Global
Class Formation and the New Global Left in World Historical Perspective*
Chris Chase-Dunn and Shoon Lio
Institute for Research on World-Systems
University of
California-Riverside
To be presented at the session on “Globalization, labor and the transformation of work" organized by Jonathan Westover at the annual meetings of the Pacific Sociological Association, April 7-11, 2010. Available as IROWS Working Paper # 57 at https://irows.ucr.edu/papers/irows57/irows57.htm
Draft v. 3/5/10 9469 words
*
Thanks to Richard Niemeyer, Preeta Saxena, Matheu Kaneshiro, and James Love for
their help on a related paper.
Abstract: This paper reviews some of the literature on
globalization and class relations and examines the changing nature of class
relations and the core/periphery hierarchy over the last several centuries. We
suggest ways to study how much class relations are becoming globalized and we
begin to resolve the disconcerting problem of viewing the world as a single
global society at the same time as it is also understood as system of national
societies. This is part of an historical and contemporary study of the
emergence of global classes, including transnational political and economic
elites, but also transnational organizations of workers, peasants, indigenous
peoples, women, environmentalists and other counter-hegemonic political
movements that are contesting capitalist globalization. We examine conceptual
issues that arise in the analysis of the relationships between class, nation,
and the core/periphery hierarchy, as well as transnational relations. We
formulate an approach to the conceptualization and operationalization of global
classes and propose a research strategy that will allow us to estimate the
trajectories of global class formation and integration over the last 200
years.
The
neoliberal globalization project has reorganized global class relations in the
world-system, producing a situation in which the labor movement is taking new
forms and is making alliances with other anti-systemic movements and
progressive regimes in an emerging constellation of progressive forces that has
become known as the New Global Left. This paper recapitulates the major
contributions to understanding recent changes in the global class structure,
discusses ways to empirically untangle the complicated relationship between the
global class structure and the core/periphery hierarchy as understood in the
world-systems perspective, and considers possible roles that the emerging
transnational working class might play in the world revolution of 20xx.
Waves of economic and political integration --
increasing and then decreasing trade and investment globalization as well as a
spiraling emergence of transnational and international political organizations
– have accompanied a process in which both elites and masses have oscillated
from predominantly local and national consciousness and organization toward
increasingly transnational and global identities and interconnections. Our
research focuses on problems of operationalizing and measuring several aspects
of global class formation and the trajectory of these trends since 1800. We
also consider the extent to which increasing transnational organization of
classes may have altered (or be altering) the other cyclical processes and
secular trends of the capitalist world-system. Especially important are the
possible consequences of global class formation for hegemonic rivalry and the
probability of war among core states.
The popular discourse about globalization presumes
the recent emergence of an international realm of economic competition that has
made military competition among the most powerful states obsolete. It is often
assumed that the core countries have achieved a degree of interdependence such
that future rivalries can easily be resolved without resort to warfare.
There is also an important literature about the
emergence of a new stage of global capitalism in which large transnational
corporations and financial markets operate on an intercontinental scale and a
relatively powerful and integrated transnational group of capitalists and
managers have emerged to constitute an organized and connected global ruling
class. It is alleged that this new stage of global capitalism has importantly
transformed the logic of economic development and governance. This approach claims that national states
have lost power to international financial markets and global corporations, and
that organized labor has lost leverage over firms because of capital flight,
job blackmail and flexible specialization.
Like the popular globalization discourse, the global capitalism thesis
tends to assume that warfare among the most powerful states is a thing of the
past. This is based on the notion that
the global capitalist class is so well integrated that it will settle future
disputes without resorting to warfare. The basic claim is that a transnational
elite has recently emerged that is much more solidly integrated than in earlier
periods. Most of the evidence adduced to
support this idea is anecdotal. An important part of our task is to devise a
strategy for comparing the amount and qualitative nature of elite integration
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
We want to conceptualize, operationalize and
measure global class formation (at the elite as well as the popular levels)
over the last two centuries in order to evaluate the claims of the “global
capitalism” school. Our study of global class formation analyses changes in the
nature and distribution of economic and political/military power among states
and firms as well as regional and global proto-state organizations (Concert of
Europe, League of Nations, U.N., World Bank, IMF, OECD, Group of 8, WTO, etc.)
since 1800. The regional, geographical, national, core/periphery and
civilizational dimensions of these structural changes need to be
considered.
