Robinson.what Empire Whose Hegemony the Transnationalization of Capital and the Gramscian Critique of Statolatry 2004

8/13/2019 Robinson.what Empire Whose Hegemony the Transnationalization of Capital and the Gramscian Critique of Statolatry 2004

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WHAT EMPIRE? WHOSE HEGEMONY?THE TRANSNATIONALIZATION OF CAPITAL

AND THE GRAMSCIAN CRITIQUE OF STATOLATRY

WILLIAM I. ROBINSON

Department of SociologyUniversity of CaliforniaSanta Barbara, CA 93106

[email protected]

FOR PRESENTATION AT THE 2004 ANNUAL MEETINGOF THE ISA, MONTREAL, MARCH 16-21

Introduction

Globalization and hegemony are concepts that occupy an increasingly important place insocial science research and are central to out understanding of 21 st century world society. Yetthey are as well the subject of progressively pitched debates among political economists andsociologists, international relations, world-systems, and Gramscian scholars, and, moregenerally, social theorists. Debate in recent years has centered on the purported decline of U.S.hegemony and what new hegemony may take its place as the world slips into turmoil orsystemic chaos (Arrighi and Silver, 2000). More recently, the 2003 U.S. invasion andoccupation of Iraq has generated a welter of claims that U.S. interventionism and unilateralism isevidence of a new U.S. bid for world empire and a new round of inter-imperialist rivalry. My

objective in the present essay is to step back from the bustle of headlines and day-to-day events,which change so quickly that analyses may well be outdated before they are published. Instead Iwish here to examine the deeper theoretical issues of structural change in world capitalism, andto focus in particular matter of hegemony in the global system from the standpoint of globalcapitalism theory, in contrast to extant approaches that analyze this phenomenon from thestandpoint of the nation-state and the inter-state system.

Hegemony may be firmly situated in our social science lexicon, yet it means differentthings to different speakers. There are at least four interwoven conceptions in the literature onthe international order and the world capitalist system:

1) Hegemony as International Domination. Hegemony in the realist tradition inInternational Relations (IR), world politics, and some International Political Economy(IPE) , understood as dominance backed up by active domination, or hegemonism.Thus the former Soviet Union exercised hegemony over Eastern Europe and the UnitedStates exercised hegemony over the capitalist world during the Cold War.

1) Hegemony as state hegemony . Hegemony in the loose sense as evoked in much world-systems and IR literature, in reference to a dominant nation-state within the core that


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serves to anchor the world capitalist system or to impose the rules and enforcement thatallows the inter-state system to function over time. Thus, there has been a succession ofhegemonic powers in the history of world capitalism, e.g., from Dutch, to British, andthen to U.S. hegemony, and a particular power is a hegemon.

1) Hegemony as consensual domination or ideological hegemony . Hegemony in the moregeneric sense meant by Antonio Gramsci as the way in which a ruling group establishesand maintains its rule. Hegemony is rule by consent, or the cultural and intellectualleadership achieved by a particular class, class fraction, strata, or social group, as part ofa larger project of class rule or domination. Thus, in modern capitalist societies thebourgeoisie has managed to achieve its hegemony during periods of stable rule, althoughthat hegemony has broken down during periods of crisis, such as in the 20 th centuryperiod of world wars and authoritarian rule in a number of countries.

1) Hegemony as the exercise of leadership within historic blocs in a social formation . Aview of hegemony that combines the loose sense of some preeminent state power in the

world system with the more specific sense of the construction of consent or ideologicalleadership around a particular historic project. Thus the United States was able toachieve hegemony in the post-WWII period as a result, not so much of its economicdominance in global political economy and military might to back it up, than to thedevelopment of a Fordist-Keynesian social structure of accumulation that becameinternationalized under the leadership of the U.S. capitalist class.

The above is, of course, a simplification. These four approaches are not mutuallyexclusive and most social scientists would view their conception of hegemony as a synthesis ofseveral or all of them. But for arguments sake the first approach is epitomized by such realist

paradigms as the theory of hegemonic stability in the field of International Relations (IR), asdeveloped by Kenneth Waltz (1979) and Robert Keohane (1984), among others. We couldcharacterize Immanuel Wallersteins well-known essay, The Three Instances of Hegemony inthe History of the Capitalist World-Economy (1984), as archetypical of the second approach,while Giovanni Arrighis 1994 study, The Long Twentieth Century , may be its most elegantexpression in the world-systems tradition. Gramscis own writings (1971) epitomize the thirdapproach. The Frankfurt school writings of the early and mid 20 th century, and perhaps morerecently, some of the theoretical work of Habermas and of Bordeau, and late 20 th centurypolitical sociology research on power, may draw on or develop out of this approach. The fourthis closely associated with the work of Robert Cox (see, inter-alia, 1987) and the Italian, or neo-Gramscian, school in IR, and may be best illustrated by Mark Ruperts study, Producing

Hegemony (1995), although Justin Rosenbergs The Empire of Civil Society (1994) stands out aswell.

All four conceptions of hegemony may be of value insofar as they have contributed tounderstanding the evolving historical structures of the world capitalist system. But here I want tosuggest that an understanding of the current dynamics of the global system requires a moreexpansive approach, one that allows for innovations in order to grasp novel transnationalprocesses unfolding in the early 21 st century that form the backdrop to the bustle of fluid andrapidly changing conjunctures, such as the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. In a nutshell, I


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suggest that we need to expunge nation-state centrism from the discussion of hegemony. Thisallows us to conceive of disputes over hegemony and other global political dynamics involvingtransnational social forces not necessarily tied to any one nation-state. We need, indeed, tomove away altogether from a statist conception of hegemony -- from statism -- and revert to aview of hegemony as a form of social domination exercised not by states but by social groups

and classes operating through states and other institutions. This allows us to identify socialgroups in the global system that may now be attempting to construct a hegemony beyond formalstate institutions, and it provides for greater latitude in assessing 21 st century hegemonic projects.

