Sam Gindin - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Sam Gindin
Pluto Press eBooks, Mar 20, 2006
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Mar 4, 2021
Abstract This article offers a critique of the attempt by Rosenberg and Boyle to use the theory o... more Abstract This article offers a critique of the attempt by Rosenberg and Boyle to use the theory of uneven and combined development not only to explain the Brexit referendum vote and Trump’s presidential victory in 2016, but also to reinforce their case for recognizing ‘the causality of the international’ in the field of International Political Economy. The critique advanced here deploys a theorization of the internationalization of capitalist states under the aegis of an informal American empire, and points to the salience of state institutional capacities as well as changes in the balance of class forces inside China, the US and UK, to demonstrate that the argument forwarded by Rosenberg and Boyle is diminished by giving insufficient causal weight to class and state forces in the very constitution of the international in the era of global capitalism.
IPPR progressive review, Jun 1, 2018
Monthly Review Press eBooks, Dec 29, 2017
The delegitimation of neoliberalism has restored some credibility to the radical socialist case f... more The delegitimation of neoliberalism has restored some credibility to the radical socialist case for transcending capitalism as necessary to realize the collective, democratic, egalitarian and ecological aspirations of humanity. It spawned a growing sense that capitalism could no longer continue to be bracketed when protesting the multiple oppressions and ecological threats of our time. And as austerity took top billing over free trade, the spirit of antineoliberal protest also shifted. Whereas capitalist globalization had defined the primary focus of oppositional forces in the first decade of the new millennium, the second decade opened with Occupy and the Indignados dramatically highlighting capitalism’s gross class inequalities. Yet with this, the insurrectionary flavour of protest without revolutionary effect quickly revealed the limits of forever standing outside the state. A marked turn on the left from protest to politics has come to define the new conjuncture, as opposition to capitalist globalization shifted from the streets to the state theatres of neoliberal practice. This is in good part what the election of Syriza in Greece and the sudden emergence of Podemos in Spain signified. Corbyn’s election as leader of the British Labour Party attracted hundreds of thousands of new members with the promise to sustain activism rather than undermine it. This transition from protest to politics has been remarkably class oriented in terms of addressing inequality in income and wealth distribution, as well as in economic and political power relations. All this compels a fundamental rethink of the relationship between class, party and state transformation. If Bolshevik revolutionary discourse seems archaic a hundred years after 1917, it is not just because the legacy of its historic demonstration that revolution was possible has faded. It is also because Gramsci’s reframing, so soon after 1917, of the key issues of revolutionary strategy – especially regarding the impossibility of an insurrectionary path to power in states deeply embedded in capitalist societies – rings ever more true. What this means for socialists, however, as we face up to a long war of position in the twenty-first century, is not only the recognition of the limitations of twentieth-century Leninism. It above all requires discovering how to avoid the social democratization even of those committed to transcending capitalism. This is the central challenge for socialists today.
New Directions in Uneven and Combined Development, 2021
Abstract This article offers a critique of the attempt by Rosenberg and Boyle to use the theory o... more Abstract This article offers a critique of the attempt by Rosenberg and Boyle to use the theory of uneven and combined development not only to explain the Brexit referendum vote and Trump’s presidential victory in 2016, but also to reinforce their case for recognizing ‘the causality of the international’ in the field of International Political Economy. The critique advanced here deploys a theorization of the internationalization of capitalist states under the aegis of an informal American empire, and points to the salience of state institutional capacities as well as changes in the balance of class forces inside China, the US and UK, to demonstrate that the argument forwarded by Rosenberg and Boyle is diminished by giving insufficient causal weight to class and state forces in the very constitution of the international in the era of global capitalism.
IPPR Progressive Review, 2018
Will the US sustain its imperial role in the wake of the fourth great crisis of capitalism?
Actuel Marx, 2016
This paper addresses the alleged contradiction between the international space of accumulation an... more This paper addresses the alleged contradiction between the international space of accumulation and the national space of states. In particular, it challenges the argument that the internationalization of production directly establishes a transnational capitalist class (TCC) as a coherent and self-conscious social force engaged in the formation of a putative transnational state (TNS). This contention rests on a set of mechanistic understandings of class formation and the role of the capitalist state. Against this, the emphasis here is on the ‘internationalization of the state’ whereby nation states have, in an uneven and asymmetric way, come to take responsibility for promoting, underwriting and superintending a globalizing capitalism, both abroad and within their own domains. The political significance of this distinction is that the attempt to match the advanced internationalization of capital with a parallel internationalization of working class solidarity leads to a misguided internationalism. It mistakenly assumes that the weaknesses of working classes at a national level can be skipped over at an international level, and fails to properly grasp the continuing centrality, even under globalization, of the national-social formation.