Both popular and most academic
discourses on globalization presume that the emergence of a global culture or a
global social order is a relatively recent phenomenon. According to this
literature, globalization involves two processes at work. The first process
entails the extension of a particular culture to the entire globe (Featherstone
1995) Heterogeneous cultures become incorporated and integrated into a dominant
culture which eventually covers the entire world. This suggests a greater
cultural integration, homogenization and unification that cross national
boundaries. The second process points to
the emergence of a global economic order in which the core countries have
achieved a degree of interdependence such that future rivalries can be easily
resolved without resort to warfare.
Structural
Globalization vs. the Globalization Project
It
is important to distinguish between different definitions of globalization,
especially between globalization as different kinds of large-scale integration
vs. globalization as a political project.
There
have been upward sweeps of economic, political and cultural integration since
the Stone Age. Globalization as
increased density and extent of interaction networks is not new,
although it has only become global in extent since the Europeans went around
the Earth in the 16th century. Since then there have been waves of
globalization as well as upward sweeps. So structural globalization is a cycle
of expansion and deglobalization and also an upward trend. A quantitative study
of trade globalization, operationalized as the ratio of international imports
relative to the size of the whole world economy, produced the results shown in
Figure 1.
Figure 1: Trade Globalization, 1830-1995
But much of what is referred to by
the word globalization is actually a set of ideological assumptions about how
the world works and political policy recommendations. Phil McMichael (2004)
calls this the ‘the globalization project.” Others have called it
“neoliberalism,” “Reaganism-
Thatcherism
“and “the
The core/periphery hierarchy and global class formation
Contemporary popular discourse about global inequalities and justice uses the
terms “Global North and Global South.” This replaced an earlier terminology
that referred to the “
In its evolution the core/periphery hierarchy has moved from a set of unequal relations among “mother countries” and their colonies, to unequal relations among formally sovereign national states, toward a set of global class relations. There has been a global class system all along, but waves of globalization and resistance have increasingly formed intraclass links so that the global hierarchy has moved in the direction of a global class system of the kind described in the works of William I. Robinson (2004, 2008). The core/periphery (c/p) hierarchy has always been a complicated nested system with core/periphery relations existing within countries as well as between them. But it has always been possible to assign national societies to the three zones of the c/p hierarchy: the core, the periphery and the semiperiphery. And this is still possible today despite the move toward a global class system. There are still significant advantages to being a worker in the core and disadvantages to being a worker in the periphery despite the move toward a global class system.
Jeffrey Kentor’s (2000, 2005) quantitative measure
of the position of national societies in the world-system remains the best
operationalization because it included GNP per capita, military capability, and
economic dominance/dependence (See Appendix). We have trichotomized Kentor’s
combined continuous indicator of world-system position into core, periphery and
semiperiphery categories for purposes of our research. The core category is
nearly equivalent to the World Bank’s “high income” classification, and is what
most people mean by the term “Global North.” We divide the “Global South” into
two categories: the semiperiphery and the periphery. The semiperiphery includes
large countries (e.g.
