WHAT EMPIRE? WHOSE HEGEMONY? THE TRANSNATIONALIZATION OF CAPITAL AND THE GRAMSCIAN CRITIQUE OF STATOLATRY WILLIAM I.

ROBINSON Department of Sociology University of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106 805-893-5607 wirobins@soc.ucsb.edu

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

Introduction Globalization and hegemony are concepts that occupy an increasingly important place in social science research and are central to out understanding of 21st century world society. Yet they are as well the subject of progressively pitched debates among political economists and sociologists, international relations, world-systems, and Gramscian scholars, and, more generally, 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 or systemic chaos (Arrighi and Silver, 2000). More recently, the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has generated a welter of claims that U.S. interventionism and unilateralism is evidence 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is to step back from the bustle of headlines and day-to-day events, which change so quickly that analyses may well be outdated before they are published.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 I wish here to examine the deeper theoretical issues of structural change in world capitalism, and to focus in particular matter of hegemony in the global system from the standpoint of global capitalism theory, in contrast to extant approaches that analyze this phenomenon from the standpoint of the nation-state and the inter-state system. Hegemony may be firmly situated in our social science lexicon, yet it means different things to different speakers. There are at least four interwoven conceptions in the literature on the international order and the world capitalist system:

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Hegemony as International Domination. Hegemony in the realist tradition in International 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 United States exercised hegemony over the capitalist world during the Cold War. Hegemony as state hegemony. Hegemony in the loose sense as evoked in much worldsystems 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 that allows the inter-state system to function over time. Thus, there has been a succession of hegemonic powers in the history of world capitalism, e.g., from Dutch, to British, and then to U.S. hegemony, and a particular power is a hegemon. 1) Hegemony as consensual domination or ideological hegemony. Hegemony in the more generic sense meant by Antonio Gramsci as the way in which a ruling group establishes and maintains its rule. Hegemony is rule by consent, or the cultural and intellectual leadership achieved by a particular class, class fraction, strata, or social group, as part of a larger project of class rule or domination. Thus, in modern capitalist societies the bourgeoisie has managed to achieve its hegemony during periods of stable rule, although that hegemony has broken down during periods of crisis, such as in the 20th century period of world wars and authoritarian rule in a number of countries. Hegemony as the exercise of leadership within historic blocs in a social formation. A view 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 ideological leadership around a particular historic project. Thus the United States was able to achieve hegemony in the post-WWII period as a result, not so much of its economic dominance in global political economy and military might to back it up, than to the development of a Fordist-Keynesian social structure of accumulation that became internationalized under the leadership of the U.S. capitalist class.

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The above is, of course, a simplification. These four approaches are not mutually exclusive and most social scientists would view their conception of hegemony as a synthesis of several 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), as developed by Kenneth Waltz (1979) and Robert Keohane (1984), among others. We could characterize Immanuel Wallersteins well-known essay, The Three Instances of Hegemony in the 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 elegant expression in the world-systems tradition. Gramscis own writings (1971) epitomize the third approach. The Frankfurt school writings of the early and mid 20th century, and perhaps more recently, some of the theoretical work of Habermas and of Bordeau, and late 20th century political sociology research on power, may draw on or develop out of this approach. The fourth is closely associated with the work of Robert Cox (see, inter-alia, 1987) and the Italian, or neoGramscian, 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 as well. All four conceptions of hegemony may be of value insofar as they have contributed to understanding the evolving historical structures of the world capitalist system. But here I want to suggest that an understanding of the current dynamics of the global system requires a more expansive approach, one that allows for innovations in order to grasp novel transnational processes unfolding in the early 21st century that form the backdrop to the bustle of fluid and rapidly changing conjunctures, such as the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. In a nutshell, I

suggest that we need to expunge nation-state centrism from the discussion of hegemony. This allows us to conceive of disputes over hegemony and other global political dynamics involving transnational social forces not necessarily tied to any one nation-state. We need, indeed, to move away altogether from a statist conception of hegemony -- from statism -- and revert to a view 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 social groups in the global system that may now be attempting to construct a hegemony beyond formal state institutions, and it provides for greater latitude in assessing 21st century hegemonic projects. In pursuing these ideas I want to draw on Gramscis theoretical discussion of hegemony and 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 by explicitly linking the process of globalization to the construction of hegemonies and counterhegemonies in the 21st century. I will draw as well from the works of Cox (1987, 1995) and others 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 and Smith, 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 analysis that accords centrality to the nation-state in macro-social inquiry (Robinson 1998; 2002). In this framework, nations are seen as discrete units within a larger system (the world-system or the international system) characterized by external relations among these units. Economic globalization is analyzed from the political framework of the nation-state system and the agency therein of national classes and groups. Studying social phenomena in the new epoch requires that we adopt a transnational or global approach in place of this outdated national/international approach. The national/international approach focuses on the pre-existing system of nationstates as an immutable structural feature of the larger world or inter-state system, whereas by contrast transnational or globalization approaches focus on how the system of nation-states and national 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 study of globalization is fundamentally historical analysis. When we forget that the nation-state is an historically-bound phenomenon we reify the nation-state, and by extension the inter-state system or the world system founded on nation-states. To reify something is to attribute a thing-like status to what should be more properly seen as a complex and changing set of social relations that 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 relations that are themselves in an ongoing process of transformation and instead attribute some independent existence to them then we are reifying. For instance, a nation-state is not a tangible thing in so far as borders are artificial lines we draw through real space. A state is not, of course, the physical buildings which house government officials or a capital city but a set of social relations and practices we have created and institutionalized. To see the state as some thing-in-itself is to reify the state. To the extent that they posit the nation-state system as an ontological feature of world capitalism extant approaches risk falling into the pitfall of reification. The imputation of a trans-historic character to the nation-state is erroneous in that it assigns a universal character to relatively fixed set of historic structures whose foundations were laid in the 16th and 17th centuries. I want to challenge the assumption so ingrained that it is often only implicit and taken-for-granted - that that by fiat we are speaking of the hegemony of a