Studies in Political Economy, 2013
American Empire and the Political Economy of Global Finance, 2009
Socialist Register, 2005
"?Recuerdan la cancion “Somos el Mundo”? En cuestiones de finanzas y politica, sino tambien ... more "?Recuerdan la cancion “Somos el Mundo”? En cuestiones de finanzas y politica, sino tambien culturales, estamos convirtiendonos en el mundo, y buena parte del mundo quiere convertirse en nosotros." (Richard Grasso, presidente del Mercado de Valores de Nueva York, 1997). La exultacion de Richard Grasso expresaba la arrogancia que ha caracterizado a las ambiciones globales de los financistas estadounidenses durante mas de un siglo. Sin embargo, el ascenso real de las finanzas norteamericanas a la posicion de dominio del mundo disto de ser suave o inevitable. El objetivo de “construir la capital del mundo para todos los tiempos por venir” en Nueva York, articulado ya a fines del siglo XIX, parecia a punto de consumarse hacia el fin de la Primera Guerra Mundial2 Sin embargo, apenas una decada despues, el derrumbe de Wall Street provoco la Gran Depresion y el colapso del orden financiero internacional. Y mientras Nueva York ocupaba su lugar como el principal centro financiero mundial al finalizar la Segunda Guerra Mundial, esto no parecio demasiado importante toda vez que el nuevo orden de Bretton Woods supuestamente habia marginado las finanzas con relacion a a la produccion y el comercio. Tal como suele narrarse en nuestros dias la historia del capitalismo del siglo XX, solo la “revolucion” neoliberal de los ‘80 y los ‘90 desato finalmente las fuerzas que hicieron de Wall Street el emplazamiento central de la economia mundial.
Varieties of Capitalism, Varieties of Approaches, 2005
For some two decades now, progressive American, British and Canadian intellectuals, determined to... more For some two decades now, progressive American, British and Canadian intellectuals, determined to resist neoliberalism’s ‘there-is-no-alternative’ mantra, have looked to continental Europe for an alternative model. One virtue of this academic and political project — which within the field of comparative political economy has now come to be known as the ‘varieties of capitalism’ or VoC approach — has been that it challenged the notion that capitalist globalization inevitably needed to take the form it has, apparently entailing, as so many of its proponents imagined, the growing impotence of nation states and the increasing homogenization of social formations. The insistence on variety among states has meant trying to refocus attention on the continuing salience of institutional arrangements and social relations specific to particular social formations and their histories, the very dimensions largely ignored in the equations of neoclassical economics and the policy prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Above all, this approach has suggested that whether and how societies adapt themselves to global competition remains an open and important question.
Historical Materialism, 2015
The first three sections of this lecture address the need for better historical-materialist theor... more The first three sections of this lecture address the need for better historical-materialist theorisations of capitalist competition, capitalist classes and capitalist states, and in particular the institutional dimensions of these – which is fundamental for understanding why and how capitalism has survived into the twenty-first century. The fourth section addresses historical materialism’s under-theorisation of the institutional dimensions of working-class formation, and how this figures in explaining why, despite the expectations of the founders of historical materialism, the working classes have not, at least yet, become capitalism’s gravediggers. While recognising that a better historical materialism along these lines will not necessarily provide us with a gps route to a socialist world beyond capitalism, it does suggest a number of guidelines for socialist strategy, with which the lecture concludes. This includes the need for building new institutions capable of defining, mobili...
International Critical Thought, 2013
Although the current crisis has amply demonstrated the many challenges and contradictions the Ame... more Although the current crisis has amply demonstrated the many challenges and contradictions the American state faces, it has also demonstrated that it nevertheless remains critical to the system's survival. Whereas it was still possible in the 1960s and 1970s to represent the capitalist relationship between the global north and south in terms of “the development of underdevelopment,” by the new millennium there was clearly a very remarkable, if still highly uneven, process of capitalist development taking place in the global south. Nowhere was this clearer than with the integration of China into global capitalism. At the same time, the severity and duration of the latest crisis in a global capitalist economy that the American state had been so central to constructing has, unsurprisingly, led to a resurgence of pronouncements that US hegemony was coming to an end. China's entry into the circuits of the international economy, many commentators now predicted, marked a fundamental “re-orientation” of the global capitalist order. However, far from displacing the American empire, China rather seems to be duplicating Japan's supplemental role in terms of providing the steady inflow of funds needed to sustain the US's primary place in global capitalism. Were this to change, it would require deeper and much more liberalized financial markets within China, which would entail dismantling the capital controls that are key pillars of Communist Party rule. Furthermore, a major reorientation of Chinese patterns of investment and production away from exports towards domestic consumption would have incalculable implications for the social relations that have sustained China's rapid growth and global integration. In this regard, though the outcome of the working class struggles now underway in China cannot be known, this cannot but impinge on, and possibly even be affected by, the direction working classes elsewhere take out of the current crisis.
