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Reflections on some lessons learned from a decade of globalisation studies

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 10; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13563460500344385

1469-9923

Mark Rupert,

Political theory and Gramsci

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (International Publishers, 1971), pp. 428, 355–6. For an exposition of my interpretation of Gramsci and his relevance for contemporary global politics, see Mark Rupert, ‘Reading Gramsci in an Era of Globalizing Capitalism’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 4 (2005), pp. 483–97. 2. These were termed ‘hyperglobalizers’ by David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt & Jonathan Perraton, in: Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Polity, 1999), pp. 3–5. 3. Paul Hist & Grahame Thompson, Globalisation in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Polity, 1996), pp. 2, 4–5. 4. For studies of large-scale changes in the global political economy, see, inter alia, John Agnew & Stuart Corbridge, Mastering Space (Routledge, 1995); Held et al., Global Transformations; Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalisation and the Postcolonial World (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Peter Dicken, Global Shift (Guilford, 2003); V. Spike Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy (Routledge, 2003); and William Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Studies of the social and political forces which contest these processes include, among many others: Stephen Gill, ‘Globalisation, Market Civilisation, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1995), pp. 399–423; Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Blackwell, 1997); Kees van der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International Relations (Routledge, 1998); William Robinson & Jerry Harris, ‘Towards a Global Ruling Class? Globalisation and the Transnational Capitalist Class’, Science and Society, Vol. 64, No. 1 (2000), pp. 11–54; Christa Wichterich, The Globalised Woman (Zed, 2000), especially ch. 6; a special issue of New Political Economy, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1997), republished as Globalisation and the Politics of Resistance, edited by Barry Gills (Palgrave, 2000); Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Blackwell, 2001); Catherine Eschle, Global Democracy, Social Movements, and Feminism (Westview, 2001); Catherine Eschle & Bice Maiguashca (eds), Critical Theories, International Relations, and the ‘Anti-Globalisation Movement’ (Routledge, 2005); and Louise Amoore (ed.), The Global Resistance Reader (Routledge, 2005). 5. On time-space compression, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1989), pp. 242, 293. On capitalism as an historically unique system of market dependence and competitive accumulation, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism (Monthly Review Press, 1999). 6. Mark Rupert, Ideologies of Globalisation (Routledge, 2000), p. 43; see also Mark Rupert & M. Scott Solomon, Globalisation and International Political Economy: The Politics of Alternative Futures (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). 7. van der Pijl, Transnational Classes, p. 129; see also Agnew & Corbridge, Mastering Space, especially ch. 7; Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order (Palgrave, 2003); and Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism; and, for the saga of an insider turned apostate, Joseph Stiglitz, Globalisation and its Discontents (Norton, 2002); and Robert Wade, ‘US Hegemony and the World Bank: The Fight over People and Ideas’, Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2002), pp. 215–43. 8. Klaus Schwab and Claude Smadja, quoted in Rupert, Ideologies of Globalisation, p. 135; see also Jean-Christophe Graz, ‘How Powerful are Transnational Elite Clubs? The Social Myth of the World Economic Forum’, New Political Economy, Vol. 8, No. 3 (2003), pp. 321–40. 9. Manfred Steger, Globalism, second edition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 58, 52, 59–60. For others who would see in neoliberalism the political project of a particular constellation of social power, see the references in notes 4 through 7 above. For my own attempt to sketch out this nexus, see Mark Rupert, ‘Class power and global governance’, in: Michael Barnett & Raymond Duvall (eds), Power in Global Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 205–28. 10. It is important to note that, although hegemony operates primarily through consensual forms of power, it does not do so to the exclusion of coercive power. On the coercive aspects of neoliberalism, see Jutta Weldes & Mark Laffey, ‘Policing and global governance,’ pp. 59–79, in: Barnett & Duvall, Power in Global Governance, pp. 59–79. 11. On the role of professional economists within the bloc of political forces pushing for economic globalisation in the US during the 1990s, see Rupert, Ideologies of Globalisation, especially ch. 3. 12. Dan Fuller & Doris Geide-Stevenson, ‘Consensus among Economists: Revisited’, Journal of Economic Education, Vol. 34, No. 4 (2003), p. 382. 13. Compare United Nations, Human Development Report (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 3; Jagdish Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalisation (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 66–7; and Robert Wade, ‘Is Globalisation reducing Poverty and Inequality?’, World Development, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2004), pp. 567–89; a useful introduction to this debate is Laura Secor, ‘Mind the Gap’, Boston Globe, 5 January 2003, p. D1. 14. For ‘critical realist’ expressions of this basic post-positivist premise, see Andrew Sayer, Method in Social Science (Routledge, 1992); and Andrew Collier, Critical Realism (Verso, 1994). 