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 that cannot be referenced here (but see, inter-alia, Clark, 1991; Held, 1984). What concerns me here are 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 state as a thing, an entity with an independent existence as expressed by a set the institutions and the managers or cadre that administer these institutions. The latter views the state as a set of institutionalized class and social power relations. The second problematic is the separation of the economic and the political under capitalism. This separation is taken as natural or organic in liberal ideology and has been given historical and theoretical treatment, among others, in the works of Marx, Polanyi, Poulantzas, and Gramsci. The formal or apparent, separation of the political and the economic spheres of a larger social totality under capitalism is not real; it is illusory. It takes the expression of the separation of the public from the private, the former seen 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 conception of the state developed by ideologues of capitalist society as derived from the separation of politics 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 to think that in actual fact there exists above them a phantom entity, the abstraction of the collective organism, a species of autonomous divinity that thinks, not with the head of a specific being, yet nevertheless 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 itself in political society, as statolatry (1971:268-69). Instead, the state is the entire complex of practical 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). Here the state becomes the integral or extended state, in Gramscis formula, encompassing political plus civil society, a conception aimed at overcoming the illusory dualism of the political and the economic. Somewhere along the way between the early 20th century of Gramscis time and the postWWII period I wont attempt here to retrace the genealogy Gramscis concept of the hegemony of ruling groups and the historical blocs of social forces they construct became transformed 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 capitalism theory 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

capitalist system has been characterized since its inception by the development of national economies, or national circuits of accumulation that were linked to each other through commodity trade and capital flows in an integrated international market. This was a world economy. Different modes of production and social forms were "articulated" within a broader social formation, or world system, while nation-states mediated the boundaries between a world of different articulated modes of production. But in recent decades the production process itself has become increasingly transnationalized, as has been amply documented (see, inter-alia, Dicken, 2002; Castells, 2000; UNCTAD, various years; Robinson, in press). National production systems are reorganized as national circuits of accumulation become broken down and functionally integrated into global circuits. This signals the rise of a new global economy. The global fragmentation and decentralization of national productive processes involves the dismantling of national economies and the construction of a single global production system. Globalization has been characterized by the rise of truly transnational capital not necessarily tied to specific countries. I want to focus here on a key dimension of globalization: transnational class formation. Recent claims by Sklair (2001), Robinson and Harris (2000), and Robinson (2001, 2003, 2004) on the rise of a transnational capitalist class, or TCC, as a group increasingly detached from specific nation-states, build on more general theories in recent years of global class formation (see, inter-alia, van der Pijl, 1984; 1998, 2001; Cox, 1987; Gill, 1990, 2003; Embong, 2001; Strange, 1996; Sunkel, 1993). My views on a TCC and, concomitantly, on the rise of a transnational state (TNS) have generated sharp polemics (see symposia, Science and Society, 2002; Theory and Society, 2001). Here, I want to push my argument further by suggesting that that the transnationalization of classes allows us to imagine a transnationalization of hegemony. Class formation is an ongoing historical process and refers to changes over time in the class structure of society, including the rise of new class groups and the decline of older ones. Under globalization, I suggest, a new class fractionation, or axis, has been occurring between national and transnational fractions of classes. In the main, states have been captured in the past two decades by transnationally-oriented dominant groups who use them to integrate their countries into emergent global capitalist structures. This does not point to a declining importance of the state as much as to a transformation of the state/nation-state as it becomes functionally part of a larger transnational configuration. Capitalism has always been a world system, but in this new transnational stage the ongoing development of world capitalism is unfolding increasingly beyond the framework of a nation-state system that organized its previous development, in a process that should be seen as transitional rather than accomplished. An analysis of class formation, as Cox (1987) has insisted, must start with the primacy of social relations of production in the constitution of antagonistic classes, and with the derivation of specific classes or class fractions, such as a transnational capitalist class, from class struggle grounded in these relations. In other words, if we want to gain an understanding of the class structure of a particular society at a particular moment in history we would do well to start with an analysis of the economy and the social production relations that prevail. I am suggesting that the globalization of production and the extensive and intensive enlargement of capitalism in recent decades constitute the material basis for the process of transnational class formation. What the varied accounts of global, class formation share (with the clear exceptions of Sklair) is a nation-state centered concept of class. They postulate national capitalist classes that converge externally with other national classes at the level of the international system through the internationalization of capital and concomitantly, of civil society. World ruling class formation

