A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World (review)

This is a Marxist interpretation of globalization. Its argument goes as follows. The history of world capitalism should be broken into periods: the age of discovery and conquest; the competitive capitalism of the industrial revolution and the creation of the modern nation state; monopoly capitalism and the development of a 'system' of nation states; and now a transnational phase of capitalism that is still emerging. This latter phase — globalization — dates from the beginning of the 1970s. Capital and labour have, of course, been moving across frontiers for centuries. What justifies the creation of a distinct post 1970 phase?

To answer this question Robinson distinguishes between 'extensive' and 'intensive' enlargement of world capitalism. The former involves extending the geography of world capitalism. The latter involves the commodification of broader spheres of life, as when not just production but also services like healthcare and education are turned over to the market. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc marked the near completion of the process of extensive enlargement. Within societies, the rapid growth of direct foreign investment since the 1960s disrupted traditional modes of life by increasing the penetration of markets. This was 'intensive' enlargement. This change is qualitative because the (near) completion of extensive enlargement and the substantial advance in intensive enlargement allows the supersession of the nation state and its replacement with a global economy. A global economy implies a global capitalist class: "the unprecedented concentration and centralization of worldwide economic management, control, and decision-making power in transnational capital and its agents" (11).

Capital, then, has been liberated from the nation-state. But the nation-state was the vehicle through which limits were imposed on the excesses of capitalism — limits embodied in Fordism and the welfare programs that went with it. So a transnational capitalist class is able to engage in unrestrained, socially damaging, accumulation. The result is subcontracting and outsourcing, each of which tends to casualize employment globally. Labour "is increasingly only a naked commodity, no longer embedded in relations of reciprocity rooted in social and political communities" (75).

There is, then, an increasingly self-conscious transnational bourgeoisie. Its pursuit of its global interests takes concrete institutional form in projects of economic integration like the World Trade Organization and regional trading blocs (the European Union, NAFTA). Its actions result in "mass social dislocations, plummeting living conditions, growing inequalities, and the rise in absolute and relative poverty levels" (53). At the same time, the transnational capitalist class conducts "prolonged ideological campaigns aimed at legitimating the dismantling of welfare and developmental states and at disseminating a global capitalist ideology of consumerism and individualism" (83). The flip side of dislocation is, then, a quest for hegemony. Robinson goes on to argue that the globalizing project is being carried forward by a 'transnational state', rendering the nation-state increasingly obsolescent "as a practical unit of the global economy" (89). He kindly cautions the reader that his discussion of this issue is "theoretically complex" and expresses the hope "that the careful reader will be able to grasp my underlying logic, and enjoy the reward of the insights that I am convinced this perspective offers" (88).

In true Marxist fashion, global capitalism is, of course, internally contradictory. Robinson lists four current crises through which the contradictions manifest themselves: overproduction or underconsumption; social polarization on a global scale; a crisis of state legitimacy; and an ecological crisis — and elaborates on the first three of them. The book finishes with a discussion of possible forms of resistance to the transnational capital class's globalizing project.

Frankly, this book depresses me. I had tended to think that Marxism as a serious form of analysis and as a political project was falling into disuse, collapsing under the implausibility of its analysis and the viciousness to which attempts to apply its precepts seem, pretty much uniformly, to have led. True, there are Marxists scattered across social science departments. But they tend to be aging...