Figure 2: The global hierarchy of national societies: core, semiperiphery and periphery
Figure 2 depicts the global
hierarchy of national societies divided into the three world-system zones. The
core countries are in dark black, the peripheral countries are gray, and the
semiperipheral countries in the middle of the global hierarchy are in
cross-hatch. The visually obvious thing is that North America and Europe are
mostly core, Latin America is mostly semiperipheral, Africa is mostly
peripheral and
The comparative world-systems perspective developed by Chase-Dunn and Hall
(1997) suggests that semiperipheral regions have been unusually fertile sources
of innovations and have implemented social organizational forms that
transformed the scale and logic of world-systems. This is termed the hypothesis
of “semiperipheral development.” This hypothesis suggests that attention
should be paid to events and developments within the semiperiphery, both the
emergence of social movements and the emergence of national regimes. The World
Social Forum process is global in extent but its entry upon the world stage has
been primarily in semiperipheral
Theories
of Global Capitalism
We will explicate the arguments of several authors
who have developed the class structure aspects of the thesis of global
capitalism. Some of the globalization
scholars contend that globalization is a social integration process that runs
from tribal groups to nation-states, superstate blocs and a world-state society
(Featherstone 1995). The impetus for the emergence of such a global order is
alleged to be technological development (Haggard 1995;Featherstone 1995).
Technological developments such as means of transportation and the rapid
development of mass media and communication technology have enabled the binding
together of larger expanses of time-space at an inter-societal and global
level. For instance, the rapid
development of communications technology has been significant for the spatial
expansion and intensification of financial activities. Computers and
telecommunication satellites have slashed the cost of transmitting information
internationally, of confirming transactions and of paying for transactions
(Haggard 1995:xiv). The development of the technology of war has also furthered
the binding of people together in a sociation of conflict over large areas.
Globalization is conceived by Robinson and Harris
(2000) as being furthered by the expansion of economic activity in so far as
the common forms of industrial production, commodities, market behavior, trade
and consumption have become generalized around the world. Particular kinds of
economic and social institutions have arisen and proliferated throughout the
world that bind diverse people together. Robinson and Harris contend that the
nineteenth century rise of the Joint Stock Company and national corporations
led to the globalization of a particular form of economic institutions and
practices as well as the development of national capitalist classes. Capitalist
classes within the boundaries of the nation-state developed interests in
opposition to rival national capitalists in other countries. What Robinson and
Harris allege to be different between the pre-World War I integration and that
of today is that the pre-1913 integration was through “arms-length” trade in goods and services between
nationally based production systems and through cross border financial flows in
the form of portfolio capital. Robinson
and Harris (2000:19) contend that in the nineteenth century national capitalist
classes organized national production chains and mobilized domestic labor to
produced commodities within their own borders, which they then traded for
commodities produced in other countries.
Robinson and Harris also observe that national
governments have traditionally taxed goods moving in international trade and
tried to limit and constrain international capital movement. Arguably, this led
to the lengthening of the worldwide Great Depression. However, after World War
II, national governments have generally lowered their trade barriers.
Multilateral negotiations under General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT)
such as the Kennedy Round in the 1960s, the Tokyo Round in the 1970s and the
Uruguay Round of the 1990s are examples of the lowering of barriers to the
international flows of goods and capital (Haggard 1995).
Bill
Robinson (1996) contends that an integrated
global capitalist class has emerged and that the
Leslie Sklair (2001) explicitly links his
definition of the transnational capitalist class to the transnational
corporation as an institution. Saskia Sassen (1991), on the other hand, focuses
on both the organizational and market-structured aspects of the emergence of
global financial institutions within global cities such as
Scholars such as George Ritzer and Mike Featherstone
argue that there is greater functional and cultural integration in production
and consumption now than ever before. For instance, certain retailing forms of
business techniques and marketing have rapidly proliferated around the world
e.g. the global success of fast-food franchises such as McDonald’s. Ritzer
(1993) and Featherstone (1995) argue that the principles of the fast-food
restaurant are dominating more sectors of American society and the rest of the
world.