is seen as the international collusion of these national bourgeoisies and their resultant international coalitions. The old view of internationalization as national blocs of capital in competition is merely modified to accommodate collusion in the new globalized age. But globalization compels us to modify some of the essential premises of class analysis, particularly the notion that classes are by definition attached to nation-states. For Marx, and for many Marxists after him, the bourgeoisie, while it is a global agent, is organically national in the sense that its development takes place within the bounds of specific nation-states and is by fiat a nation-state based class (this argument, for example, is made explicitly by Wood, 2002). Early 20th century theories of imperialism, such as those of Hilderding (1981[first published 1910) and Lenin (1917), established the Marxist analytical framework of rival national capitals, a framework carried by subsequent political economists into the latter 20th century via theories of dependency and the world system, radical IR theory, studies of U.S. intervention, and so on. According to this perspective, the capitalist class is organized through the distinct political boundaries of nation-states. The competition among capitals that is inherent to the system therefore takes the form of competition (as well as cooperation, depending on the circumstances of the moment) among capitalist groups of different nation-states, and is expressed as inter-state competition, rivalry, and even war. This then became the context in which hegemony in the world capitalist system has been studied. In fact, many aspects of international relations and world development over the past five centuries can be explained by the dynamics of inter-state rivalries and national capitalist competition. The problem begins when we fail to acknowledge the historic specificity of these phenomena and instead extrapolate a transhistoric conclusion regarding the dynamics of world class formation from a certain historic period in the development of capitalism. The relationship between nation-states, economic institutions and social structures has become modified as each national economy has been reorganized and integrated into the new global production system. Nation-states are still important and will be for a long time to come. But class formation is less tied to territory and to the political jurisdiction of nation-states in the way that it has been for much of the history of world capitalism. It is the globalization of production that provides the basis for the transnationalization of classes and the rise of a TCC. As I will discuss further below, this does not mean that capitalists no longer need states. The capitalist system cannot function and would implode in on itself without a political authority to organize and regulate the totality of competing capitals. Indeed, one of the contradictions of the current epoch is the accelerated transnationalization of capital through a nation-state political system and a very incipient and partially formed set of supranational institutions.

Production Relations, Social Forces, and Hegemony

Let us now revisit our pending queries. If we return to Gramscis original notion of hegemony as a form of social domination and apply it to 21st century global society, the key question becomes, who is the ruling class? Is the ruling group a class or class fraction from a particular nation-state? Are there still distinct national ruling classes? In order to answer these questions we need to specify how the critique of nation-state centrism and statolatry in extant frameworks is related to hegemony. I want to argue that, simply put, we cannot speak of the

hegemony of a state. Hegemony is exercised by social groups, by classes or class fractions, by a particular social configuration of these fractions and groups. When we speak of British hegemony or U.S. hegemony we do not really mean British or U.S. as in the country. This is merely shorthand for saying the hegemony of British capitalist groups and allied strata, such as British 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 a particularly misleading way because, in the Gramscian construct, a country or a state cannot be a hegemon. A social group exercising hegemony through a state may be hegemonic and hence the 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 an earlier moment in the history of world capitalism classes were organized around national markets and national circuits of accumulation, even as these national markets and capital circuits were in turn linked to a more encompassing world market and processes of accumulation on a world scale. I want to suggest, however, that the process of economic globalization is creating the conditions for a shift in the locus of class and social group formation from the nation-state to the global 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 such shorthand. Historically the process of class formation in the capitalist system may have taken place through the institutional framework of the nation-state but under globalization this is increasingly less so. Until recently, the reality of capital as a totality of competing individual capitals and their concrete existence as a class relation within specific spatial confines determined geographically as nation-states worked against a trans-, or supranational, unifying trend in the development of world capitalism. To state this differently, in a world of national economies, classes developed around national circuits of accumulation. As these circuits become transnationalized so too do classes, political processes, states, and cultural-ideological processes. The locus of class and group relations in the new epoch shifts increasingly from the nation-state to the global system. How is the matter of transnational class formation linked to that of hegemony? There may be a plethora of competing interpretations of hegemony but all exhibit an underlying assumption that hegemony is exercised by countries or states within the nation-state/inter-state system. To get beyond this we need to extend the analysis developed by the neo-Gramscian school, following Cox (1987:4) that by discerning different modes of social relations of production it is possible to consider how changing production relations give rise to particular social forces that become bases of power within and across states and then within a specific world 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, how these forces may become the bases of power in forms of state and how this might shape world order. I am suggesting here that globalizing production relations have thrown up new social forces, or class forces, namely a TCC and allied transnationally-oriented strata, and this TCC is at the helm of a project albeit incomplete and contested to construct a transnational hegemony. In what ways have new social forces been generated by the globalization process? The particular local social structures of accumulation that developed during the nation-state phase of world capitalism often took the form of corporatist, welfare, and developmentalist projects, all predicated on a redistributive logic and on incorporation of labor and other popular classes into national historical blocs (Kotz, McDonough, and Reich, 1994). As these modes of