In pursuing these ideas I want to draw on Gramscis theoretical discussion of hegemonyand on his critique of the reification of the state. My aim is to apply a global capitalism approach(see, e.g., Robinson, 1996, 2001, 2003, 2004; Sklair, 2001, 2002;) to the current global order byexplicitly linking the process of globalization to the construction of hegemonies and counter-hegemonies in the 21 st century. I will draw as well from the works of Cox (1987, 1995) andothers from the neo-Gramscian (see, inter-alia, Gill, 1990, 1993; 2003 Gill and Mittelman, 2001)and related schools of critical global political economy (see, inter-alia, Palan, 2000; Rupert andSmith, 2002). But I will part ways over what I see as excessive state-centric emphases,

attempting to move to beyond what I have critiqued as a nation-state framework of analysisthat accords centrality to the nation-state in macro-social inquiry (Robinson 1998; 2002). In thisframework, nations are seen as discrete units within a larger system (the world-system or theinternational system) characterized by external relations among these units. Economicglobalization is analyzed from the political framework of the nation-state system and the agencytherein of national classes and groups. Studying social phenomena in the new epoch requiresthat we adopt a transnational or global approach in place of this outdated national/internationalapproach. The national/international approach focuses on the pre-existing system of nation-states as an immutable structural feature of the larger world or inter-state system, whereas bycontrast trans national or globalization approaches focus on how the system of nation-states andnational economies, etc., are becoming transcended by transnational social forces and institutions

grounded in the global system rather than the interstate system.To get beyond nation-state centrist ways of thinking we need to keep in mind that a studyof globalization is fundamentally historical analysis. When we forget that the nation-state is anhistorically-bound phenomenon we reify the nation-state, and by extension the inter-state systemor the world system founded on nation-states. To reify something is to attribute a thing-likestatus to what should be more properly seen as a complex and changing set of social relationsthat our practice has created, and that has no ontological status independent of human agency.When we forget that the reality to which these concepts refer is our own sets of social relationsthat are themselves in an ongoing process of transformation and instead attribute someindependent existence to them then we are reifying. For instance, a nation-state is not atangible thing in so far as borders are artificial lines we draw through real space. A state isnot, of course, the physical buildings which house government officials or a capital city but a setof social relations and practices we have created and institutionalized. To see the state as something-in-itself is to reify the state. To the extent that they posit the nation-state system as anontological feature of world capitalism extant approaches risk falling into the pitfall ofreification. The imputation of a trans-historic character to the nation-state is erroneous in that itassigns a universal character to relatively fixed set of historic structures whose foundations werelaid in the 16 th and 17th centuries. I want to challenge the assumption so ingrained that it isoften only implicit and taken-for-granted - that that by fiat we are speaking of the hegemony of a


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particular nation-state or coalition of states when we discuss hegemony in the global system.It is only a short step from reifying the nation-state to reifying the state (the two are not

coterminous). There is a rich theoretical literature across the social sciences on the state thatcannot be referenced here (but see, inter-alia, Clark, 1991; Held, 1984). What concerns me hereare twin problematics. The first problematic is the Weberian versus the Marxist conceptions of

the state, a matter that I have taken up at some length elsewhere (Robinson, 2001; 2003; 2004),and which I want to apply to the analysis of transnational hegemony. The former reifies the stateas a thing, an entity with an independent existence as expressed by a set the institutions and themanagers or cadre that administer these institutions. The latter views the state as a set ofinstitutionalized class and social power relations. The second problematic is the separation ofthe economic and the political under capitalism. This separation is taken as natural or organic inliberal ideology and has been given historical and theoretical treatment, among others, in theworks of Marx, Polanyi, Poulantzas, and Gramsci. The formal or apparent, separation of thepolitical and the economic spheres of a larger social totality under capitalism is not real; it isillusory. It takes the expression of the separation of the public from the private, the formerseen as the state proper, or what Gramsci referred to as political society, and the latter as what

Gramsci referred to as civil society (1971:12-13).In his essay, State and Civil Society, Gramsci (1971:210-276) critiques the conceptionof the state developed by ideologues of capitalist society as derived from the separation ofpolitics and economics and conceived as a thing in itself, as a rational absolute (1971:117).This results, in Gramscis view, is a reified or fetishistic view, in which individuals are led tothink that in actual fact there exists above them a phantom entity, the abstraction of the collectiveorganism, a species of autonomous divinity that thinks, not with the head of a specific being, yetnevertheless thinks, that moves, not with the real legs of a person, yet still moves (Gramsci,1995:15). Gramsci criticized this view of the state as a thing-in-itself, as an entity unto itselfin political society, as statolatry (1971:268-69). Instead, the state is the entire complex ofpractical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its

dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules (Ibid:244). Herethe state becomes the integral or extended state, in Gramscis formula, encompassingpolitical plus civil society, a conception aimed at overcoming the illusory dualism of the politicaland the economic.

Somewhere along the way between the early 20 th century of Gramscis time and the post-WWII period I wont attempt here to retrace the genealogy Gramscis concept of thehegemony of ruling groups and the historical blocs of social forces they construct becametransformed into the notion of the hegemony of a state in the inter-state system. Was this

justified? Is it still? I will return to these queries after a brief excursion into global capitalismtheory and the thesis of transnational class formation.

Global Capitalism and Transnational Class Formation

My approach to globalization can be broadly identified with the "global capitalism" thesis(see, inter-alia, McMichael, 2000; Ross and Trachte, 1990; Went, 2002; Sklair, 1999,2002;Robinson, 1996, 2001, 2003, 2004) that proposes that globalization represents an epochal shift (not a rupture or discontinuity per se ) in the history of world capitalism. In synthesis, the world


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hegemony of a state . Hegemony is exercised by social groups , by classes or class fractions, by aparticula r social configuration of these fractions and groups. When we speak of Britishhegemony or U.S. hegemony we do not really mean British or U.S. as in the country. Thisis merely shorthand for saying the hegemony of British capitalist groups and allied strata, such asBritish state managers and middle class sectors, in the context of world capitalism. But problems

arise when we forget that this is just shorthand. The term hegemon is generally evoked in aparticularly misleading way because, in the Gramscian construct, a country or a state cannot be ahegemon. A social group exercising hegemony through a state may be hegemonic and hencethe term hegemon to describe that state is shorthand that is highly susceptible to reification.

