ways that transcend the zonal boundaries of the core–periphery hierarchy identified in the world-systems literature. And, finally, in keeping with the Marxian notion that good social science should reflect conditions on the ground ‘as if in a mirror’, global capitalism school researchers assert that social scientists need to move away from ‘nation-state-centric thinking’ (Robinson, 2001) toward a perspective that is based on the reality of transnational processes that are beginning to overdetermine life at macro-, meso-, and, micro-social levels globally and locally.

The Merits of a Special Issue

In light of the continued unfolding of the current crisis of accumulation, worldwide popular resistance in various forms to the transnational capitalist hegemonic project, and frequent environmental shocks and dislocations, the insights offered by global capitalism theorists deserve careful consideration. Insofar as the central focus of the perspective described above is germane to understanding the potential outcomes and nuances of transnational capitalist practices and policies in the near future—including the potentials for continuation, collapse, or transcendence of transnational capitalist class hegemony—the following essays warrant the present special issue of Globalizations.

The Prague conference on ‘Global Capitalism and Transnational Class Formation’, 16–18 September 2011—whence the manuscripts for the present special issue derive—was cosponsored by the Centre of Global Studies (Prague), the Global Studies Association of North America, and the International Sociological Association Research Committee RC02 (Economy and Society). A tangible result of 15 years of research and debate, the gathering formally announced the global capitalism perspective as a unique research area with a current network of approximately 200 scholars, and culminated in the formation of the Network for Critical Studies of Global Capitalism (Network for Critical Studies of Global Capitalism, 2013; Sklair and Timms, 2012). The conference’s focus on the emergent paradigm drew scholars from more than 20 countries worldwide.¹

Given the wide interest in global capitalism school theory and research, we hope the present issue inspires critical reflection from both the perspective’s sympathizers and critics. Whether one regards transnational class formation as merely ‘more of the same’ logic of capitalist development beginning prior to the emergence of the early modern world-system (Hall and Chase-Dunn, 2006; Wallerstein, 2000) or one regards the introduction of information technology and the shipping container to global circuits of production and accumulation as the material basis for novel social relations (Dicken, 2007; Robinson, 2004), the essays below are provocative examples of global capitalism perspective scholarship.

Contributors’ Perspectives and Innovations²

William I. Robinson’s impassioned and polemical exposition, ‘Global Capitalism and its Anti-“Human Face”: Organic Intellectuals and Interpretations of the Crisis’ continues the global capitalism school tradition of assessing ‘the ongoing and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, characterized by novel articulations of transnational social power’, and asserts that the outcomes of the current economic and social crisis associated with transnational capital will vary significantly from the ‘system-wide crisis’ of previous periods. After reviewing attributes that distinguish both the epoch in question and thereby the perspective itself, Robinson highlights those features that substantially differentiate the current moment of crisis from those of the 1930s and 1970s: ‘the ecological limits of [systemic] reproduction’, the ‘magnitude of the means of violence and social control…, limits to extensive [and] intensive expansion’ of capitalism, the phenomenon of ‘the rise of a vast surplus population’ worldwide, and finally the contradictions created by transnationalization of productive and financial architecture and a ‘nation-state based system of political authority’. Robinson further links these limits and pressures to ‘militarized accumulation, frenzied worldwide financial speculation, and the raiding and sacking of public budgets’. He then warns, in Polanyian fashion, of the potentials for a rise in ‘a twenty-first century fascism’ to overcome the manifold contradictions of the global capitalist system.

Not content with merely ‘comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole’ (Marx and Engels, 1959 [1848], p. 17), Robinson admonishes us to remember our urgent responsibility as scholars to couple careful empirical analysis with practical and concrete transformative action.

Rubin Patterson significantly contributes to the global capitalism perspective in his essay, ‘Transnational Capitalist Class: What’s Race Got to Do With It? Everything!’ by synthesizing arguments from both transnational capitalist class analysis, and critical race theory in order to contextualize the role of race in transforming ‘the powers of the state to help shift from national obligations to labor to global obligations to capital’. Through his novel combination of race and class perspectives, Patterson assesses the effects of ‘the rapidly changing demographic landscape and its potential impact on the [transnational capitalist class]’. Specifically, he uncovers the links between electoral politics in the US South and the transnational capitalist class’s use of race ‘in getting a sufficient number of officeholders in power to advance its agenda’. Perhaps most importantly, Patterson reminds us that ‘Progressive analysts who seek to understand how the capitalist class has morphed in the new era of a new globalized economy tend not to traffic in ideas or concerns with race.’

We proceed at our own peril if we fail to account for the analytical disjuncture between race and class scholarship—transnational or otherwise—and continue to neglect the connections between capitalist globalization and the use of race Patterson reveals.

Among the important recent developments within the global capitalism perspective is the shift in attention empirically (the attention has always been present theoretically) toward elements of popular and subordinate classes who are beginning to coalesce around a global counter-hegemonic project. Continuing the theme of network analysis and class composition, William Carroll focuses on ‘an emergent component of global civil society: Transnational alternative policy groups (TAPGs)’ (emphasis original). In his essay, ‘Networks of Cognitive Praxis: Transnational Class Formation from Below?’ Carroll analyzes organizations that have served as ‘collective intellectuals’ in ‘facilitating the construction of a counter-hegemonic bloc that transects national borders and poses democratic alternatives to neoliberal globalization’. The article offers analysis of some of the institutional actors emerging on the popular left that ‘exert political and cultural influence’, and focuses on ‘some of the challenges [counter-hegemonic forces] face … on the contested terrain of global civil society’. Again, moving from the commanding heights to the analysis of popular agentic forces represents an important tendency in the global capitalism school, and will further the explanatory reach of the perspective.

Carroll’s conclusion is crucial: there exists a ‘nascent historical bloc in which TAPGs figure importantly, a network of counterpublics’, which I would argue is potentially poised to push the pendu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Introduction: Global Capitalism and Transnational Class Formation
• 2. Global Capitalism and its Anti-‘Human Face’: Organic Intellectuals and Interpretations of the Crisis
• 3. Transnational Capitalist Class: What’s Race Got to Do With It? Everything!
• 4. Networks of Cognitive Praxis: Transnational Class Formation from Below?
• 5. The New Structuring of Corporate Ownership
• 6. Translateral Politics, Class Conflict, and the State
• 7. The Icon Project: The Transnational Capitalist Class in Action
• Index