Fordist/Keynesian accumulation corresponding to national capitalism eroded under the thrust of globalization, new variants of capitalist relations emerged and these social structures of accumulation and the class alliances and arrangements between dominant and subordinate groups 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 of forces among classes and social groups in each nation of the world and at a global level towards a TCC and its agents. As capital assumed new power relative to labor with the onset of globalization, states shifted from reproducing Keynesian social structures of accumulation to servicing the general needs of the new patterns of global accumulation and the TCC. Economic integration processes and neo-liberal structural adjustment programs are driven by transnational capitals campaign to open up every country to its activities, to tear down all barriers to the movement of goods and capital, and to create a single unified field in which global capital can operate 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 and to determine economic policies, a constant theme in the literature on globalization, reflects the newfound power that transnational capital has acquired over popular classes. This newfound power of transnational capital helped it in its efforts to mold a highly favorable global social structures of accumulation (see, inter-alia, Overbeek, 1993; Hoogvelt, 1997; Robinson, 2001, 2003; 2004). There are important political and class implications of the transnationalization of the capital circuit. In previous epochs of capitalism the nation-state was the predominant locus of struggles among classes and social groups over the distribution of wealth, over social arrangements, and political projects. The nation-state acted fundamentally to mediate class relations and was a key political determinant in class formation. Subordinate classes mediated their relation to capital through the nation-state. Capitalist classes developed within the protective 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 the historic blocs of nation-states. But as national productive structures become transnationally integrated through the globalization process, world classes whose organic development took place through the nation-state are experiencing supra-national integration with "national" classes of other countries. To the extent that local production systems are integrated into globalized circuits of production through the process of transnationalization, the logic of local and global accumulation tend to converge and the earlier rivalries between capitalists no longer take the form of national rivalries. Competition between capitalists remains fierce but there have been changes in the character of this competition. Given the increasing deterritorialization of accumulation processes and the transnational integration of capitalists (see below), competition is increasingly between oligopolist clusters in a transnational environment. National capitalist classes are drawn by globalization into transnational chains that reorient the determinants of class formation. Globalization creates new forms of transnational class alliances across borders and new forms of class cleavages globally and within countries, regions, cities, and local communities, in ways quite distinct from the old national class structures and international class conflicts and alliances. Internationalization occurs when national capitals expand their reach beyond their own national borders. Transnationalization is when national capitals fuse with other internationalizing national capitals in a process of cross-border interpenetration that disembedds them from their nations and locates them in new supranational space opening up

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 the devices we construct to define the material bases of transnational classes. It is not possible to explore 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 existing research is not conclusive, but it does provide us with some direct data on the rise of a TCC and a great deal of indirect, or peripheral, indicators. Taken as a whole, these are clear markers on the basis of which we can infer an underlying process of TCC formation. Among these markers are: 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 worldwide subcontracting 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) are important because they contribute to the development of worldwide networks that link local capitalists to one another, generate an identity of objective interests and of subjective outlook among these capitalists around a process of global (as opposed to local) accumulation. They therefore function as integrative mechanisms in the formation of the TCC and act to shift the locus of class formation from national to emergent transnational space. The leading capitalist strata worldwide may be crystallizing into a TCC. This new transnational bourgeoisie may be viewed as comprising the owners of transnational capital, that is, the group that owns the leading worldwide means of production as embodied principally in the transnational corporations, or TNCs, and private financial institutions. This class is transnational because it is tied to globalized circuits of production, marketing, and finances unbound from particular national territories and identities, and because its interests lie in global over local or national accumulation. The TCC therefore can be located in the global class structure by its ownership and/or control of transnational capital. What distinguishes the TCC from national or local capitalists is that it is involved in globalized production and manages globalized circuits of accumulation that give it an objective class existence and identity spatially and politically in the global system above any local territories and polities. As the agent of the global economy, transnational capital has become the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale. Here fraction denotes segments within classes determined by their relation to social production and the class as a whole. The hegemonic fraction of capital is that fraction which imposes the general direction and character on production worldwide and conditions the social,

political, and cultural character of capitalist society worldwide. The TCC has been attempting to establish itself as a new ruling class worldwide. It is represented by a class-conscious transnational elite that has been pursuing a class project of capitalist globalization, as reflected in its global decision-making and the rise of a transnational state (TNS) apparatus under the auspices of this fraction. In modern conditions, argues Gramsci, a class maintains its dominance not simply through 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, within certain limits, with a variety of allies who are unified in a social bloc of forces which Gramsci calls the historic bloc. The bloc represents the basis of consent for a certain social order, in which 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 are hegemonic projects, in arguing that hegemony in 21st century global society will not be exercised by a nation-state - which in any event is shorthand for saying it will not be exercised by dominant groups from any particular nation-state or region - but by an emergent global capitalist historic bloc. This emergent hegemonic bloc consists of various economic and political forces led by the TCC whose politics and policies are conditioned by the new global structure of accumulation and production. It is the logic of global, rather than national, accumulation that guides the political and economic behavior of this bloc, henceforth referred to as the globalist bloc. At the center of the globalist bloc is the TCC, comprised of the owners and managers of the transnational corporations and other capitalists around the world who manage transnational capital. The bloc also includes the cadre, bureaucratic managers and technicians who administer the agencies of the TNS, such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO, the states of the North and the South, and other transnational forums. Membership in the hegemonic bloc would also include an array of politicians and charismatic public figures, along with select organic intellectuals, who provide ideological legitimacy and technical solutions. Below this transnational elite are a small and shrinking layer of middle classes and cosmopolitan professionals 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 this way that we can speak of a historic bloc in the Gramscian sense as a ruling coalition and a social base in which one group exercises leadership (the TCC) and imposes its project through the consent of those drawn into the bloc. Those from this poor majority who are not drawn into the hegemonic project, either through material mechanisms or ideologically, are contained or repressed. The world politics of this new global ruling class is not driven, as they were for national ruling classes, by the flux of shifting rivalries and alliances played out through the interstate system.