International Critical Thought, 2013
Following their work in the 1990s demystifying theories of globalization which suggested states w... more Following their work in the 1990s demystifying theories of globalization which suggested states were no longer as important as in the past, and instead emphasizing the continued centrality of state power to the workings of capitalism, Panitch and Gindin embarked on a long term research project to understand the role of American Empire in global capitalism. Their book, released in fall 2012 with Verso and titled The Making of Global Capitalism, is the culmination of a decade of work on the topic. In it, they uncover the role of the American state as manager of both US and global capitalism, examining the contradictions this dual role creates. Additionally, their work attempts to overcome the false dichotomy between “states” and “markets,” and attempts to explain the financial underpinnings of American power. Now, five years into to the first truly global capitalist crisis in world history, triggered by a crisis in the American financial system that spread globally through an uneven process, their work has become more relevant than ever. Additionally, with the rise of East Asia, particularly China, as a new center of world accumulation, it appears to some that the era of American hegemony is over, suggesting that China may soon be the new ruler of global capitalism in an increasingly multi-polar world. In contrast with these perspectives, Panitch and Gindin continue to insist on the American state as a unique imperial state with a structural role in the global political economy not shared by any other state. In the context of their book, and contemporary worldhistorical conditions, in this interview Panitch and Gindin share their views on the continued centrality of American power to the workings of global capitalism.
Critical Sociology, 2013
This article traces the central role of the American state, led by the Treasury, not only in the ... more This article traces the central role of the American state, led by the Treasury, not only in the spread and deepening of global finance, but also in containing the financial crises to which this gave rise. The first part examines this role in relation to the financial crises abroad in the 1990s. The second part focuses on the Treasury’s opting for failure containment over failure prevention amidst the financialization it promoted through the 1990s. The third part shows how this laid the basis for the interpenetration of US and foreign financial markets in the mortgage credit boom in the years leading up to the 2007 financial crisis.
Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2013
Handbook of the International Political Economy of Production
Pluto Press eBooks, Mar 20, 2006
Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Mar 4, 2021
Abstract This article offers a critique of the attempt by Rosenberg and Boyle to use the theory o... more Abstract This article offers a critique of the attempt by Rosenberg and Boyle to use the theory of uneven and combined development not only to explain the Brexit referendum vote and Trump’s presidential victory in 2016, but also to reinforce their case for recognizing ‘the causality of the international’ in the field of International Political Economy. The critique advanced here deploys a theorization of the internationalization of capitalist states under the aegis of an informal American empire, and points to the salience of state institutional capacities as well as changes in the balance of class forces inside China, the US and UK, to demonstrate that the argument forwarded by Rosenberg and Boyle is diminished by giving insufficient causal weight to class and state forces in the very constitution of the international in the era of global capitalism.
IPPR progressive review, Jun 1, 2018
Monthly Review Press eBooks, Dec 29, 2017
The delegitimation of neoliberalism has restored some credibility to the radical socialist case f... more The delegitimation of neoliberalism has restored some credibility to the radical socialist case for transcending capitalism as necessary to realize the collective, democratic, egalitarian and ecological aspirations of humanity. It spawned a growing sense that capitalism could no longer continue to be bracketed when protesting the multiple oppressions and ecological threats of our time. And as austerity took top billing over free trade, the spirit of antineoliberal protest also shifted. Whereas capitalist globalization had defined the primary focus of oppositional forces in the first decade of the new millennium, the second decade opened with Occupy and the Indignados dramatically highlighting capitalism’s gross class inequalities. Yet with this, the insurrectionary flavour of protest without revolutionary effect quickly revealed the limits of forever standing outside the state. A marked turn on the left from protest to politics has come to define the new conjuncture, as opposition to capitalist globalization shifted from the streets to the state theatres of neoliberal practice. This is in good part what the election of Syriza in Greece and the sudden emergence of Podemos in Spain signified. Corbyn’s election as leader of the British Labour Party attracted hundreds of thousands of new members with the promise to sustain activism rather than undermine it. This transition from protest to politics has been remarkably class oriented in terms of addressing inequality in income and wealth distribution, as well as in economic and political power relations. All this compels a fundamental rethink of the relationship between class, party and state transformation. If Bolshevik revolutionary discourse seems archaic a hundred years after 1917, it is not just because the legacy of its historic demonstration that revolution was possible has faded. It is also because Gramsci’s reframing, so soon after 1917, of the key issues of revolutionary strategy – especially regarding the impossibility of an insurrectionary path to power in states deeply embedded in capitalist societies – rings ever more true. What this means for socialists, however, as we face up to a long war of position in the twenty-first century, is not only the recognition of the limitations of twentieth-century Leninism. It above all requires discovering how to avoid the social democratization even of those committed to transcending capitalism. This is the central challenge for socialists today.