Emergence
of a Transnational Capitalist Class For Itself
According to David Kowalewski (1997), networks of
private and public elites have been constructed within national societies
across the world in the post World War II period. These networks or “establishments” have become
more transnational in their structure and processes. Increasingly the political
and economic elites of the North have established links with those of the South
into a web of mutual benefit. The emergence of a transnational or global elite
class has been facilitated by the increasing concentration of capital in the
world. Transnational elites have been
the major agents for a new global class formation. Kowalewski quotes from the
speech that Walter Wriston of Citicorp delivered to the International
Industrial Conference:
The development of the World Corporation into a truly multinational organization has produced a group of managers of many nationalities whose perception of the needs and wants of the human race know no boundaries. They really believe in One World…. They are managers who are against the partitioning of the world …on the pragmatic ground that the planet has become too small…to engage in the old nationalistic games (Cited in Kowalewski 1997:20).
Kowalewski (1997:15) contends that the
transnational capitalist class has emerged because of the secular trend of
capital concentration. The world’s
capitalist elites have merged through a number of informal and formal
connections. Informal connections are
those connections that have expressive rather than instrumental objectives.
These include ties and relationships that ease the frictions arising from more
formal connections. Examples of informal connections include family, school and
social clubs.
Formal connections are those
institutional connections that have instrumental objectives (Kowaleski 1997:
16). They include interlocking directorates, shareholdings, joint ventures,
economic associations, public enterprises, and political payments. All of these
various networks form the structure that permits the transnational elite to
“form a collective consciousness of identity, values, and solidarity. It allows them to formulate common strategies
“(Kowalewski 1997:18). Many scholars have focused on the emergence of
transnational and global institutions that furthered the concentration of
capital and facilitated the emergence of this transnational elite. Most accounts begin with World War II and
argue that class formation in the twentieth century is a new phenomenon that
needs to be explained. We will take up
this historical challenge by examining global processes in the nineteenth
century and compare them with the twentieth century.
Classes
in the World-System: The Spiral of Integration
An alternative approach is provided by the
world-systems perspective (Wallerstein 1974; Chase-Dunn 1998; Arrighi 1994). In
this view the modern world-system has been importantly integrated by
transnational relations for centuries. National development has occurred within
a larger arena of geopolitical and economic competition. The objective class
structure of the world has been structured politically as an interstate system,
a system of competing and unequally powerful states, but transnational
alliances and business activities have been central to the evolution of
organizational strategies and the expansion of the world-system for six hundred
years.
There has been a global capitalist class
for centuries in the "an sich" (objective) sense. It has gotten bigger
(fewer landed aristocracies to compete with), and it has gotten more integrated
in a series of waves separated by periods of disintegration and conflict (World
Wars). The global capitalist class is probably more integrated now than it has
ever been, but how much more? And is it integrated enough to prevent future
world wars? Also the transnational capitalist class has evolved while it has
grown. Most of its early integration was based on informal and kin-based ties
of the kind discussed below. But the trend since World War II has been toward
integration based on formal institutions. The World Economic Forum, founded in
1971, is the most important institution for integrating the global capitalist
class by bringing the leadership groups of the largest transnational
corporations together with politicians, entertainers and academicians.
The organizational structure of classes and states
has oscillated back and forth between greater transnational integration and
more “mercantile” and state-organized national structures. This cycle corresponds to waves of expansion
and intensification of international trade and investment and is affected by
the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers – the Dutch in the seventeenth
century, the British in the nineteenth century and the
Figure 3 diagrams the global class structure,
indicating that a portion of each class is transnationally linked. For the
global capitalism theorists this is a condition of recent origin, whereas for
world-systemites it has long been the case, but the size of the transnational
segments has been getting larger with each upward spiral of integration. The
big question that we would like to answer is how much larger are the transnational
segments now than they were in the nineteenth century; and are they large
enough to prevent the system from undergoing another period of world war?
Figure 3: World Classes with Transnational Segments
Nineteenth Century Globalization and
the Ideology of Liberalism
Cultural integration existed between the different
elites of the core nations and also between core and peripheral elites in the
nineteenth century. For instance, the ruling class that governed
As with the contemporary wave of global
integration, a nineteenth century liberal ideology generated the widespread
expectation that free trade would bring about the end of an era of
despotism. However, for free trade and
democratic government to spread globally, there must be greater international
economic and social integration. In the last half of the nineteenth century
international trade and finance became highly integrated and cosmopolitan. The Pax Britannica championed free
trade and strove to overcome the structure of the mercantilist era in which
states placed substantial restrictions on trade as part of the project of
nation building.
