Reply to Jenny Lewinsky

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jenny, I suggest you take a look at the July-August 1999 Monthly Review
(http://www.monthlyreview.org/volume51.htm#July) which looks at capitalism
at the end of the millenium. It contains an article by Ellen Meiksins Wood
titled "Unhappy Families: Global Capitalism in a World of Nation-States"
which you should find relevant. Here is a passage from that article:

===
Today, capitalism is all but universal. Capitalist laws of motion, the
logic of capitalism, has penetrated ever deeper into the societies of
advanced capitalism and spatially throughout the world. Every human
practice, every social relationship, and the natural environment are
subject to the requirements of profit-maximization, capital accumulation,
the constant self-expansion of capital. At one extreme, in advanced
capitalist countries, this means the penetration of capitalist principles
into those social, institutional, and cultural spaces that even a few
decades ago they hadn't yet reached. At the other extreme, it means the
marginalization and increasing impoverishment of whole regions outside the
advanced capitalist countries (an effect vividly described by John Saul and
Colin Leys in this issue in the article on sub-Saharan Africa). In a sense
the class polarizations of capitalism are being reproduced in the
North-South divide, not to mention the impoverishment of so-called
"underclasses" within advanced capitalist countries.

But to say that capitalism is universal is not to say that all, or even
most, capital is transnational. The measure of universalization isn't
whether, or to what degree, capital has escaped the confines of the
nation-state. We still have national economies, national states, nationally
based capital, even nationally based transnationals. It hardly needs to be
added that international agencies of capital, like the IMF or the World
Bank, are above all agents of specific national capitals, and derive
whatever powers of enforcement they have from nation-states-both the
imperial states that command them and the subordinate states that carry out
their orders.

It isn't just that nation-states have stubbornly held on through the
universalization of capitalism. If anything, the universalization of
capitalism has also meant, or at least been accompanied by, the
universalization of the nation-state. Global capitalism is more than ever a
global system of national states, and the universalization of capitalism is
presided over by nation-states, especially one hegemonic superpower.

This is a point worth emphasizing. The conventional view of "globalization"
seems to be based on the assumption that the natural tendency of capitalist
development, and specifically its internationalization, is to submerge the
nation-state, even if the process is admittedly still far from over. The
internationalization of capital, in other words, is apparently in an
inverse relation to the development of the nation-state: the more
internationalization, the less nation-state. But the historical record
suggests something different. The internationalization of capital has been
accompanied by the proliferation of capital's original political form. When
capitalism was born, the world was very far from being a world of
nation-states. Today, it is just that. And while new multinational
institutions have certainly emerged, they have not so much displaced the
nation-state as given it new roles -in fact, in some cases, new instruments
and powers.

What, then, of the decline of national sovereignty that people associate
with globalization? Of course the global economy is highly integrated, and
of course massive and rapid movements of capital across national
boundaries, especially in the form of financial speculation, are a dominant
feature of the world economy-as the articles that follow here will testify.
But those same articles will show how every transnational process is not
only shaped by specifically local conditions but also how the state is
their indispensable instrument. If "globalization" means the decline of
national capitalist classes and the nation-state, the transfer of
sovereignty from the state to the organs of some kind of unified
transnational capital, it certainly hasn't happened yet and seems unlikely
ever to happen. It is hard to foresee the day when capital will stop being
organized on national principles,

In fact, globalization itself is a phenomenon of national economies and
national states. It is impossible to make sense of it without taking
account of competition among national economies, and national states
carrying out policies to promote international "competitiveness", to
maintain or restore profitability to domestic capital, to promote the free
movement of capital while confining labor within national boundaries and
subjecting it to disciplines enforced by the state, to create and sustain
global markets-not to mention national policies deliberately designed to
forfeit national sovereignty. It needs to be added, too, that globalization
has in large part taken the form of regionalization (a point emphasized by
Greg Albo and Alan Zuege in their discussion of Europe), creating blocs of
unevenly developed and hierarchically organized national economies and
nation-states.

To say all this is certainly not to deny that the relations between capital
and nation-state take many different forms. The relations among advanced
capitalist economies and among their national states are obviously very
different from the relations between them and weaker national entities. And
the room for national maneuver varies accordingly. But it is not an
insignificant fact that all these various relations are, in one way or
another, inter-national relations.

It is not insignificant (for instance, in its consequences for oppositional
struggles, such as those described by James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer in
their article on Latin America in this issue) that imperialism today is no
longer a matter of direct colonial domination but a relationship between
national entities. In a sense, the new forms of imperial domination by
means of debt and financial manipulation, or even foreign direct
investment, are what they are precisely because they provide a means of
penetrating national boundaries, barriers that hardly existed for older
forms of colonial domination by direct military means. And, of course, this
kind of imperial power, no less than earlier forms, is exercised by
nation-states, whether directly or through international agencies.

