Complex Stratification in the World System: Capitalist Totality and Geopolitical Fragmentation (original) (raw)
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The Heart of Empire? Theorising US empire in an era of transnational capitalism
Contemporary critical theorising on US Empire tends to diverge in two ways. First, more traditional approaches tend to foreground the national basis of the USA's imperial project and the subsequent ongoing inter-imperial rivalry inherent between rival capitalist states and regions. A second 'global-capitalist' approach rejects the notion of US Empire and instead posits the transcendence of a nationally based imperialism in favour of an increasingly transnationally orientated state and global ruling class. I argue that both accounts fail in their singularity to capture the nature and role of the US state within a global political economy. Instead, I argue that the US state has long been both subject to and demonstrative of a dual national and transnational structural logic that seeks to enhance US national interests while reproducing a world order favourable for global capital as a whole. Crucially, the end of the Cold War and the terrorist attacks on 9/11 have exacerbated the tensions between these dual logics; these will potentially affect both the hegemony of American Empire and the future of international relations in profound ways. After 9/11 it has become common to analyse the USA as an empire and US interests in the third world as essentially (neo)-imperialist. This 'new imperial' discourse is typically periodised in relation to either the post-9/11 era or the end of the Cold War. This article starts by outlining these new discourses and then critiquing them by arguing that the US state has long been imperial. I ground the contemporary trends in US foreign policy within the historical development of global capitalism. While historical materialism has long theorised on the relationship between capitalism and imperialism, Lenin's notion of inter-imperial rivalry between leading capitalist states is not sufficiently attentive to the transnationalisation of capitalism and the relatively benign and positive-sum nature of US Empire in relation to other core capitalist powers. Conversely, 'global-capitalist' theorists who posit the transcendence of the nation state and American Empire through the transnationalisation of capital and class fail to fully capture the continuity of a logic of 'national interest' inherent within US Empire. After outlining
A review of Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, 2012), £20 As the world commemorates the centenary of the First World War (with limited awareness of its meaning) a book by two leading Marxists that explores contemporary imperialism demands our careful assessment. A century ago there were two broad Marxist approaches to imperialism. Firstly, there was Karl Kautsky's theory of " ultra-imperialism " which suggested the potential for the replacement of rivalry by an alliance of the imperialist countries against subordinate parts of the world. The second approach, the classical Marxist perspective of inter-imperialist rivalry developed by Lenin and Bukharin, argued that competitive capital accumulation produced giant firms that operated increasingly internationally and enlisted their home states in their conflicts with other nations' capitals. The bloodshed and horrors of the war and subsequent decades showed that rivalry provided a superior explanation of international capitalist dynamics. By 1971 Bob Rowthorn noted the emergence of an additional perspective. He argued that a new US super-imperialism had developed in which the US dominated other capitalist powers and had become the " organiser of world capitalism " , able to contain such antagonisms as did appear. 1 Panitch's and Gindin's work sits squarely in this camp, with occasional nods towards ultra-imperialism. Based on earlier collaborative work and an impressive amount of research, The Making of Global Capitalism (henceforth TMGC) provides a comprehensive history of US capitalism and the economic statecraft mobilised to open the global economy to US influence over the last century or so. 2 TMGC's focus is captured in its first two sentences: This book is about globalisation and the state. It shows that the spread of capitalist markets, values and social relationships around the world, far from being an inevitable outcome of inherently expansionist economic tendencies, has depended on the agency of states—and of one state in particular: America. 3 What has emerged from the US state's role in the development of globalised capitalism, including the imposition of US-designed rules for the global economy, is " the American informal empire, which succeeded in integrating all the other capitalist powers into an effective system of coordination under its aegis ". 4 This is not Michael Hardt's and Toni Negri's Empire, within whose post-national space the idea of rival national imperialisms is outdated. 5 Nor does it neatly correspond to the transnationalist perspective developed by Marxists like William Robinson, because neither a transnational capitalist class nor a global state based on the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) is emerging. In the first place, TMGC notes that capital's national roots and institutional linkages remain important, and that US multinational corporations, however international, remain American rather than transnational. 6 Meanwhile, the IFIs were an expression of US postwar power and remain sites of negotiation and coordination between separate " national systems of regulation among the advanced capitalist states ". 7 Nevertheless, TMGC shares with these perspectives the view that US hegemony has so successfully contained conflicts within the West that the idea of inter-imperialist rivalry is no longer helpful. Appearance and essence
US unilateralism, transnational elite formation and the global state (2008)
"It has become commonplace to relate causally the apparent frailty of neoliberal hegemony and the decline of the United States of America, while the neo-realist metaphor of a re-emerging multipolar balance of power has regained its temporarily lost ideological clout. This article questions the validity of state-centric explanations of the global struggle for and against the restructuring of social relations of production since the 1970s, and locates itself firmly within neo-Gramscian scholarship in order to shift our focus towards the agency of an emergent ‘transnational historic bloc’ in the transformation of production relations. It expounds the inter-related economic, ideological and institutional forms taken by the global process of restructuring, and theorises the state as a fluid, contradictory organisation of subjection to suggest that institutional restructuring involved the embryonic formation of a global state in the latest phase of capital globalisation."
The Absent Geopolitics of Pure Capitalism
World Review of Political Economy, 2010
The first Marxist theories of capitalist geopolitics emerged in the early 20th century as theories of imperialism and uneven and combined development. They were also the first theories of capitalist geopolitics. While they explained the intensification of imperialism through new interpenetrations of politics and economics in national states and economies, the revival of Marxist thinking about capitalist geopolitics in the English-speaking world in recent decades suffers from a pure, purely economic, conception of capitalism, uncontaminated by politics, by nation-states. It is, as a consequence, also a cosmopolitan conception of capitalism. In it the very object of study disappears. This article argues that it does so because so many Marxists have come to share the cosmopolitan biases of mainstream thinking by accepting the discourses of 'globalization' and 'empire' and shows how this is so in the case of two pioneers of the recent revival of Marxist geopolitical thinking, Justin Rosenberg and Benno Teschke.
Critical Reflections on the Rise of the Transnational State in Current Global Affairs
2011
In this paper I will critically examine whether it is true or not that the contemporary global transformation brings forth a transnational state (TNS) which is dominated by a territorially independent transnational capital class (TCC). My central argument will be that, from an Open Marxist/Canadian School of IPE-perspective, Robinson and other supporters of the ‘transnational’ departure overstate the role and abilities of a TCC which leads to a misleading conclusion concerning class relations and state authority in the process of neoliberal globalisation. First of all, I am going to provide some theoretical/terminological background to the (Neo-)Gramscian approach submitted by Cox et al. to establish the base: This includes the important role of agency in the constitution of hegemony and the formation of a historic bloc. Subsequently, I present key arguments of Robinson’s enhanced thesis including his crucial notion that we are currently living in epochal times of a transition from a world economy (nation-state phase) to a global economy (transnational phase). Finally, I am going to contest his precipitated assumptions by providing critical counter-arguments concerning the relation of social forces and the state and by reviewing his rather dissatisfactory methodology.