If classes and groups are nationally-organized then this shorthand is justified. In anearlier moment in the history of world capitalism classes were organized around national marketsand national circuits of accumulation, even as these national markets and capital circuits were inturn linked to a more encompassing world market and processes of accumulation on a worldscale. I want to suggest, however, that the process of economic globalization is creating theconditions for a shift in the locus of class and social group formation from the nation-state to theglobal system. If a claim can be made that classes and groups are no longer in the main national

then we need to put aside the shorthand and reformulate the conceptions that justified suchshorthand. Historically the process of class formation in the capitalist system may have takenplace through the institutional framework of the nation-state but under globalization this isincreasingly less so. Until recently, the reality of capital as a totality of competing individualcapitals and their concrete existence as a class relation within specific spatial confinesdetermined geographically as nation-states worked against a trans-, or supranational, unifyingtrend in the development of world capitalism. To state this differently, in a world of nationaleconomies, classes developed around national circuits of accumulation. As these circuitsbecome transnationalized so too do classes, political processes, states, and cultural-ideologicalprocesses. The locus of class and group relations in the new epoch shifts increasingly from thenation-state to the global system.

How is the matter of transnational class formation linked to that of hegemony? Theremay be a plethora of competing interpretations of hegemony but all exhibit an underlyingassumption that hegemony is exercised by countries or states within the nation-state/inter-statesystem. To get beyond this we need to extend the analysis developed by the neo-Gramscianschool, following Cox (1987:4) that by discerning different modes of social relations ofproduction it is possible to consider how changing production relations give rise to particularsocial forces that become bases of power within and across states and then within a specificworld order. To examine the reciprocal relationship between production and power there is,then, a focus on how social relations of production may give rise to certain social forces, howthese forces may become the bases of power in forms of state and how this might shape worldorder. I am suggesting here that globalizing production relations have thrown up new socialforces, or class forces, namely a TCC and allied transnationally-oriented strata, and this TCC isat the helm of a project albeit incomplete and contested to construct a transnationalhegemony.

In what ways have new social forces been generated by the globalization process? Theparticular local social structures of accumulation that developed during the nation-state phase ofworld capitalism often took the form of corporatist, welfare, and developmentalist projects, allpredicated on a redistributive logic and on incorporation of labor and other popular classes intonational historical blocs (Kotz, McDonough, and Reich, 1994). As these modes of


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Fordist/Keynesian accumulation corresponding to national capitalism eroded under the thrust ofglobalization, new variants of capitalist relations emerged and these social structures ofaccumulation and the class alliances and arrangements between dominant and subordinategroups they embodied, began to break down (Lipeitz, 1987; Ross and Trachte, 1990; Hoogvelt,1997). The liberation of transnational capital from the constraints and commitments placed on it

by the social forces in the nation-state phase of capitalism has dramatically altered the balance offorces among classes and social groups in each nation of the world and at a global level towardsa TCC and its agents. As capital assumed new power relative to labor with the onset ofglobalization, states shifted from reproducing Keynesian social structures of accumulation toservicing the general needs of the new patterns of global accumulation and the TCC. Economicintegration processes and neo-liberal structural adjustment programs are driven by transnationalcapitals campaign to open up every country to its activities, to tear down all barriers to themovement of goods and capital, and to create a single unified field in which global capital canoperate unhindered across all national borders (see, inter-alia, Robinson, 2001; 2003; in press).This declining ability of the nation-state to intervene in the process of capital accumulation andto determine economic policies, a constant theme in the literature on globalization, reflects the

newfound power that transnational capital has acquired over popular classes. This newfoundpower of transnational capital helped it in its efforts to mold a highly favorable global socialstructures of accumulation (see, inter-alia, Overbeek, 1993; Hoogvelt, 1997; Robinson, 2001,2003; 2004).

There are important political and class implications of the transnationalization of thecapital circuit. In previous epochs of capitalism the nation-state was the predominant locus ofstruggles among classes and social groups over the distribution of wealth, over socialarrangements, and political projects. The nation-state acted fundamentally to mediate classrelations and was a key political determinant in class formation. Subordinate classes mediatedtheir relation to capital through the nation-state. Capitalist classes developed within theprotective cocoon of nation-states and developed interests in opposition to rival national capitals.

These states expressed the coalitions of classes and groups that were incorporated into thehistoric blocs of nation-states. But as national productive structures become transnationallyintegrated through the globalization process, world classes whose organic development tookplace through the nation-state are experiencing supra-national integration with "national" classesof other countries. To the extent that local production systems are integrated into globalizedcircuits of production through the process of transnationalization, the logic of local and globalaccumulation tend to converge and the earlier rivalries between capitalists no longer take theform of national rivalries. Competition between capitalists remains fierce but there have beenchanges in the character of this competition. Given the increasing deterritorialization ofaccumulation processes and the transnational integration of capitalists (see below), competitionis increasingly between oligopolist clusters in a transnational environment. National capitalistclasses are drawn by globalization into transnational chains that reorient the determinants ofclass formation. Globalization creates new forms of transnational class alliances across bordersand new forms of class cleavages globally and within countries, regions, cities, and localcommunities, in ways quite distinct from the old national class structures and international classconflicts and alliances. Internationalization occurs when national capitals expand their reachbeyond their own national borders. Transnationalization is when national capitals fuse withother internationalizing national capitals in a process of cross-border interpenetration thatdisembedds them from their nations and locates them in new supranational space opening up


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under the global economy.At what point national classes become transformed into transnational classes is open to

debate - despite the fact that we can conceptually distinguish such a class - and depends upon thedevices we construct to define the material bases of transnational classes. It is not possible toexplore the rapidly expanding body of empirical research on TCC formation (but see, inter-alia,

Robinson and Harris, 2000; Sklair, 2001; Carroll, 2002; Carroll and Carson, 2003; Robinson,2004). We need ongoing methodologically diverse research into this process. The existingresearch is not conclusive, but it does provide us with some direct data on the rise of a TCC anda great deal of indirect , or peripheral, indicators. Taken as a whole, these are clear markers onthe basis of which we can infer an underlying process of TCC formation. Among these markersare:

The phenomenal rise of foreign direct investment (FDI); The spread of transnational corporations (TNCs); A steep increase in cross-border mergers and acquisitions; Increasing transnational interlocking of TNC directorates; Increasing ownership by nationals from numerous countries of TNC stock The rapid spread of strategic alliances among companies of distinct national origins; New global economic arrangements (diverse forms of transnatioally-networked

production involving capitalists from multiple countries, such as worldwidesubcontracting and outsourcing);

TCC formation in the Third World and increased FDI originating from the Global South; The increase in numbers, and heightened influence of, transnational peak business

associations.

Diverse new network forms of organizing globalized production (see, e.g., Castells, 2000) areimportant because they contribute to the development of worldwide networks that link localcapitalists to one another, generate an identity of objective interests and of subjective outlookamong these capitalists around a process of global (as opposed to local) accumulation. Theytherefore function as integrative mechanisms in the formation of the TCC and act to shift thelocus of class formation from national to emergent transnational space.

