Rooted Globalism by Kevin Funk

Author:Kevin Funk
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780253062567
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2022-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

4

ROOTLESS GLOBALISTS?

On Denationalization and Globality

THE AIM OF THIS CHAPTER IS TO ANALYZE the claim that there exist, at least among my interviewees, economic elites whose interpretive frameworks are predominantly denational or global. At stake, again, is a crucial distinction that needs to be parsed carefully.

As noted in the previous chapter, a national or transnational capitalist is one whose profit-seeking and -generating endeavors follow a place-based logic. This means that her/his economic activities are directed toward at least one particular and delimited geographic space—such as a country or region—because the actor in question is drawn there through a personal and/or collective linkage. In turn, the terms denational, denationalized, and denationalizing refer to the decentering of the national imaginary, and situations in which national and other place-based subjective moorings are no longer the primary factor motivating economic activities.

What one would thus expect from a denational, denationalizing, or denationalized capitalist is profit-seeking behavior that passes through little to no filtering of a geographic, affective nature. Returning to the example suggested by Karl Marx (1867), the object for this iteration of “Mr. Moneybags” is to pursue profit across space and time with decreasing or no regard for territorial sentimentality. He or she is again “chase[d] … over the whole surface of the globe” in search of increasing returns, and will—or indeed “must”—“nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, [and] establish connexions [sic] everywhere,” so long as the price is right (Marx and Engels 1888, 476).

Of course, the national, transnational, and denational capitalist are species within the same genus. All are driven by a structurally determined “need for money” and to accumulate for accumulation’s sake (Marx 1844, 93). Yet whereas the national or transnational capitalist will concentrate profit-seeking endeavors within a particular space (or spaces) of personal or collective relevance, the denational capitalist has shed any such territorial logic and will instead go more or less wherever the going is good. His or her economic cartography is indeed a “flat world” (Friedman 2005).

If we imagine—for the sake of argument—that capitalist identities exist in logical and chronological order, then the final group under consideration is the global capitalist class. Continuing with the thought experiment, if Mr. Moneybags’s profit motive is largely defined by a single national/place-based set of attachments, then he (or she) can be labeled a national capitalist. If plural, then a transnational capitalist. In turn, if this place-based subjective mooring were to be decentered, we would call him or her a denational capitalist. A global Mr. Moneybags represents the next leap. In this scenario, place-based imaginaries have lost much if not all of their subjective pull, and this void has been filled by global attachments—first, to a set of (likely English-speaking) global capitalist peers, and second, to a globally organized economy, hence the aforementioned imaginary of capitalist elites as “rootless globalists.”

We may thus conceive of a global capitalist as a denational capitalist who has subsequently developed a new class consciousness based on belonging to an imagined community of capitalist peers the world over. Both may seek profits anywhere and everywhere.

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