15. For prominent examples, see Gary Burtless, Robert Z. Lawrence, Robert Litan & Robert Shapiro, Globaphobia (Brookings Institution, 1998); Douglas Irwin, Free Trade under Fire (Princeton University Press, 2002); and Bhagwati, In Defense of Gobalisation. To the extent that such authors have expressed support for political reforms, they have done so not on grounds of social justice or economic democracy (considerations which remain anathema in economic discourse) but instrumentally, as concessions necessary to secure political support broad-based enough for the neoliberal project to proceed. 16. Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalisation, pp. 30, 53–4. 17. Ibid., pp. 14, 18, 16, 17, 19 and 15 respectively. For evidence that Bhagwati badly underestimates the global scope of resistance to neoliberal capitalism, see Emma Bircham & John Charlton, Anticapitalism: A Guide to the Movement (Bookmarks, 2001); Eddie Yuen, George Katsiaficas & Daniel Rose (eds), The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalisation (Soft Skull, 2001); Notes from Nowhere (ed.), We are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (Verso, 2003); William Fisher & Thomas Ponniah (eds), Another World is Possible: Popular Alternatives to Globalisation at the World Social Forum (Zed, 2003); and Tom Mertes (ed.), A Movement of Movements (Verso, 2004). 18. Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalisation, pp. 20, 16. 19. Ibid., pp. 30, 32, 123, 132, 150, 164–5. 20. Ibid., p. 162. 21. Ibid., p. 84. Bhagwati's argument here entirely ignores very substantial evidence that globalisation is integrally related to a historic shift in workplace power in the US and elsewhere: see, for example, Kim Moody, An Injury to All (Verso, 1988) and Workers in a Lean World (Verso, 1997); Kate Bronfenbrenner, ‘We'll Close!’, Multinational Monitor, Vol. 18, No. 3 (1997), available at http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/mm0397.04.html; and ‘Raw Power’, Multinational Monitor, Vol. 21, No. 12 (2000), available at http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2000/00december/power.html. Further, Bhagwati contradicts his own subsequent argument that it is the enduring strength of US institutions – including unions and their political clout – which prevents the race to the bottom from occurring in America: compare Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalisation, pp. 129, 131. 22. Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalisation, p. 245. 23. Ibid., pp. 82, 175; see also pp. 172, 193. Even as he dismisses the possibility of power and exploitation in global production chains, Bhagwati acknowledges that ‘what does seem to emerge persistently from many studies is that the work in EPZ factories is subject to more discipline and may not be suited to all’, p. 84. Further, we are left to wonder why it is disproportionately young women who seem to be ‘suited’ to such workplace discipline. 24. For examples of such gendered analyses of globalisation, see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases (University of California Press, 1989), especially chs 7–8; Jeanne Vickers, Women and the World Economic Crisis (Zed, 1993); Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women (Routledge, 1996), especially chs 8–9; Wichterich, The Globalized Woman; Oxfam, Trading Away our Rights: Women Working in Global Supply Chains (Oxfam, 2004); and Peterson, Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy. 25. Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalisation, p. 76. 26. Ibid., pp. 81, 79. 27. Ibid., p. 46. 28. Ibid., pp. 46–8, 246–7. 29. Ibid., pp. 167–70. 30. Ibid., pp. 204–6. 31. I do not intend here to deny the reproductive labour of the household, but rather to affirm that critical analysis of the processes of social self-production should include the integral relation of productive and reproductive labours. 32. However, this is not to say, in some pluralist sense, that class is only one of a number of possible social identities all of which are equally contingent. In so far as productive interaction with the natural world remains a necessary condition of all human social life, I would maintain that any account of social power relations which abstracts from the social organisation of production must be radically incomplete. 33. Christina Gabriel & Laura Macdonald, ‘NAFTA, Women and Organising in Canada and Mexico: Forging a Feminist Internationaliy’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1994), pp. 539, 536, 539 respectively. Gabriel and Macdonald were inspired by the seminal work of Chandra Mohanty; see, for example, ‘Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’, in: B. Ashcroft, G. Griffths & H. Tiffen, Post-colonial Studies Reader (Routledge, 1995), pp. 259–63. 34. Eschle, Global Democracy, Social Movements, and Feminism, p. 92. 35. Ibid., p. 121. 36. Ibid., pp. 123, 141. 37. Although I see potential affinities between my own (admittedly somewhat heterodox) Gramscian-inflected interpretation of historical materialism and the materially grounded ‘weak postmodernism’ with which Eschle identifies herself, I must note that she is pessimistic about reconciliation of feminist projects with historical materialism (which, alas, she understands in relatively reductivist terms): see Eschle, Global Democracy, Social Movements, and Feminism, pp. 166–70; compare Rupert, ‘Reading Gramsci in an Era of Globalizing Capitalism’. 38. Himadeep Muppidi, The Politics of the Global (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. xviii, 17. 39. Ibid., p. 28. 40. Ibid., p. 83. 41. Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000). 42. Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (Pluto, 2002), p. 3; pp. 152–75 are specifically devoted to Negri's position within these currents; see also Alex Callinicos, ‘Toni Negri in context’, in: Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Debating Empire (Verso, 2003), pp. 121–43. 