The leading capitalist strata worldwide may be crystallizing into a TCC. This newtransnational bourgeoisie may be viewed as comprising the owners of transnational capital, thatis, the group that owns the leading worldwide means of production as embodied principally inthe transnational corporations, or TNCs, and private financial institutions. This class istrans national because it is tied to globalized circuits of production, marketing, and financesunbound from particular national territories and identities, and because its interests lie in globalover local or national accumulation. The TCC therefore can be located in the global classstructure by its ownership and/or control of transnational capital. What distinguishes the TCCfrom national or local capitalists is that it is involved in globalized production and managesglobalized circuits of accumulation that give it an objective class existence and identity spatiallyand politically in the global system above any local territories and polities. As the agent of theglobal economy, transnational capital has become the hegemonic fraction of capital on a worldscale. Here fraction denotes segments within classes determined by their relation to socialproduction and the class as a whole. The hegemonic fraction of capital is that fraction whichimposes the general direction and character on production worldwide and conditions the social,


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political, and cultural character of capitalist society worldwide. The TCC has been attempting toestablish itself as a new ruling class worldwide. It is represented by a class-conscioustransnational elite that has been pursuing a class project of capitalist globalization, as reflected inits global decision-making and the rise of a transnational state (TNS) apparatus under theauspices of this fraction.

In modern conditions, argues Gramsci, a class maintains its dominance not simplythrough a special organization of force, but because it is able to go beyond its narrow,corporative interests, exert a moral and intellectual leadership, and make compromises, withincertain limits, with a variety of allies who are unified in a social bloc of forces which Gramscicalls the historic bloc. The bloc represents the basis of consent for a certain social order, inwhich the hegemony of a dominant class is created and re-created in a web of institutions,material/power relations, and ideas. I draw on Gramscis concept of historic blocs, which arehegemonic projects, in arguing that hegemony in 21 st century global society will not be exercisedby a nation-state - which in any event is shorthand for saying it will not be exercised bydominant groups from any particular nation-state or region - but by an emergent global capitalisthistoric bloc.

This emergent hegemonic bloc consists of various economic and political forces led bythe TCC whose politics and policies are conditioned by the new global structure of accumulationand production. It is the logic of global, rather than national, accumulation that guides thepolitical and economic behavior of this bloc, henceforth referred to as the globalist bloc. At thecenter of the globalist bloc is the TCC, comprised of the owners and managers of thetransnational corporations and other capitalists around the world who manage transnationalcapital. The bloc also includes the cadre, bureaucratic managers and technicians who administerthe agencies of the TNS, such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, the states of the Northand the South, and other transnational forums. Membership in the hegemonic bloc would alsoinclude an array of politicians and charismatic public figures, along with select organicintellectuals, who provide ideological legitimacy and technical solutions. Below this

transnational elite are a small and shrinking layer of middle classes and cosmopolitanprofessionals who exercise very little real power but who - pacified with mass consumption -form a fragile buffer between the transnational elite and the world's poor majority. It is in thisway that we can speak of a historic bloc in the Gramscian sense as a ruling coalition and a socialbase in which one group exercises leadership (the TCC) and imposes its project through theconsent of those drawn into the bloc. Those from this poor majority who are not drawn into thehegemonic project, either through material mechanisms or ideologically, are contained orrepressed. The world politics of this new global ruling class is not driven, as they were fornational ruling classes, by the flux of shifting rivalries and alliances played out through theinterstate system.

The Debate on U.S. Hegemony and Hegemonic Transitions

How, then, do we conceive of hegemony in the emerging global order? The struggle forhegemony is always unfinished and ongoing. Among the welter of social forces and institutionsbound up with battles over hegemony, I want to foreground the rise of an emergent transnationalconfiguration, led by the TCC, and its struggle to achieve hegemony in global society. Whether


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such a transnational hegemony becomes stabilized, and what institutional configuration couldachieve its maintenance and reproduction remains to be seen. Yet the worldwidedecentralization of production takes place together with the centralization of command andcontrol of the global economy.

For realists, world-system analysts, and Marxists, hegemony is inextricably tied up with

state power, and state power is conceived in terms of the nation-state. The logic of a competingnation-state system as the basis for analyzing world dynamics leads analysts to search forhegemony in some type of nation-state configuration in the new global order. The world-systemapproach to hegemony focuses on successive state hegemons . Looking backward, the baton waspassed from the Italian city states to Holland, Great Britain, and then the United States. Thepredominant view now seems to be the rise of an East Asian hegemony (Arrighi and Silver,1999; Frank, 1998). For its part, the Italian school focuses on a succession of hegemonic

projects , from the liberal international economy (1789-1873) under British leadership, to an eraof rival imperialisms (1873-1945), and then to the post-WWII of pax Americana , under U.S.leadership (Cox, 1987:109). The neo-Gramscians acknowledge that profound changes to worldorder but most retain the framework of the nation-state and the inter-state system in their

concrete analyses (see, e.g. Gill, 1990, 2003).A reified vision of the state that suggests states rather than social groups and classes ascentral historical actors leads to the search for a state-based configuration in analysis ofcommand, control, and power in the global system. But command and control of the globaleconomy is ever-more centralized not within a state or a nation-state but in transnational capitaland allied groups and strata, such as transnationally-oriented state managers and functionaries ofthe supranational agencies (the IMF, WTO, etc.). Hence, the historical pattern of successive"hegemons" may be coming to an end. Pax Americana was the "final frontier of the old nation-state system and hegemons therein. We are witness to a bid for transnational hegemony asexpressed in the rise of a new global capitalist historic bloc, global in scope and based on thehegemony of transnational capital. The problem of state-centric and nation-state centric analysis

is that it does not allow us to conceive of an emergent global hegemony in terms of transnationalclasses and groups less bound than in the past to any one state or to specific geographies.Transnational structures are emerging from the womb of a nation-state system which itself isunevenly developed. The form of the old inevitably shapes that of the new. The old and newexist in both the structural organization of globalization as well as the subjective thinking of itsactors and agents. We are witnessing the decline of U.S. supremacy and the early stages of thecreation of a transnational hegemony through supra-national structures that are not yet capable ofproviding the economic regulation and political conditions for the reproduction of globalcapitalism.