The Debate on U.S. Hegemony and Hegemonic Transitions How, then, do we conceive of hegemony in the emerging global order? The struggle for hegemony is always unfinished and ongoing. Among the welter of social forces and institutions bound up with battles over hegemony, I want to foreground the rise of an emergent transnational configuration, 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 could achieve its maintenance and reproduction remains to be seen. Yet the worldwide decentralization of production takes place together with the centralization of command and control 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 competing nation-state system as the basis for analyzing world dynamics leads analysts to search for hegemony in some type of nation-state configuration in the new global order. The world-system approach to hegemony focuses on successive state hegemons. Looking backward, the baton was passed from the Italian city states to Holland, Great Britain, and then the United States. The predominant 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 era of 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 world order 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 as central historical actors leads to the search for a state-based configuration in analysis of command, control, and power in the global system. But command and control of the global economy is ever-more centralized not within a state or a nation-state but in transnational capital and allied groups and strata, such as transnationally-oriented state managers and functionaries of the 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 nationstate system and hegemons therein. We are witness to a bid for transnational hegemony as expressed in the rise of a new global capitalist historic bloc, global in scope and based on the hegemony 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 transnational classes 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 is unevenly developed. The form of the old inevitably shapes that of the new. The old and new exist in both the structural organization of globalization as well as the subjective thinking of its actors and agents. We are witnessing the decline of U.S. supremacy and the early stages of the creation of a transnational hegemony through supra-national structures that are not yet capable of providing the economic regulation and political conditions for the reproduction of global capitalism. But my argument has meant stiff resistance from social scientists from a variety of traditions 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 world system is assumed to still be characterized in the current epoch by competitive nation-states as the appropriate sub-units of analysis. But hegemonic transition theories see world hegemony as exercised by particular nation-states or geopolitical entities. The stubborn Weberian problem of reification that predominates among world-system, international relations, international political economy, and even Marxist paradigms of world political dynamics leads us time and again to confuse 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, for the state/nation-state as a fictitious macro-agent. Reification prevents us from identifying the constellation of social forces in conflict and cooperation, their changing historical development, interests and relations, as explanatory of state policies, ideologies, etc. (what states "do"). There is 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 the early 21st century are nationally-based social forces, that is, social forces whose interests lie in defense of national economies and capitalists in competition with those from other nations. I do not believe this prevailing theoretical framework of hegemonic transitions, with its state structuralism 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 particular states 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 early 1990s 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 competing core 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 regional formations. Each core grouping was said to be integrating its periphery into a regional formation in competition with rival regional blocs and a number of scholars predicted the rise of an East Asia hegemon. The notions of renewed Great Power rivalry and of three competing blocs were backed by little concrete evidence and not really supported by global political and economic dynamics in recent years. An analysis of global investment patterns by transnational corporations suggested each bloc was interpenetrated by the other two and formed an increasingly integrated global "triad" based on the expanding interpenetration of capital among the worlds top TNCs. As these capitalists integrate they draw in local networks and production chains into complex cross-national webs, making it difficult to box political relations among states and competition among economic groups into the old nation-state geopolitical framework. In this outdated framework, for instance, Asian economic success is to constitute a competitive threat to U.S. interests and a sign of geopolitical competition. But we could only reach such a conclusion by ignoring the fact that East Asian dynamism is inseparable from the massive entrance of transnational capital and that local elites have sought not a regional circuit of accumulation in rivalry with circuits elsewhere but a more complete integration into globalized circuits. U.S. investors have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in Asia. Economic dynamism benefits these investors as much as it benefits local elites. Given an open global economy and capitals global mobility, superior economic performance in a particular region clearly benefits all investor groups in that region. Even if the argument could be made that leading national states protect the interests of investors within determined national borders that is, even if there still exists a territorial dimension to capital and a geopolitical content to world politics - the fact remains that those investors originate from many countries. Capitalists with investment 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 that the U.S. national state protects and promotes their investments. A more satisfying explanation than geopolitical competition, I suggest, is that regional accumulation patterns reflect certain spatial distinctions complementary to an increasingly integrated global capitalist configuration. We do not see so a recentering of the global economy in East Asia, as Arrighi and Silver (1999:219) claim from the world-system perspective, as much

