Historical Materialism and Globalisation by Mark Rupert;Hazel Smith;

Author:Mark Rupert;Hazel Smith; [Smith;, Mark Rupert;Hazel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134900367
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2016-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Of course, much of Marxist (and non-Marxist) reflection on the global political economy is focused on the tensions between global accumulation and territorial sovereignty; but only by explicitly problematizing the international character of capitalist politics can we gain theoretical leverage on this issue. Marx, for instance, constructed his theory of capital precisely by abstracting from the multiplicity of capitalist states and suggesting that in order to understand the process of capital accumulation ‘in its integrity … we must treat the whole world of trade as one nation and assume that capitalist production is established everywhere and has taken possession of every branch of industry’ (Marx 1977: 727). Trying to understand capitalist society’s concrete existence, however, we have to reintroduce the interstate system, without assuming that capital operates globally in the same way, whether political space is fractured territorially or not.

It is thus necessary to ask in what way the ‘logic of process’ of the capitalist mode of production became structured by the fact that its political space is fractured by sovereign territoriality; how this shapes the nature of competition between individual capitals; how the fragmentation of the capitalist polity structures the relations between classes domestically and internationally; how the world market is regulated by territorial authority and what the dynamics for the restructuration of the relationship between states and the world market are; and in what way the operation of the law of value is modified in the world market context by the fact that the circulation of capital is mediated by national currencies.

Instead of systematically answering these questions, I will here limit myself to suggesting that the starting point has to be the recognition that ‘the international’ is deeply problematic to the individual state seeking to maintain the ability of the capitals located or rooted within its boundaries to successfully extract surplus value and to accumulate. The fact that the state cannot control the conditions under which ‘its’ capitals have to reproduce themselves (and thus allow the state to reproduce itself in turn) entails a very different role of the state in the international and domestic contexts. Whereas the state domestically stands apart from the competition between individual capitals, and seeks to regulate the economy through universal forms of governance like the rule of law and money, in the international sphere it is or can itself be a competitor seeking to promote the interests of its capitals with political and economic means.

Internationally, individual states can use their political power to structure international competition in ways which benefit ‘their’ capitals to the detriment of the capitals of other states. They can use their borders and currencies to mediate the competition between the multitude of individual capitals. Thus, the world market is not simply a system of individual capitals competing with each other economically, but it is a system in which states are parties in the competition for world market shares rather than guarantors of the market as such. In that sense, it may be argued that the domestic separation of

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