But my argument has meant stiff resistance from social scientists from a variety oftraditions who advance such scenarios as competing regions, hegemonic rivalries, and a U.S.drive for world hegemony (see, e.g., Arrighi, 1994; Arrighi and Silver, 1999; Gowan, 1999;Frank, 1998; Goldfrank, 2001; Freeman, 2002; Gibbs, 2001). In these scenarios, the worldsystem is assumed to still be characterized in the current epoch by competitive nation-states asthe appropriate sub-units of analysis. But hegemonic transition theories see world hegemony asexercised by particular nation-states or geopolitical entities. The stubborn Weberian problem ofreification that predominates among world-system, international relations, international politicaleconomy, and even Marxist paradigms of world political dynamics leads us time and again toconfuse the collective agency of historically situated and evolving social forces, who operate


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from within and outside institutions such as states that are themselves historical and evolving, forthe state/nation-state as a fictitious macro-agent. Reification prevents us from identifying theconstellation of social forces in conflict and cooperation, their changing historical development,interests and relations, as explanatory of state policies, ideologies, etc. (what states "do"). Thereis no justification in assuming a priori, rather than demonstrating, that particular constellations

of social forces exercising a commanding influence of national states around the world in theearly 21st century are nationally-based social forces, that is, social forces whose interests lie indefense of national economies and capitalists in competition with those from other nations. I donot believe this prevailing theoretical framework of hegemonic transitions, with its statestructuralism and nation-state centrism, is adequate to capture the current period of change,insofar as new transnational social forces have emerged that are no longer grounded in particularstates and the old dynamics of state and geo-political competition.

The claim that Great Power rivalry is again on the increase was popular in the early1990s and enjoyed a comeback after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq in the face of French,German, and Russian opposition. A more nuanced approach saw struggle among competingcore power blocs for hegemonic succession in the wake of U.S. decline. In this "three competing

blocs" (or "regionalization") scenario, EU, U.S., and East-Asian blocs were non-global regionalformations. Each core grouping was said to be integrating its periphery into a regional formationin competition with rival regional blocs and a number of scholars predicted the rise of an EastAsia hegemon. The notions of renewed Great Power rivalry and of three competing blocs werebacked by little concrete evidence and not really supported by global political and economicdynamics in recent years. An analysis of global investment patterns by transnationalcorporations suggested each bloc was interpenetrated by the other two and formed anincreasingly integrated global "triad" based on the expanding interpenetration of capital amongthe worlds top TNCs. As these capitalists integrate they draw in local networks and productionchains into complex cross-national webs, making it difficult to box political relations amongstates and competition among economic groups into the old nation-state geopolitical framework.

In this outdated framework, for instance, Asian economic success is to constitute acompetitive threat to U.S. interests and a sign of geopolitical competition. But we could onlyreach such a conclusion by ignoring the fact that East Asian dynamism is inseparable from themassive entrance of transnational capital and that local elites have sought not a regional circuit ofaccumulation in rivalry with circuits elsewhere but a more complete integration into globalizedcircuits. U.S. investors have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in Asia. Economicdynamism benefits these investors as much as it benefits local elites. Given an open globaleconomy and capitals global mobility, superior economic performance in a particular regionclearly benefits all investor groups in that region. Even if the argument could be made thatleading national states protect the interests of investors within determined national borders thatis, even if there still exists a territorial dimension to capital and a geopolitical content to worldpolitics - the fact remains that those investors originate from many countries. Capitalists withinvestment in the territory of the United States, for instance, carry passports from Germany,France, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Japan, Brazil, Korea, and numerous other countries, and find thatthe U.S. national state protects and promotes their investments.

A more satisfying explanation than geopolitical competition, I suggest, is that regionalaccumulation patterns reflect certain spatial distinctions complementary to an increasinglyintegrated global capitalist configuration. We do not see so a recentering of the global economyin East Asia, as Arrighi and Silver (1999:219) claim from the world-system perspective, as much


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are captured from these groups. The second is from dominant groups who are less integratedinto (or even opposed to) global capitalism, such as, for example, the Baath Party/Iraq state eliteprior to the 2003 U.S. invasion, sectors among the Russian oligarchy, or Chinese economic andpolitical elites. The uneven development of the transnationalization process is an importantsource of conflict. Distinct national histories, regional experiences, and political cultures shape

how particular countries enter the global system. Despite TCC formation in Russia, to take oneexample, there are powerful economic groups in that country who appropriated Soviet stateenterprises grounded in regional Russian rather than global markets. These groups are moredirectly dependent on Russian expansionary influence and state support than they would be iftheir enterprises exhibited a greater integration into global capital circuits. The emerging globalorder, we should bear in mind, is unevenly hegemonic. Hegemonic power does not operate in auniform manner across the globe.

Could regionally as opposed to globally-oriented elites, therefore, attempt to chart anindependent course, say, in East Asia, should they manage to gain state power? Could theywithdraw their region from the global economy or try to set up a regional alternative to it? Thisis a plausible, if unlikely, scenario. But does it validate the conclusion that 21 st century world

political dynamics are, in actual fact, driven by regional competition for hegemony? I think not.First, the extensive transnational integration of regional economic groups and theinterpenetration of their capitals is particularly noteworthy in the case of European and EastAsian groups precisely those that according to predominant thinking are most likely to becontenders for regional hegemony. Why would the interests of these groups lie in a withdrawalinto their own regions, or in a competing regional center, rather than in a globally integratedsystem? Second, there is little empirical support in actual politics for the claim that Asian elitesare seeking regional hegemonic pretension and much in the foreign and economic policies ofEast Asian nations to suggest just the opposite an increasing transnational orientation amongthese groups. Third, the view that dominant groups in Europe or Asia are seeking the hegemonyof their regions, even if this were backed by evidence, does not justify the thesis of U.S.

