Assault on Paradise: Perspectives on Globalization and Class Struggles

Chapter Three: The Class Struggle Is Here to Stay

61 Chapter Three The Class Struggle Is Here to Stay Overview This chapter aims to rethink the contributions of historical materialism to understanding global capitalism in terms of transnational restructuring and the centrality of class struggle in constituting and contesting the contemporary corporatocratic world order. In more detail, it will focus on: 1. core meta-theoretical issues such as the conceptualization of structure and agency and the structural power of discourse in international relations; 2. the reorganization of states through conditions of uneven development and global restructuring; 3. a periodization of different historical and contemporary trajectories of imperialism; and 4. concrete varieties of anti-capitalism in relation to the organization and further development of resistance against neo-liberal globalization. Introduction Marx used the term mode of production to refer to the specific organization of economic production in a given society. A mode of production includes the means of production used by a given society, such as factories and other facilities, machines, and raw materials. It also includes labour and the organization of the labour force. The term relations of production refers to the relationship between those who own the means of production (the capitalists or bourgeoisie) and those who do not (the workers or the proletariat). According to Marx, history evolves through the interaction between the mode of production and the relations of production. The mode of production constantly evolves toward a realization of its fullest productive capacity, but this evolution creates antagonisms between the classes of people defined by the relations of production—owners and workers. Capitalism is a mode of production based on private ownership of the means of production. Capitalists produce commodities for the exchange 62 market and to stay competitive must extract as much labour from the workers as possible at the lowest possible cost. The economic interest of the capitalist is to pay the worker as little as possible, in fact just enough to keep him alive and productive. The workers, in turn, come to understand that their economic interest lies in preventing the capitalist from exploiting them in this way. As this example shows, the social relations of production are inherently antagonistic, giving rise to class struggles. Global Inequality: The Return of Class The last recent decades have been good for poor nations of the world. Since the late 1980s, what the international economic organizations call “developing Asia”, mainly China, India and the ASEAN countries, has been growing at a pace about double the world as a whole. Since 2001, subSaharan Africa, the tragic laggard of development in the last third of the last century, has been outgrowing the world, including the ‘advanced economies’. Latin America has been growing faster than the rich world since 2003, and the Middle East since 2000. Except for post-Communist Europe, ‘emerging and developing economies’ also weathered the Anglo-Saxon bankers’ crisis much better than the rich world. Nations and Classes We are experiencing a historical turn, not only in geopolitics but also in terms of inequality. The 19th and 20th century international development of underdevelopment meant, among other things, that inequality among humans became increasingly shaped by where they lived, in developed or underdeveloped areas, territories, nations. By 2000, it has been estimated that 80 per cent of the income inequality among households depended on the country you live in (Milanovic 2011: 112). This is currently changing. International inequality is declining overall, although the gap between the rich and the poorest has not stopped growing. But intra-national inequality is, on the whole, increasing, albeit unevenly, denying any pseudo-universal determinism of ‘globalization’ or of technological change. This amounts to a return of class, as an increasingly powerful global determinant of inequality. Class has always been important, but in the 20th century context of mainly national class organizations and class struggles – 63 albeit including some networks of ‘proletarian internationalism’ – national class inequality was overshadowed by global inter-national gaps. Now, nations are growing closer, and classes are growing apart. The class side of the new global distribution pattern grew to prominence in the 1990s. That was the time when Chinese inequality soared, even more than along the capitalist road in the former Soviet Union, when the modest tendency to (rural) equalization in India was reversed into increasing rural as well as urban inequality. In Latin America, Mexico and Argentina had their neoliberal inequality shocks. An IMF (2007: 37) study has shown, if not properly reflected...