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as a decentering of the global economy; its fragmentation and the rise of several zones of intense global accumulation. One such zone in Europe runs from the northwest to the south east, cutting across borders and reaching out into areas of Eastern Europe. Another in North America is the U.S.-Mexico border zones. Several such axes criss-cross East Asia. These may not be territorially-bounded rivals for hegemony as much as sites of intensive accumulation within a global economy that bring together transnational capitalists and elites in diverse locations around the world, precisely what we would expect from a supranational and decentered transnational configuration. The recurrent dualisms of "states and markets" or of the economic and the political has led to a dual logic approach: at the economic level the global logic of a world economy prevails, whereas at the level of the political a state-centered logic of the inter-state system prevails. The rise of a TCC and a TNS does not imply the absence of conflict among distinct capitalists groups and state elites. Conflict is prone to occur at multiple levels: between transnationally-oriented elites and those with a more local, national or regional orientation; between agents of global capitalism and popular forces; among competing groups within the globalist bloc who may foment inter-state conflicts in pursuit of their particular interests; and so on. The picture is further complicated by the instability wrought by the breakdown of social order and the collapse of national state authority in many regions. However, the key point is this: conflict and competition must take place through institutions that either already exist or that groups in conflict create. National states may be utilized by a multiplicity of capitals, none of which are necessarily national capitals to the extent that national networks of capital have become overlapping and interpenetrating. Capital requires a state and capitalism cannot exist without an institution to regulate and coordinate accumulation, to adjudicate among capitalists, impose social control, and so forth. However, as Went has observed, concurrent with my analysis, capitals home government need not necessarily undertake [these functions]. The domestic state where capital originates from may do so, but there are alternatives, such as, e.g., foreign state structures, capital itself either singly or in conjunction with other capitals, or state bodies in cooperation with each other (Went, 2002:108). The TNS does not yet constitute a centralized global state and formal political authority remains to a considerable extent fragmented, and fragmented unevenly, among weaker and stronger national states. This peculiar institutional structure is an historic contradiction of the global capitalist system. It presents transnational elites with the possibility, and the need, to influence a multitude of national states. State managers are exposed to multiple and contradictory pressures, including distinct sets of local and transnational demands. National states are bureaucratic apparatuses operating according to standard procedures and established routines. They are subject to ongoing instrumental pressures from a variety of sectors. State managers may respond to the agenda of a transnational elite but they must simultaneously sustain legitimacy among nation-based electorates (or at least attempt to), and often develop contradictory strategies and legitimation discourses. These multifarious processes can produce confusing and unpredictable behavior on the part of policymakers within states, even such seemingly schizoid conduct as the enactment of protectionist measures in one area simultaneous to liberalization in other areas. It is the task of our analysis to discern underlying tendencies but this does not mean that every event can be explained by these tendencies. What about challenges to the global capitalist bloc from forces opposed to its transnational agenda? Challenges of this sort are likely to come from two sources. The first is from subordinate groups in transnational civil society or from specific nation-states when they