hegemonic pretension, insofar as U.S. state policy could well be seen as an effort to shore upglobal capitalism over attempts to regionalize the world economy.How, then, do we understand such evident realities of trade wars, often acrimonious

differences among core power governments, and above all, the preponderant role of the UnitedStates in world affairs, its seeming hegemony, and its often unilateral military interventionabroad? According to extant paradigms U.S. state behavior in the global arena are undertaken indefense of "U.S. interests" (e.g., Gibbs 2001; Gowan, 1999). Most scholars and analysts see theinstitutions of the TNS as instruments of U.S. hegemony. The main project within the WTO[is] what we can call the Anglo-American project, claims Bello, echoing the typical argument.The same is true of the IMF and the World Bank. What we are really talking about is theAnglo-Americanization of capitalism (Bello, 2002b:39). But an official from the U.S., Germanor Japanese government who staffs the IMF or the WTO may well be pursuing transnationalcapitalist interests within these organizations and not (reified) "U.S., "German, or "Japanese"interests. When the IMF or the World Bank opens up a country through liberalization measuresit is opened not exclusively to Anglo-U.S. capital but to capitalists from anywhere in theworld. Approached from an empirical standpoint, there is little evidence to suggest that U.S.state policies in recent years have advanced the interests of "U.S" capital over other "national"capitals. Analysis would suggest, to the contrary, that the U.S. state has, in the main, advancedtransnational capitalist interests. And an analysis of TNS institutions suggests that they act not to


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enforce U.S. policies but to force nationally-oriented policies in general into transnationalalignment. The United States has taken the lead in developing policies and strategies on behalfof the global capitalist agenda precisely because it was the last "hegemon" among core powers,because globalization emerged in the period of worldwide U.S. dominance and the concentrationof resources and coercive powers within the U.S. national state allows it to play a leadership role

on behalf of a transnational elite. The TCC and its globalist bloc has relied to advance itsinterests on existing national state apparatuses and also increasingly on the emergent apparatusof a TNS, and in doing so it has found the U.S. national state to be the most powerful of theseapparatuses. This is the particular form through which the old geopolitics of the nation-state aresimultaneously being played out and winding down.

What about trade wars and national competition, which are seen by scholars such asBrenner (2002) to drive world political dynamics in the 21 st century? Trade tensions may wellbreak out between individual sectors (such as bananas) that turn to specific national states forsupport. But the evidence suggests a process of mutual competition and integration acrossborders rather than U.S. hegemony. Capitalist groups that in earlier epochs produced nationallyand then exported to the world market have largely replaced this strategy with in-country

production. In 1997, global figures for sales by TNC in-country affiliates reached $9.7 trillion,compared to cross-border trade that totaled $5.3 trillion (USITC, 2001:1-3). According to theU.S. International Trade Commission, in 1997 sales by U.S. owned foreign affiliates abroadtotaled $2.4 trillion compared to $928 billion in U.S. exports. Sales by foreign affiliates insidethe U.S. reached $1.7 trillion while their imports amounted to $1 trillion (USITC, 2001:2-6).Under these circumstances trade wars begin to lose all meaning if analyzed in conventionterms of rival national capitalist groups and their respective states.

This does not mean that trade conflicts are illusory. Capitalist competition underglobalization is as fierce as it has ever been. But it takes on a new meaning. It is less a case ofnational states using their power to win export markets for territorially-based corporations thancompetition among transnational corporate conglomerates that seek advantages over competitors

through corporate dominance achieved via the global integration of production facilities and thatseek the favor of a multiplicity of states. Competition in the globalization epoch takes placeamong dense networks of transnational corporate alliances and through struggles within everycountry and within transnational institutions. Given their global interests and the extent of theirtransnational interpenetration, TNCs must take an active political and economic interest in eachcountry and region in which they operate. They may turn to any national state to gaincompetitive advantage as part of their corporate strategy. Globalization is not a nationalproject but a class project without a national strategy, or rather, with a strategy that seeks toutilize the existing political infrastructure of the nation-state system and simultaneously to craftTNS structures.

We have not seen a resurgence of the old imperialism or an intensification of inter-imperialist rivalry. The classical theories of imperialism emphasized core national state controlover peripheral regions in order to open these regions to capital export from the particularimperialist country and to exclude capital from other countries. Export capital feels mostcomfortablewhen its own state is in complete control of the new territory, for capital exportsfrom other countries are then excluded, it enjoys a privileged position, observed Hilferding, inhis classic study on imperialism (1910:322). The competition among these competing nationalcapitals, according to the theory, led to inter-state competition and military rivalry among themain capitalist countries. The structural changes that have led to the transnationalization of


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national capitals, finances, and markets, and the actual outcomes of recent U.S.-led political andmilitary campaigns, suggest new forms of global capitalist domination, whereby interventioncreates conditions favorable to the penetration of transnational capital and the renewedintegration of the intervened region into the global system.

Global capitalism requires an apparatus of direct coercion to open up zones that may fall

under renegade control, to impose order, and repress rebellion when it threatens the stability orsecurity of the system. There are no transnational capitalist armed forces and there may not befor many years to come. Transnational investors who may carry a passport from any countryneed to move their capital around the world with the security of knowing there will be ultimatecoercive protection of their capital and of property rights. A political authority with a coercivecapacity must exist that will attempt to secure the environment necessary to undertakeaccumulation. For historic reasons the U.S. state houses and exercises direct control over theprinciple military machine in the world and that military machine has been deployed on a regularbasis in the globalization era as the ultimate guarantor of global capitalism and its authority.Hardt and Negri (2000) have provided us with an appropriate image of the global capitalistsyst em as empire whose legitimacy is sustained through ongoing military intervention

(spearheaded by the U.S. military machine) or what they term police action. Militaryexpansion is in the interests of the TNCs. U.S. military intervention opens up for TNCs newmarkets, outlets for investment, access to raw materials, and pools of exploitable labor. The1991 and the 2003 U.S. military interventions in the Middle East and the 2002 intervention inCentral Asia, among others, resulted in a transnational outcome, despite surface appearance,insofar as these region became more drawn into the global capitalist system.

The U.S. state is the point of condensation for pressures from dominant groups to resolveproblems of global capitalism and for pressures to secure the legitimacy of the system overall.This subjects it to great strain. Moreover, although U.S. state managers face institutionalconstraints and structural imperative to bolster global accumulation processes they also facedirect instrumental pressures of groups seeking their particular interests. It was notorious, for

instance, that oil and military-industrial concerns brazenly utilized the administration of GeorgeW. Bush to pursue narrow corporate gains ( The Economist , 2003) in a way that may appeared tohave contravened the more long-term interests of the transnational project. But narrow corporateinterests do not mean U.S . corporate interests. The beneficiaries of U.S. military action aroundthe world are not U.S. but transnational capitalist groups. The Economist (2003:52) found thatout of 405 top corporate directors in the United States who formerly held important governmentpost most were concentrated in a handful of industries, top among them finance and insurance(64 directorships), energy and utilities (53), telecoms and software (39), healthcare andpharmaceuticals (26), and defense (22), precisely those sectors that tend to be mosttransnationalized. More generally, U.S. intervention facilitates a shift in power from locally andregionally-oriented elites to new groups more favorable to the transnational project (Robinson,1996). The result of U.S. military conquest is not the creation of exclusive zones for U.S.exploitation, as was the result of the Spanish conquest of Latin America, the British of SouthAfrica and India, the Dutch of Indonesia, and so forth, in earlier moments of the world capitalistsystem. We see not a reenactment of this old imperialism but the colonization and recolonizationof the vanquished for the new global capitalism and its agents. The underlying class relationbetween the TCC and the U.S. national state needs to be understood in these terms.