International
migration spurred global integration. Continental merchants and bankers settled
in
Partnerships and collaborations in the form of
joint ventures crossed national
boundaries.
For instance, the Discount Bank of
Intermarriage
and the Emergence of a Global Elite Culture
Intermarriage between groups is an important form
of intergroup integration in nearly all world-systems (Chase-Dunn and Hall
1997: 135). In kin-based systems kin groups create political and economic
alliances primarily by means of marriage. In modern complex systems family
structures only complement other institutional structures, but they still
remain an important aspect of the informal linkages that create trust among
both elites and masses. The institutions of informal association have long been
examined as an important aspect of national class formation (e.g. Domhoff
1998), but this kind of analysis is also important to the examination of
transnational class linkages.
Intermarriage was an important mechanism for
the formation and integration of a transnational mercantile class in the
nineteenth century. Families concerned with foreign trade usually place their
sons in the houses of their overseas correspondents to learn the trade (Jones
1987: 88). Apprenticeship not only led to the diffusion of a cosmopolitan
liberal ideology across national boundaries, it also created social contracts
that would lead to intermarriage. For
instance, the children of
In the first half of the century, European
businessmen on the African coast took
indigenous wives who were active partners in their trading ventures (Jones
1987). Many of the West African mercantile elites were the result of such
liaisons. Anglo-American intermarriages
were also becoming fashionable by the late 1880s. Between 1870 and 1914 there
were 454 rich young American women who crossed the
The most prominent of the Anglo-American marriages
was the Churchill family (Fowler 1993).
Intermarriage also created cross-national relationships that mitigated
the risks of international trade. Merchant banks preferred working with a
trusted house that would perform business for them on commission and joint
accounts (Jones 1987:99). Intermarriage facilitated the creation of integrated
international connections. For instance, the Rathbones of Liverpool relied on
Henry Gair for representation in the
Structural
Integration via Legal Incorporation and Joint Stock Companies
In the seventeenth century Dutch investors from
In
the nineteenth century wartime disruptions, the move to more capital-intensive
manufacturing, the breakdown of established systems of regulated trade, and the
diffusion of a global liberal ideology accelerated the processes of
international mercantile apprenticeship. Migration facilitated the
intermingling of merchants of different nationalities (Jones 1987).
This intermingling led to a more complete social
integration; the newcomers diversified out of international trade into
landownership in their adoptive countries. Intermarriage between the northern
elites and indigenous elites led to the formation of a cosmopolitan elite in
which ethnicity and nationality were not the primary determinants of
status. Structurally, the system still
impeded the creation of strong transnational interlocking partnerships. For instance, unlimited liability made these
interlocking partnerships too risky. Thus, there were attempts to push for
partnership with limited liability.
Major railways and banks achieved limited liability through legislative
acts in one country after another (Jones 1987:104). Easier legal incorporation of limited
liability firms permitted the rapid spread of banks, shipping companies and
other ventures (Jones 1987: 106).
This limited liability made it easier for an owner
to leave direct supervision in the hands of a local managing agent while he
lived a life as a rentier, spreading his capital in a number of
securities. Another effect of incorporation was that it reduced the risks
involved in the diversification of firms.
Firms would diversify by creating a new corporation for every
venture.
Nationalism
and Fragmentation of the Transnational Bourgeoisie
According to Jones (1987) merchants from both the
core and periphery moved into banking and land, insurance, railways, public
utilities, manufacture, distribution and mining. In the process, more
vertically integrated systems for the finance, processing and shipment of
internationally traded commodities emerged. This led to greater contact and competition
between firms. Railways facilitated the
movement of produce and commodities to markets and the people to work.