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are captured from these groups. The second is from dominant groups who are less integrated into (or even opposed to) global capitalism, such as, for example, the Baath Party/Iraq state elite prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion, sectors among the Russian oligarchy, or Chinese economic and political elites. The uneven development of the transnationalization process is an important source 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 one example, there are powerful economic groups in that country who appropriated Soviet state enterprises grounded in regional Russian rather than global markets. These groups are more directly dependent on Russian expansionary influence and state support than they would be if their enterprises exhibited a greater integration into global capital circuits. The emerging global order, we should bear in mind, is unevenly hegemonic. Hegemonic power does not operate in a uniform manner across the globe. Could regionally as opposed to globally-oriented elites, therefore, attempt to chart an independent course, say, in East Asia, should they manage to gain state power? Could they withdraw their region from the global economy or try to set up a regional alternative to it? This is a plausible, if unlikely, scenario. But does it validate the conclusion that 21st 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 the interpenetration of their capitals is particularly noteworthy in the case of European and East Asian groups precisely those that according to predominant thinking are most likely to be contenders for regional hegemony. Why would the interests of these groups lie in a withdrawal into their own regions, or in a competing regional center, rather than in a globally integrated system? Second, there is little empirical support in actual politics for the claim that Asian elites are seeking regional hegemonic pretension and much in the foreign and economic policies of East Asian nations to suggest just the opposite an increasing transnational orientation among these groups. Third, the view that dominant groups in Europe or Asia are seeking the hegemony of 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 up global 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 United States in world affairs, its seeming hegemony, and its often unilateral military intervention abroad? According to extant paradigms U.S. state behavior in the global arena are undertaken in defense of "U.S. interests" (e.g., Gibbs 2001; Gowan, 1999). Most scholars and analysts see the institutions 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 the Anglo-Americanization of capitalism (Bello, 2002b:39). But an official from the U.S., German or Japanese government who staffs the IMF or the WTO may well be pursuing transnational capitalist 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 measures it is opened not exclusively to Anglo-U.S. capital but to capitalists from anywhere in the world. 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, advanced transnational 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 transnational alignment. The United States has taken the lead in developing policies and strategies on behalf of 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 concentration of 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 its interests on existing national state apparatuses and also increasingly on the emergent apparatus of a TNS, and in doing so it has found the U.S. national state to be the most powerful of these apparatuses. This is the particular form through which the old geopolitics of the nation-state are simultaneously being played out and winding down. What about trade wars and national competition, which are seen by scholars such as Brenner (2002) to drive world political dynamics in the 21st century? Trade tensions may well break out between individual sectors (such as bananas) that turn to specific national states for support. But the evidence suggests a process of mutual competition and integration across borders rather than U.S. hegemony. Capitalist groups that in earlier epochs produced nationally and 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 the U.S. International Trade Commission, in 1997 sales by U.S. owned foreign affiliates abroad totaled $2.4 trillion compared to $928 billion in U.S. exports. Sales by foreign affiliates inside the 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 convention terms of rival national capitalist groups and their respective states. This does not mean that trade conflicts are illusory. Capitalist competition under globalization is as fierce as it has ever been. But it takes on a new meaning. It is less a case of national states using their power to win export markets for territorially-based corporations than competition among transnational corporate conglomerates that seek advantages over competitors through corporate dominance achieved via the global integration of production facilities and that seek the favor of a multiplicity of states. Competition in the globalization epoch takes place among dense networks of transnational corporate alliances and through struggles within every country and within transnational institutions. Given their global interests and the extent of their transnational interpenetration, TNCs must take an active political and economic interest in each country and region in which they operate. They may turn to any national state to gain competitive advantage as part of their corporate strategy. Globalization is not a national project but a class project without a national strategy, or rather, with a strategy that seeks to utilize the existing political infrastructure of the nation-state system and simultaneously to craft TNS structures. We have not seen a resurgence of the old imperialism or an intensification of interimperialist rivalry. The classical theories of imperialism emphasized core national state control over peripheral regions in order to open these regions to capital export from the particular imperialist country and to exclude capital from other countries. Export capital feels most comfortablewhen its own state is in complete control of the new territory, for capital exports from other countries are then excluded, it enjoys a privileged position, observed Hilferding, in his classic study on imperialism (1910:322). The competition among these competing national capitals, according to the theory, led to inter-state competition and military rivalry among the main 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 and military campaigns, suggest new forms of global capitalist domination, whereby intervention creates conditions favorable to the penetration of transnational capital and the renewed integration 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 or security of the system. There are no transnational capitalist armed forces and there may not be for many years to come. Transnational investors who may carry a passport from any country need to move their capital around the world with the security of knowing there will be ultimate coercive protection of their capital and of property rights. A political authority with a coercive capacity must exist that will attempt to secure the environment necessary to undertake accumulation. For historic reasons the U.S. state houses and exercises direct control over the principle military machine in the world and that military machine has been deployed on a regular basis 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 capitalist system as empire whose legitimacy is sustained through ongoing military intervention (spearheaded by the U.S. military machine) or what they term police action. Military expansion is in the interests of the TNCs. U.S. military intervention opens up for TNCs new markets, outlets for investment, access to raw materials, and pools of exploitable labor. The 1991 and the 2003 U.S. military interventions in the Middle East and the 2002 intervention in Central 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 resolve problems 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 institutional constraints and structural imperative to bolster global accumulation processes they also face direct instrumental pressures of groups seeking their particular interests. It was notorious, for instance, that oil and military-industrial concerns brazenly utilized the administration of George W. Bush to pursue narrow corporate gains (The Economist, 2003) in a way that may appeared to have contravened the more long-term interests of the transnational project. But narrow corporate interests do not mean U.S. corporate interests. The beneficiaries of U.S. military action around the world are not U.S. but transnational capitalist groups. The Economist (2003:52) found that out of 405 top corporate directors in the United States who formerly held important government post 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 and pharmaceuticals (26), and defense (22), precisely those sectors that tend to be most transnationalized. More generally, U.S. intervention facilitates a shift in power from locally and regionally-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 South Africa and India, the Dutch of Indonesia, and so forth, in earlier moments of the world capitalist system. We see not a reenactment of this old imperialism but the colonization and recolonization of the vanquished for the new global capitalism and its agents. The underlying class relation between 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, in Washington. 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, to bomb the former Yugoslavia, for peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions, etc.) in order to sustain and defend global capitalism. U.S. imperialism refers to the use by transnational elites of the U.S. state apparatus to continue to attempt to expand, defend and stabilize the global capitalist 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. state power 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 has run up against one crisis after another in its effort to secure its leadership and reproduce hegemony. A necessary condition for the attainment of hegemony by a class or class fraction is the supersession of narrow economic interests by a more universal social vision or ideology, and the 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 narrow interests 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 social vision has been difficult to secure because distinct elites seek different and even conflicting solutions to the problems of global capitalism based in the historic experiences of their regional systems. There has been considerable strategic debate and tactical differences within the ranks of the TCC, and in particular, rising splits and factional disputes. The system of global capitalism, in fact, entered into a deep crisis in the late 1990s. There were twin dimensions to this crisis. The first was a structural crisis of overaccumulation and of social polarization. By redefining 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 in earlier epochs to offset the inherent tendency within capitalism towards polarization. The result has been a rapid process of global social polarization and a crisis of social reproduction. In most countries, the average number of people who have been integrated into the global marketplace and are becoming "global consumers" has increased rapidly in recent decades. However, it is also true that the absolute number of the impoverished - of the destitute and near destitute has increased and the gap between the rich and the poor in global society has been widening since the 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 hundred countries in the 1990s with per capita incomes lower than in the 1980s, or in some cases, lower than 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% Second 20% Third 20% 2.3 2.9 4.2 2.2 2.8 3.9 1.7 2.2 3.5 1.4 1.8 2.1