We face an empire of global capital, headquartered, for evident historic reasons, inWashington. There is little disagreement among global elites, regardless of their formal


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nationality, that U.S. power should be rigorously applied (e.g., to impose IMF programs, tobomb the former Yugoslavia, for peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions, etc.) in orderto sustain and defend global capitalism. U.S. imperialism refers to the use by transnationalelites of the U.S. state apparatus to continue to attempt to expand, defend and stabilize the globalcapitalist system. The question for global elites, and a major point of contention among them, is,

in what ways, under what particular conditions, arrangements, and strategies should U.S. statepower be wielded?

The Problematic Nature of Hegemony and the Crisis of Global Capitalism

The globalist bloc may have appeared insurgent and triumphalist in the 1990s but it hasrun up against one crisis after another in its effort to secure its leadership and reproducehegemony. A necessary condition for the attainment of hegemony by a class or class fraction isthe supersession of narrow economic interests by a more universal social vision or ideology, andthe concrete coordination of the interests of other groups with those of the leading class or

fraction in the process of securing their participation in this social vision. Here, the narrowinterests of transnational finance capital (currency speculators, bankers, portfolio investors, etc.)seemed to hold out the prospects of frustrating a hegemonic project. As well, a unified socialvision has been difficult to secure because distinct elites seek different and even conflictingsolutions to the problems of global capitalism based in the historic experiences of their regionalsystems. There has been considerable strategic debate and tactical differences within the ranksof the TCC, and in particular, rising splits and factional disputes. The system of globalcapitalism, in fact, entered into a deep crisis in the late 1990s. There were twin dimensions tothis crisis.

The first was a structural crisis of overaccumulation and of social polarization . Byredefining the phase of distribution in the accumulation of capital in relation to nation-states,

globalization undermines the distinct state redistribution and other mechanisms that acted inearlier epochs to offset the inherent tendency within capitalism towards polarization. The resulthas been a rapid process of global social polarization and a crisis of social reproduction. In mostcountries, the average number of people who have been integrated into the global marketplaceand are becoming "global consumers" has increased rapidly in recent decades. However, it isalso true that the absolute number of the impoverished - of the destitute and near destitute hasincreased and the gap between the rich and the poor in global society has been widening sincethe 1970s (tables 1). Broad swaths of humanity have experienced absolute downward mobility.While global per capita income tripled over the period 1960-1994, there were over a hundredcountries in the 1990s with per capita incomes lower than in the 1980s, or in some cases, lowerthan in the 1970s and 1960s (UNDP, as cited in Stalker, 2000:139).

Table 1: Shares of World Income 1965-1990 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Population Percent of Total World Income

1965 1970 1980 1990

Poorest 20% 2.3 2.2 1.7 1.4Second 20% 2.9 2.8 2.2 1.8Third 20% 4.2 3.9 3.5 2.1


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Fourth 20% 21.2 21.3 18.3 11.3Richest 20% 69.5 70.0 75.4 83.4---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Source: (Korzeniewicz and Moran, 1997)

The system cannot expand because the marginalization of a significant portion ofhumanity from direct productive participation, the downward pressure on wages and popularconsumption worldwide, and the polarization of income, has reduced the ability of the worldmarket to absorb world output. This is the structural underpinning to the series of crises thatbegan in Mexico in 1995 and then intensified with the Asian financial meltdown of 1997-98, andthe world recession that began in 2001. The inability of the system to expand through absorptionof its surplus by the consumption of ordinary working people makes state-driven militaryspending and the growth of a military-industrial complex an outlet for surplus and gives thecurrent global order a frightening built-in war drive.

No emergent ruling class can construct an historic bloc without developing diversemechanisms of legitimation and securing a social base. Such a bloc involves a combination of

the consensual integration through material reward for some, and the coercive exclusion ofothers that the system is unwilling or unable to coopt. The system cannot meet the needs of amajority of humanity, or even assure minimal social reproduction. Achieving consensualintegration or effective coercive exclusion has been difficult, given the extent of socialpolarization worldwide, which seems to have contributed to a new "politics of exclusion" inwhich the problem of social control becomes paramount and coercion plays an increasinglysalient role over consent.

The second dimension is a crisis of legitimacy and authority . The legitimacy of thesystem has increasingly been called into question by millions, perhaps even billions, of peoplearound the world, and is facing an expanded counter-hegemonic challenge. Global elites haveexpressed increasingly concern over this crisis. Opening up the annual meeting of the World

Economic Forum earlier this year in Davos, Switzerland, Klaus Schwab, for example, soundedthe alarm for the transnational elite. Never before in the 33 years of the Forum, he said, hasthe situation in the world been as fragile, as complex, and as dangerous as this year. Pointing toa Gallup International poll of 47 countries polling a total of 1.4 billion people, Schwab noted themassive decline in civic trust in national legislatures and large corporations. The voices ofdissent within the globalist bloc grew in the late 1990s and by the turn of the century the roster ofdesertions from its ranks included the best and the brightest technocrats, intellectuals, andpolitically active members of the transnational capitalist class and their agents, among them:international currency speculator George Soros; former World Bank deputy director and Clintonadministration advisor, Joseph Stiglitz; IMF consultant Jeffrey Sachs; WTO advisor JagdishBhagwati; Paul Krugman of Princeton University; UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; and

several European heads of state. This clamor for reform from the top-down reflected a crisis ofconfidence in the global capitalist system within the ranks of the transnational elite, and awillingness among the more politically astute to seek reform a so-called globalization with ahuman face - in the interests of saving the system itself.