Native and expatriate international merchants
found their ambiguous nationality and comprador status more of a liability in
countries where the political tide had turned against cosmopolitan liberalism
(Jones 1987: 197). The cosmopolitan
bourgeoisie were under simultaneous threat from local populist pressures and
the competitive forces of metropolitan capital (Jones 1987:198). When Mexico’s
Minister of finance, Jose Yves Limantour ran for president in 1900, he was
attacked by his enemies for being a Frenchman because of his parentage and
because he had sacrificed the short-run domestic interests of Mexico through
conservative monetary and spending policies (Topik 200:732). Merchants tried to
deal with these twin threats by developing closer accommodation with the local
states that were willing to help those businessmen who identified with and
resided in the country.
Though we are unconvinced by many of the arguments
that portray the contemporary period as a qualitatively new form of global
capitalism based on transnational corporations, globalized financial markets or
flexible specialization, we do see at least one development that indicates that
a new dynamic may be operating. The series of global debt cycles that began in
the early nineteenth century virtually always ended in a collapse of the
financial structures and a recalibration of the relationship between the real
world of production and consumption and the symbolic world of financial claims
to future income streams (Suter 1992). The global debt crisis of the 1980s did
not eventuate in such a collapse. The debt was restructured and some was
written off, but the majority of the load of symbolic claims survived. This
non-collapse was made possible by the organizational coordination of the
We have demonstrated that there was a good deal of
transnational integration in the last half of nineteenth century and that it
declined during the contraction of international economic integration that
occurred in early twentieth century. What we have not been yet able to do is
figure out how to move toward a quantitative estimate of the degree of
transnational elite integration for the world-system as a whole. As with other
efforts to measure globalization (e.g.
Chase-Dunn, Kawano, and Brewer 2000), the estimation of a global characteristic
needs to take account of the changing size of the system as a whole. Of course
there are more transnational communications and interactions now than there
were in the nineteenth century. There are also more within-nation
communications and interactions because the world population and the world
economy have become larger. It is the ratio of these that must be studied.
Intermarriage, interlocking directorates and joint
ventures are possible empirical indicators of elite integration that might be
operationalized in order to construct the measurements that we see as vital. We
propose to compare these indicators of integration of the global capitalist
class for two time periods, the last two decades of the nineteenth century and
the last two decades of the twentieth century.
The boundaries between classes are usually fuzzy
and so an effort to study the whole global capitalist class would quickly
encounter the sticky problem of where to draw the line. We will avoid this
conundrum by focusing on only the very top segment of the global capitalist
class, and this will be defined as two entities; the richest 100 individuals on
earth as indicated by wealth and income, and the largest 100 business
enterprises as indicated by yearly gross revenues and number of employees. It
should be possible to identify these segments for the decades under study and
to study the degree of integration of these segments regarding informal and formal
ties.
The comparative study of ties needs to pay
attention not only to the overall degree of integration but also to the
structure of the integration. Our main motivation for studying elite
integration is to shed light on the probabilities and possibilities of future
wars among the great powers. Studies of earlier world wars and their
relationship with the processes of hegemonic rise and fall, or what Modelski
and Thompson (1996) call the “power cycle” of the rise and fall of “system
leaders” have noted some interesting patterns. William R. Thompson (2000) notes that declining “system leaders”
often ally with an amiable rising challenger against another challenger that is
perceived at more threatening. Thompson then looks closely at the formerly
hostile relationship between the
The question this raises for our study of integration
is “integration with whom?” A truly global integration that would prevent bloc
formation in a conflictive situation would need to crosscut the most friable
cleavages. This instructs us to pay close attention to whatever links there may
have been before World War I across the fault lines that emerged as chasms of
the Great War.