New Directions in Uneven and Combined Development, 2021
Abstract This article offers a critique of the attempt by Rosenberg and Boyle to use the theory o... more Abstract This article offers a critique of the attempt by Rosenberg and Boyle to use the theory of uneven and combined development not only to explain the Brexit referendum vote and Trump’s presidential victory in 2016, but also to reinforce their case for recognizing ‘the causality of the international’ in the field of International Political Economy. The critique advanced here deploys a theorization of the internationalization of capitalist states under the aegis of an informal American empire, and points to the salience of state institutional capacities as well as changes in the balance of class forces inside China, the US and UK, to demonstrate that the argument forwarded by Rosenberg and Boyle is diminished by giving insufficient causal weight to class and state forces in the very constitution of the international in the era of global capitalism.
IPPR Progressive Review, 2018
Will the US sustain its imperial role in the wake of the fourth great crisis of capitalism?
Actuel Marx, 2016
This paper addresses the alleged contradiction between the international space of accumulation an... more This paper addresses the alleged contradiction between the international space of accumulation and the national space of states. In particular, it challenges the argument that the internationalization of production directly establishes a transnational capitalist class (TCC) as a coherent and self-conscious social force engaged in the formation of a putative transnational state (TNS). This contention rests on a set of mechanistic understandings of class formation and the role of the capitalist state. Against this, the emphasis here is on the ‘internationalization of the state’ whereby nation states have, in an uneven and asymmetric way, come to take responsibility for promoting, underwriting and superintending a globalizing capitalism, both abroad and within their own domains. The political significance of this distinction is that the attempt to match the advanced internationalization of capital with a parallel internationalization of working class solidarity leads to a misguided internationalism. It mistakenly assumes that the weaknesses of working classes at a national level can be skipped over at an international level, and fails to properly grasp the continuing centrality, even under globalization, of the national-social formation.
Studies in Political Economy, 2013
American Empire and the Political Economy of Global Finance, 2009
Socialist Register, 2005
"?Recuerdan la cancion “Somos el Mundo”? En cuestiones de finanzas y politica, sino tambien ... more "?Recuerdan la cancion “Somos el Mundo”? En cuestiones de finanzas y politica, sino tambien culturales, estamos convirtiendonos en el mundo, y buena parte del mundo quiere convertirse en nosotros." (Richard Grasso, presidente del Mercado de Valores de Nueva York, 1997). La exultacion de Richard Grasso expresaba la arrogancia que ha caracterizado a las ambiciones globales de los financistas estadounidenses durante mas de un siglo. Sin embargo, el ascenso real de las finanzas norteamericanas a la posicion de dominio del mundo disto de ser suave o inevitable. El objetivo de “construir la capital del mundo para todos los tiempos por venir” en Nueva York, articulado ya a fines del siglo XIX, parecia a punto de consumarse hacia el fin de la Primera Guerra Mundial2 Sin embargo, apenas una decada despues, el derrumbe de Wall Street provoco la Gran Depresion y el colapso del orden financiero internacional. Y mientras Nueva York ocupaba su lugar como el principal centro financiero mundial al finalizar la Segunda Guerra Mundial, esto no parecio demasiado importante toda vez que el nuevo orden de Bretton Woods supuestamente habia marginado las finanzas con relacion a a la produccion y el comercio. Tal como suele narrarse en nuestros dias la historia del capitalismo del siglo XX, solo la “revolucion” neoliberal de los ‘80 y los ‘90 desato finalmente las fuerzas que hicieron de Wall Street el emplazamiento central de la economia mundial.
Varieties of Capitalism, Varieties of Approaches, 2005
For some two decades now, progressive American, British and Canadian intellectuals, determined to... more For some two decades now, progressive American, British and Canadian intellectuals, determined to resist neoliberalism’s ‘there-is-no-alternative’ mantra, have looked to continental Europe for an alternative model. One virtue of this academic and political project — which within the field of comparative political economy has now come to be known as the ‘varieties of capitalism’ or VoC approach — has been that it challenged the notion that capitalist globalization inevitably needed to take the form it has, apparently entailing, as so many of its proponents imagined, the growing impotence of nation states and the increasing homogenization of social formations. The insistence on variety among states has meant trying to refocus attention on the continuing salience of institutional arrangements and social relations specific to particular social formations and their histories, the very dimensions largely ignored in the equations of neoclassical economics and the policy prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Above all, this approach has suggested that whether and how societies adapt themselves to global competition remains an open and important question.