43. Simon Tormey, Anticapitalism: A Beginner's Guide (Oneworld, 2004), p. 116; see also John Holloway, Change the World without Taking Power (Pluto, 2002); and ‘Autonomy’, in: Notes from Nowhere, We are Everywhere, pp. 107–19. 44. Hardt & Negri, Empire, pp. 235, 43. 45. Ibid., p. 62; for similar statements of the autonomist premise, see also pp. 51–2, 210, 234–5, 256, 261, 268–9 and 360. 46. Ibid., p. 52. 47. Ibid., pp. 58, 59. 48. Ibid., p. 393. On the untenable claim that globalising capitalism entails the effacement of the state or its displacement by a globalised sovereignty, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘A Manifesto for global capital?’, in: Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Debating Empire (Verso, 2003), pp. 61–82. For an earlier intervention which argued strongly for the continuing significance of nation-states within globalising capitalism, see Leo Panitch, ‘Rethinking the role of the state’, in: James Mittelman (ed.), Globalisation: Critical Reflections (Lynne Rienner, 1996), pp. 83–113. 49. For a critical engagement with anarchism as an animating impulse in crucial segments of the Global Justice Movement, see Mark Rupert, ‘Anti-capitalist convergence? Anarchism, socialism, and the Global Justice Movement’, in: Manfred Steger (ed.), Rethinking Globalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), pp. 121–35; for a learned and thoughtful, but also elegantly clear and accessible, discussion of similar themes, see also Tormey, Anticapitalism. 50. Hardt & Negri, Empire, p. 210. Note that more philosophically astute critics such as Callinicos and Tormey attribute this feature of Hardt and Negri's thought to the intellectual influence of Deleuze. I associate Hardt and Negri's ‘will to resist’ with anarchism because I believe it is this affinity which accounts for the strong resonance of their work within the global justice movement. 51. See Rupert, ‘Reading Gramsci in an Era of Globalizing Capitalism’. 52. On the active contestation of popular ideology and the politics of transnational solidarity-building as opposed to proto-fascist reaction, see Rupert, Ideologies of Globalisation; and Steger, Globalism. For political critiques of Hardt and Negri in some ways convergent with my own, see Michael Rustin, ‘Empire: a postmodern theory of revolution’, in: Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Debating Empire (Verso, 2003), pp. 2–18; and Leo Panitch & Sam Gindin, ‘Gems and baubles in Empire’, in: Balakrishnan, Debating Empire, pp. 42–60; and, from a feminist perpective, Mary Hawkesworth, ‘Global containment: the production of feminist invisibility and the vanishing horizon of justice’, in: Steger, Rethinking Globalism, pp. 51–65. For an Althusserian-inspired perspective which foregrounds the politics of pluralism in globalising capitalism and thus offers a more promising approach than Hardt and Negri, see Mark Laffey & Kathryn Dean, ‘A flexible Marxism for flexible times’, in: Mark Rupert & Hazel Smith (eds), Historical Materialism and Globalisation (Routledge, 2002), pp. 90–109. 53. For a particularly egregious expression of hubris on my part, see Mark Rupert, ‘Democracy, peace: what's not to love?’, in: Tarak Barkawi & Mark Laffey (eds), Democracy, Liberalism, and War (Lynne Rienner, 2001), p. 172, where I straightforwardly equated the politics of transnational civil society with ‘the global politics of the twenty-first century’. I do not wish to be misunderstood here: I stand by the substance of my critique of mainstream American international relations scholarship in general and the democratic peace thesis in particular, and I continue to believe that a neo-Gramscian analysis of the politics of transnational civil society holds promise for understanding the dynamics and possibilities of globalisation from below; but I acknowledge that the critical alternative I envisioned was insufficiently attentive to the ways in which interstate politics, warfare and conquest continue to be entwined with the relations and processes of globalising capitalism. For the wisdom of accomplished scholars of historical materialism suggesting (years before the Iraq invasion) that globalisation had not displaced imperial forms of power, see Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble (Verso, 1999); and the following essays in Rupert & Smith, Historical Materialism and Globalisation: Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘Global capital, national states’, pp. 17–39; Bob Sutcliffe, ‘How many capitalisms?’, pp. 40–58; and Fred Halliday, ‘The pertinence of imperialism’, pp. 75–89. 54. White House, National Security Strategy for the United States (17 September 2002), available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/print/nssall.html 55. Ibid., p. 12. 56. For a more substantial elaboration of this analysis, see Rupert & Solomon, Globalisation and International Political Economy, especially ch. 5 entitled ‘Globalisation, Imperialism and Terror’. Strongly critical of imperial militarism, placing it in a longer-term politico-cultural context but without explicitly linking it to the structures and processes of globalising capitalism, is Andrew Bacevich's book, The New American Militarism (Oxford University Press, 2005). 57. For recent works untangling the relationship of neo-imperial power and globalising capitalism, see among others Perry Anderson, ‘Force and Consent’, New Left Review, No. 17 (2002), pp. 5–30; Alex Callinicos, The New Mandarins of American Power (Polity, 2003); David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 2003); Leo Panitch & Sam Gindin, ‘Global capitalism and American empire’, in: Leo Panitch & Colin Leys (eds), Socialist Register 2004: The New Imperial Challenge (Merlin Press, 2003), pp. 1–42; Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (Verso, 2003); Neil Smith, The Endgame of Globalisation (Routledge, 2005); and Steger, Globalism.