The
World Working Class
Defined objectively in terms of
control over the means of production there has been a single world proletariat
for centuries. Its fully proletarianized segment has undoubtedly grown as a
proportion of the whole world work force, but there has long been a large
semi-proletariat of part-time workers who rely on rural redoubts for at least
some of their sustenance. The classical migrant labor forces have evolved into
a more permanently urbanized group of “informal sector” workers in the
megacities of the periphery and semiperiphery.
In order to study the question of transnational class integration
analogous to our study of the global capitalist class we need to first get a
good grip on the structure of the global work force. In this we need to include
peasants who grow their own food and/or produce for the market. In order to
keep our study feasible we will adopt the same strategy of looking at the two fin-de-sciecle
decades of each century. So the first question is to compare the structure of
the world work force in these two time periods.
The second question is about
integration. And here we are interested in communications, direct interactions,
organizational ties, and participation in explicitly international and
transnational political organizations. Migration is an important aspect of
these ties.
Boswell
and Chase-Dunn (2000) have conceptualized “world revolutions” in which the
mobilization of movements of resistance to domination and exploitation has
restructured the normative and institutional structures of “world orders.” Thus
they see the abolition of legal slavery and the eventual elimination of formal
colonialism as the result of movements of resistance that eventually culminated
in structuring normative regimes that all states and actors are sanctioned for
violating. The labor movement, the socialist movement and the communist states
are all understood as efforts of resistance to capitalism that attempted to
fundamentally restructure its logic, but that instead impelled capitalists and
their statesmen to expand and reorganize the institutions of capital
accumulation. In this view the workers and peasants are not inert victims.
Rather their efforts to resist and to found less exploitative institutions have
been an important driving force in the evolution of global capitalism.
The
question at hand is about the comparison of transnational integration of the
global working class in the last two decades of the last two centuries. This
question is also germane to the problem of global conflict broached above.
Labor internationalism has long been understood as a potential force for peace.
The classical failure of the Second International on the eve of World War I is
perhaps the most poignant episode.
Samuel
Huntington (1973) long ago predicted that the growth and multiplication of
transnational corporations would eventually lead to the building of global
unions as a necessary counter-response by organized labor. Transborder
organizing and global labor agreements have indeed been implemented in the
following years (Stevis and Boswell 2008) but these efforts have continued to
suffer from the problems created by nationalism, cultural differences and
North/South differences income and interests. The global labor movement has a
long way to go in becoming a powerful force. Much progress has been made in allying
with other social movements, but there are still big problems of collective
action on a global scale. The socialist
and communist claims that the working class would be the agent of the
transformation of capitalism to a more cooperative and humane social logic has
fallen on hard times, though the theories of global capitalism and the idea of
a globalized working class may hold out hope for a revitalization of these
ideas.
The Pink Tide
The World Social Forum (WSF) is not the only political force that demonstrates the rise of the New Global Left. The WSF is embedded within a larger socio-historical context that is challenging the hegemony of global capital. It was this larger context that facilitated the founding of the WSF in 2001. The anti-IMF protests of the 1980s and the Zapatista rebellion of 1994 were early harbingers of the current world revolution that challenges the neoliberal capitalist order.