This multidimensional crisis has generated intense discrepancies and disarray within theglobalist ruling bloc, which has begin to tear apart from the seams under the pressure of conflictsinternal to it and from forces opposed to its logic. The political coherence of ruling groupsalways frays when faced with structural and/or legitimacy crises as different groups push distinct


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strategies and tactics or turn to the more immediate pursuit of sectoral interests. Faced with theincreasingly dim prospects of constructing a viable transnational hegemony, in the Gramsciansense of a stable system of consensual domination, the transnational bourgeoisie has notcollapsed back into the nation-state. Global elites have, instead, mustered up fragmented and attimes incoherent responses involving heightened military coercion, the search for a post-

Washington consensus, and acrimonious internal disputes. In the post 9/11 period the Bushregime militarized social and economic contradictions, launching a permanent war mobilizationto try to stabilize the system through direct coercion. This military dimension appears toexercise an overdetermining influence in the reconfiguration of global politics. But we need tomove beyond a conjunctural focus on the Bush regime to grasp the current moment and the U.S.role in it. The U.S. state, to repeat, is the point of condensation for pressures from dominantgroups around the world to resolve problems of global capitalism and to secure the legitimacy ofthe system overall. In this regard, Bush policies may be less a campaign for U.S. hegemony perse than a contradictory political response to the crisis of global capitalism to economicstagnation, legitimation problems, and the rise of counterhegemonic forces.

A Global Counter-Hegemonic Movement?

Let us then turn, by way of conclusion, to the prospects of counter-hegemonic resistanceto the globalist bloc. The September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New Yorksuggests the rise of new modalities of conflict between the weak and the powerful in globalsociety. In the past, the most exploited, oppressed, and dispossessed, the colonized, were forcedby material and spatial reality to limit their resistance to the direct sites of colonial control; theywere limited to facing colonizers and imperialists on their own lands. Globalization placesresistance in a whole new ball park, metaphorically speaking. For the first time, acts ofrebellion can be waged around the world irregardless of space. The spatial separation of theoppressors from the oppressed as epitomized in the old colonial system is vanishing. Globalcapitalism is too porous for spatial containment. Just as progressive resistance to thedepredations of global capitalism is less space-bound and more transnational than in the past, sotoo is reactionary resistance.

Global capitalism has generated crises of social reproduction (survival) for countlessmillions of people. Expanding poverty, inequality, marginality and deprivation are the darkunderside of the global capitalist cornucopia so celebrated by the transnational elite. Mass socialdislocation, evaporating social protection measures, declining real opportunities, and spiralingpoverty and inequality, sparked widespread yet often spontaneous and unorganized resistancearound the world in the 1980s and 1990s, as epitomized in IMF food riots. But everywherethere were also organized resistance movements, ranging from the Zapatistas in Mexico and theLandless Movement in Brazil, to the Assembly of the Poor in Thailand, the National Alliance ofPeoples Movements in India, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, and Via Campesinathroughout the Global South.

Challenges to the hegemony of the globalist bloc may come from several quarters:

1) The anti-globalist far right. This far-right has been able to capitalize in numerouscountries on the insecurities of working and middle classes in the face of rapidlychanging circumstances to mobilize a reactionary bloc. The far-right draws in particularon the insecurities of those sectors formerly privileged within national social structures of


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accumulation, such as white workers, family farm sectors, middle and professional stratafacing deskilling and downward mobility, and national fractions of capital threatened byglobalization. Pat Buchanan in the United States, Jorg Haider and the Freedom Party inAustria, the One Nation party in Australia, Le Pens National Front in France, RussiasVladimir Zhirinovsky, and so on, epitomize the rise of this reactionary bloc. It is

certainly possible that some reactionary forces become drawn into the globalist bloc andin some cases its program may even generate conditions more favorable to thetransnational elite agenda.

2) Progressive elites and nationalist groups in Third World countries, such as Hugo Chavezin Venezuela. These elites was well draw on insecurities of vulnerable sectors butarticulate a progressive vision as distinct from the far right. In this category also areelites from certain countries and regions that have not been fully drawn into the globaleconomy, or are being integrated into it in a way that is structurally distinct from that ofnational contingents of the TCC in most countries and regions. Here China and Russia,and perhaps India, stand out. Political projects that emerge could well be one of

cooptation or accommodation with the globalist bloc or heightened conflict with it.

3) Popular sectors worldwide, as expressed in the rise of a global justice movement (what isusually referred to, not entirely accurately, as the anti-globalization movement). In theclosing years of the 20 th century popular resistance movements and forces began tocoalesce around an anti-neo-liberal agenda for social justice, epitomized in the Seattleprotest of late 1999 and the Porto Alegre encounters of 2001, 2002, and 2003.

A counter hegemonic impulse could come from any of these sectors, or from acombination of these forces, in ways that cannot be anticipated. Clearly the counter hegemonic

discourse of the global justice movement was in ascendance in the late 20th

century. By the turnof the century globalist bloc had been placed on the defensive. For the first time perhaps since1968 a crisis of the systems legitimacy had begun to develop and, I believe, the outlines of acounter-hegemony had come into view. Fundamental change in a social order becomes possiblewhen an organic crisis occurs. An organic crisis is one in which the system faces a structural(objective) crisis and also a crisis of legitimacy or hegemony (subjective). No doubt worldcapitalism has tremendous reserves upon which to draw. It is not possible to predict the outcomeof the crisis, which may be a reassertion of productive over financial capital in the globaleconomy and a global redistributive project just as it may be a global fascism founded onmilitary spending and wars to contain the downtrodden and the irrepented. The war onterrorism provided a cover for the introduction of a new coercive dimension to the globalistproject that in the eyes of some could be headed towards the institution of a global police state.On the other hand, perhaps the more reformist (as opposed to radical) wing of the global justicemovement will ally with the more reformist (as opposed to conservative) wing of the TCC topush a reformist project or global redistributive project, along the lines of what Gramsci(borrowing from Croce) called transformismo , whereby actual and potential leaders and sectorsfrom the subordinate groups are incorporated into the dominant project in an effort to prevent theformation of counter-hegemony.

It is at times of great social transformation that established social theories are called into


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question and new ones proliferate to provide explanation for changing circumstances. At timesof great social crisis such as the one we appear to face in early 21 st century global society soundtheoretical understandings are crucial if we hope to intervene effectively in the resolution of suchcrises. The task is certainly daunting, given such a vast and complex theoretical object asemergent global society, and the character of the current situation as transitionary and not

accomplished. It is my hope that the present essay contributes in some small way to thisendeavor by suggesting one way forward in gaining a more nuanced theoretical understanding ofemergent global social structures.

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