Historical Materialism, 2015
The first three sections of this lecture address the need for better historical-materialist theor... more The first three sections of this lecture address the need for better historical-materialist theorisations of capitalist competition, capitalist classes and capitalist states, and in particular the institutional dimensions of these – which is fundamental for understanding why and how capitalism has survived into the twenty-first century. The fourth section addresses historical materialism’s under-theorisation of the institutional dimensions of working-class formation, and how this figures in explaining why, despite the expectations of the founders of historical materialism, the working classes have not, at least yet, become capitalism’s gravediggers. While recognising that a better historical materialism along these lines will not necessarily provide us with a gps route to a socialist world beyond capitalism, it does suggest a number of guidelines for socialist strategy, with which the lecture concludes. This includes the need for building new institutions capable of defining, mobili...
International Critical Thought, 2013
Although the current crisis has amply demonstrated the many challenges and contradictions the Ame... more Although the current crisis has amply demonstrated the many challenges and contradictions the American state faces, it has also demonstrated that it nevertheless remains critical to the system's survival. Whereas it was still possible in the 1960s and 1970s to represent the capitalist relationship between the global north and south in terms of “the development of underdevelopment,” by the new millennium there was clearly a very remarkable, if still highly uneven, process of capitalist development taking place in the global south. Nowhere was this clearer than with the integration of China into global capitalism. At the same time, the severity and duration of the latest crisis in a global capitalist economy that the American state had been so central to constructing has, unsurprisingly, led to a resurgence of pronouncements that US hegemony was coming to an end. China's entry into the circuits of the international economy, many commentators now predicted, marked a fundamental “re-orientation” of the global capitalist order. However, far from displacing the American empire, China rather seems to be duplicating Japan's supplemental role in terms of providing the steady inflow of funds needed to sustain the US's primary place in global capitalism. Were this to change, it would require deeper and much more liberalized financial markets within China, which would entail dismantling the capital controls that are key pillars of Communist Party rule. Furthermore, a major reorientation of Chinese patterns of investment and production away from exports towards domestic consumption would have incalculable implications for the social relations that have sustained China's rapid growth and global integration. In this regard, though the outcome of the working class struggles now underway in China cannot be known, this cannot but impinge on, and possibly even be affected by, the direction working classes elsewhere take out of the current crisis.
International Critical Thought, 2013
Following their work in the 1990s demystifying theories of globalization which suggested states w... more Following their work in the 1990s demystifying theories of globalization which suggested states were no longer as important as in the past, and instead emphasizing the continued centrality of state power to the workings of capitalism, Panitch and Gindin embarked on a long term research project to understand the role of American Empire in global capitalism. Their book, released in fall 2012 with Verso and titled The Making of Global Capitalism, is the culmination of a decade of work on the topic. In it, they uncover the role of the American state as manager of both US and global capitalism, examining the contradictions this dual role creates. Additionally, their work attempts to overcome the false dichotomy between “states” and “markets,” and attempts to explain the financial underpinnings of American power. Now, five years into to the first truly global capitalist crisis in world history, triggered by a crisis in the American financial system that spread globally through an uneven process, their work has become more relevant than ever. Additionally, with the rise of East Asia, particularly China, as a new center of world accumulation, it appears to some that the era of American hegemony is over, suggesting that China may soon be the new ruler of global capitalism in an increasingly multi-polar world. In contrast with these perspectives, Panitch and Gindin continue to insist on the American state as a unique imperial state with a structural role in the global political economy not shared by any other state. In the context of their book, and contemporary worldhistorical conditions, in this interview Panitch and Gindin share their views on the continued centrality of American power to the workings of global capitalism.
Critical Sociology, 2013
This article traces the central role of the American state, led by the Treasury, not only in the ... more This article traces the central role of the American state, led by the Treasury, not only in the spread and deepening of global finance, but also in containing the financial crises to which this gave rise. The first part examines this role in relation to the financial crises abroad in the 1990s. The second part focuses on the Treasury’s opting for failure containment over failure prevention amidst the financialization it promoted through the 1990s. The third part shows how this laid the basis for the interpenetration of US and foreign financial markets in the mortgage credit boom in the years leading up to the 2007 financial crisis.
Alternate routes: a journal of Critical Social Research, 2013
Handbook of the International Political Economy of Production