History proceeds in a series of waves. Capitalist expansions ebb and flow, and
egalitarian and humanistic counter-movements emerge in a cyclical dialectical
struggle. Polanyi(1944) called this the double-movement (Polanyi 1944), while
others have termed it a “spiral of capitalism and socialism.” This spiral of
capitalism and socialism describes the undulations of the global economy that
has alternated between expansive commodification throughout the global economy,
followed by resistance movements on behalf of workers and other oppressed
groups (Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000). The Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal capitalist
globalization project extended the power of transnational capital. This project
has reached its ideological and material limits. It has increased inequality
within and between countries, exacerbated rapid urbanization in the Global
South (so-called Planet of Slums), attacked the welfare state and institutional
protections for the poor, and led to global financial collapse. The
globalization project was crisis management because of overaccumulation in core
manufacturing and a declining profit rate in the 1970s and 1980s. Obvious
limitations of the expansion of financialization led certain neoconservative
elements of the global elite to support “imperial over-reach” an effort to use
military power to control the global oil supply as a means to prop up declining
A global countermovement has arisen to challenge neoliberalism and
neoconservatism and decades of capitalist expansion. This progressive
countermovement is composed of increasingly transnational social movements and
a growing number of populist governments in
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|
0 |
|
|
|
0 |
|
|
|
0 |
|
|
|
0 |
1992 |
|
|
0 |
1996 |
|
|
0 |
|
|
|
0 |
|
|
|
0 |
|
|
|
0 |
|
|
|
0 |
|
|
|
0 |
|
|
|
2 |
1959 |
|
|
2 |
1998 |
|
|
1 |
1993 |
|
|
2 |
2000 |
|
|
1 |
2001 |
|
|
2 |
2002 |
|
|
2 |
2003 |
|
|
2 |
2003 |
|
|
2 |
2005 |
|
|
2 |
2006 |
|
|
2 |
2006 |
|
|
2 |
2006 |
|
|
1 |
2007 |
|
|
1 |
2007 |
|
|
2 |
2008 |
|
|
2 |
2009 |
Table 1: Pink Tide status of Latin American countries: 0= not Pink Tide; 1= Partial Pink Tide,
2= Full-Blown Pink Tide
An important difference between these and many earlier Leftist regimes in the non-core is that they have come to head up governments by means of popular elections rather than by violent revolutions. This signifies an important difference from earlier world revolutions. The spread of electoral democracy to the non-core has been part of a larger political incorporation of former colonies into the European interstate system. This evolutionary development of the global political system has mainly been caused by the industrialization of the non-core and the growing size of the urban working class in non-core countries (Silver 2003). While much of the democratization of the Global South has taken the form of “polyarchy” in which elites play musical chairs (Robinson 1996), in some countries Most of the Pink Tide Leftist regimes have been voted into power. This is a very different form of regime formation than the revolutionary road taken by most earlier Leftist regimes in the non-core.
The ideologies of the Pink Tide regimes have been both socialist and
indigenist, with different mixes in different countries. The acknowledged
leader of the Pink Tide as a distinctive brand of leftist populism is the
Bolivarian Revolution led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. But various
other forms of progressive political ideologies are also heading up states in
The development of states in
Thus one sees waves between the spread of capital domination and the struggle
for popular rights throughout the history of many countries in
Figure 4: The Pink
Tide in
As one can see from Figure 4,
the rise of the left has engulfed nearly all of South America and a
considerable portion of
Wallerstein’s long run rise of wages (pp 58-59) in
his Decline of American Power, 3 major
trends that reach asymptotes (wages, taxes, ecological degradation).
Stages of w-s devel. Arrighi, systemic cycles of
accum. Iw. Millenariansism and asymtotes, continuity and change. The stages
issue. What are the important diffs from
the last sysemic cycle of accum and the last period of hegemonic downturn? See 3 futures.
Measuring global class formation: class in itself, class for itself
How to measure. How not to. Within/between diffs,
struggle to deal with north/south diffs within labor movment and other
movements. Issues. South/south diffs.
How much global class formation? Compare with 19th
century or earlier
Bergesen on globology and the global mode of
production
John Meyer, et al on world society
Leslie Sklair on transnational practices
Bill robinson on transnational capitalist class,
transnational capitalist state, and new
informalized global working class.
Struna paper on global proletarian fractions
Roberts and Struna asa paper on C/p and class
More on the core periphery hierarchy and global class
formation
Bev Silver, informalization, planet of slums, deruralization.
The global reserve army of labor. Semiproletarianization.
Evo of glob class and c/p hierarchy interact. Waves
of. Spiral of cap and soc.
Class relations in and for an sich and fur sich.
Globalized workers- attack on unions. History of
Job blackmail., regional-global
When all labor is free we will
have socialism
Coercion and free labor’ pkap.
The function of class harmony in the core.
Urbanization,
proletarianization, informal sector, casualized labor
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