The other side of the new imperialism is a new kind of militarism. This one
doesn't generally have territorial ambitions, and generally leaves
nation-states in place. Its objective is not hegemony over specific
colonies with identifiable geographic boundaries but boundless hegemony
over the global economy. So instead of absorbing or annexing territory,
this imperialist militarism typically uses massive displays of violence to
assert the dominance of global capital-which really means exercising the
military power of specific nation-states to assert the dominance of capital
based in a few nation-states, or one in particular, the United States,
enforcing its freedom to navigate the global economy without hindrance.

There is very little, then, that can be said about the global economy
without reference to its national constituent parts, and very little that
can be said about global economic processes without reference to relations
among national economies and states. What can we say about globalization
without invoking the relations between the United States and Japan, or
between both and the European Union, or each of them and various third
world countries? What can we say about the European Union without
acknowledging the complex and contradictory processes (explored by Albo and
Zuege) generated by the uneven development of its various constituent
economies, and the tensions between integration and competition among them,
or between impulses toward integration and assertions of national
sovereignty? What can we say about the dynamics of global capitalism in
general without acknowledging the constant tension between international
cooperation and struggles for dominance among national capitalisms-such as,
say, the consistently contradictory relationship between the United States
and Japan?

What implications, then, does all this have for our understanding of the
prolonged crisis-or the long downturn-that is the hallmark of capitalism
"at the end of the millennium"?

On the one hand, it's certainly not just a Japanese or Latin American
crisis, or the consequence of specific national strategies or policy
failures. As the articles in this issue show, it is not a function of
"crony capitalism," nor of any other specific and defective form of
capitalism. It is not exclusive to deficient capitalisms, such as the
parasitic Russian form analyzed by Stanislav Menshikov, or to the victims
of imperialism, such as those portrayed by Petras and Veltmeyer or by
Prabhat Patnaik in his article on Asia. It is a consequence of capitalism
pure and simple, and it manifests itself, as Doug Henwood demonstrates in
his piece on the United States, even in the most ostensibly successful
capitalism. Crisis is a consequence of systemic processes inherent in
capitalism as such, which are playing themselves out in every capitalist
economy and in the relations among them.

On the other hand, those systemic processes manifest themselves in
different ways in different contexts. The global crisis is shaped by the
specific national forms of its constituent parts, each with its own history
and its own internal logic, and by the relations among those national
entities. It is also shaped by the uneven development among the national
components of global capitalism. All capitalist families today are unhappy,
and all for the same fundamental reasons, but each is unhappy in its own way.

This is so not least because the principal economic actors and classes are
still organized above all on a national basis. Each nation's working class
has its own class formations, practices, and traditions. And while no one
would deny that capital is far more mobile and less place-rooted than labor
(with consequences outlined in this issue, for instance, by Bill Tabb), we
are still a very long way from the global capitalist class depicted by the
"globalization thesis." No one is likely to have much trouble
distinguishing U.S. from Japanese capital, or either one from Russian or
Brazilian. In fact, global integration itself, whatever else it may mean,
has meant intensified competition among national capitals. It would be very
hard to make sense of recent crises and the long downturn without
acknowledging that fact.

To say, as Marx did, that capitalists have no nation is certainly to say
that they have no national loyalties and will move wherever the imperatives
of profit-maximization take them, but it certainly doesn't mean that they
have no roots in, or no need for, the state or for their own nation-state
in particular. The need to maximize profit has always involved certain
requirements of organization and enforcement (among other things, to keep
the working class in place) which up to now have been, and in the
foreseeable future still promise to be, fulfilled above all by nation-states.

The fact that capitalism is a global system organized nationally means two
things, both of which are amply demonstrated in the articles that follow:
on the one hand, its systemic weaknesses and contradictions, its endemic
crises, are not national in origin. They are global, and they are inherent
in the system, rooted in capitalism's basic laws of motion. This means that
no specific national policy caused them, nor can any specific national
strategy resolve them. On the other hand, because global capitalism is
nationally organized and irreducibly dependent on national states, national
economies and national states can still be the primary terrain of
anti-capitalist struggle. At the same time, really effective oppositional
struggles can't be directed at resolving the contradictions of capitalism,
which aren't national in origin, but must be aimed at detaching social life
from the logic of capitalism altogether.


Louis Proyect

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