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Fourth 20% 21.2 21.3 18.3 11.3 Richest 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 of humanity from direct productive participation, the downward pressure on wages and popular consumption worldwide, and the polarization of income, has reduced the ability of the world market to absorb world output. This is the structural underpinning to the series of crises that began in Mexico in 1995 and then intensified with the Asian financial meltdown of 1997-98, and the world recession that began in 2001. The inability of the system to expand through absorption of its surplus by the consumption of ordinary working people makes state-driven military spending and the growth of a military-industrial complex an outlet for surplus and gives the current global order a frightening built-in war drive. No emergent ruling class can construct an historic bloc without developing diverse mechanisms 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 of others that the system is unwilling or unable to coopt. The system cannot meet the needs of a majority of humanity, or even assure minimal social reproduction. Achieving consensual integration or effective coercive exclusion has been difficult, given the extent of social polarization worldwide, which seems to have contributed to a new "politics of exclusion" in which the problem of social control becomes paramount and coercion plays an increasingly salient role over consent. The second dimension is a crisis of legitimacy and authority. The legitimacy of the system has increasingly been called into question by millions, perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is facing an expanded counter-hegemonic challenge. Global elites have expressed 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, sounded the alarm for the transnational elite. Never before in the 33 years of the Forum, he said, has the situation in the world been as fragile, as complex, and as dangerous as this year. Pointing to a Gallup International poll of 47 countries polling a total of 1.4 billion people, Schwab noted the massive decline in civic trust in national legislatures and large corporations. The voices of dissent within the globalist bloc grew in the late 1990s and by the turn of the century the roster of desertions from its ranks included the best and the brightest technocrats, intellectuals, and politically active members of the transnational capitalist class and their agents, among them: international currency speculator George Soros; former World Bank deputy director and Clinton administration advisor, Joseph Stiglitz; IMF consultant Jeffrey Sachs; WTO advisor Jagdish Bhagwati; 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 of confidence in the global capitalist system within the ranks of the transnational elite, and a willingness among the more politically astute to seek reform a so-called globalization with a human face - in the interests of saving the system itself. This multidimensional crisis has generated intense discrepancies and disarray within the globalist ruling bloc, which has begin to tear apart from the seams under the pressure of conflicts internal to it and from forces opposed to its logic. The political coherence of ruling groups always 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 the increasingly dim prospects of constructing a viable transnational hegemony, in the Gramscian sense of a stable system of consensual domination, the transnational bourgeoisie has not collapsed back into the nation-state. Global elites have, instead, mustered up fragmented and at times incoherent responses involving heightened military coercion, the search for a postWashington consensus, and acrimonious internal disputes. In the post 9/11 period the Bush regime militarized social and economic contradictions, launching a permanent war mobilization to try to stabilize the system through direct coercion. This military dimension appears to exercise an overdetermining influence in the reconfiguration of global politics. But we need to move 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 dominant groups around the world to resolve problems of global capitalism and to secure the legitimacy of the system overall. In this regard, Bush policies may be less a campaign for U.S. hegemony per se than a contradictory political response to the crisis of global capitalism to economic stagnation, 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 resistance to the globalist bloc. The September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York suggests the rise of new modalities of conflict between the weak and the powerful in global society. In the past, the most exploited, oppressed, and dispossessed, the colonized, were forced by material and spatial reality to limit their resistance to the direct sites of colonial control; they were limited to facing colonizers and imperialists on their own lands. Globalization places resistance in a whole new ball park, metaphorically speaking. For the first time, acts of rebellion can be waged around the world irregardless of space. The spatial separation of the oppressors from the oppressed as epitomized in the old colonial system is vanishing. Global capitalism is too porous for spatial containment. Just as progressive resistance to the depredations of global capitalism is less space-bound and more transnational than in the past, so too is reactionary resistance. Global capitalism has generated crises of social reproduction (survival) for countless millions of people. Expanding poverty, inequality, marginality and deprivation are the dark underside of the global capitalist cornucopia so celebrated by the transnational elite. Mass social dislocation, evaporating social protection measures, declining real opportunities, and spiraling poverty and inequality, sparked widespread yet often spontaneous and unorganized resistance around the world in the 1980s and 1990s, as epitomized in IMF food riots. But everywhere there were also organized resistance movements, ranging from the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Landless Movement in Brazil, to the Assembly of the Poor in Thailand, the National Alliance of Peoples Movements in India, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, and Via Campesina throughout 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 numerous countries on the insecurities of working and middle classes in the face of rapidly changing circumstances to mobilize a reactionary bloc. The far-right draws in particular on 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 strata facing deskilling and downward mobility, and national fractions of capital threatened by globalization. Pat Buchanan in the United States, Jorg Haider and the Freedom Party in Austria, the One Nation party in Australia, Le Pens National Front in France, Russias Vladimir 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 and in some cases its program may even generate conditions more favorable to the transnational elite agenda. 2) Progressive elites and nationalist groups in Third World countries, such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. These elites was well draw on insecurities of vulnerable sectors but articulate a progressive vision as distinct from the far right. In this category also are elites from certain countries and regions that have not been fully drawn into the global economy, or are being integrated into it in a way that is structurally distinct from that of national 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. Popular sectors worldwide, as expressed in the rise of a global justice movement (what is usually referred to, not entirely accurately, as the anti-globalization movement). In the closing years of the 20th century popular resistance movements and forces began to coalesce around an anti-neo-liberal agenda for social justice, epitomized in the Seattle protest of late 1999 and the Porto Alegre encounters of 2001, 2002, and 2003.

3)

A counter hegemonic impulse could come from any of these sectors, or from a combination 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 turn of the century globalist bloc had been placed on the defensive. For the first time perhaps since 1968 a crisis of the systems legitimacy had begun to develop and, I believe, the outlines of a counter-hegemony had come into view. Fundamental change in a social order becomes possible when 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 world capitalism has tremendous reserves upon which to draw. It is not possible to predict the outcome of the crisis, which may be a reassertion of productive over financial capital in the global economy and a global redistributive project just as it may be a global fascism founded on military spending and wars to contain the downtrodden and the irrepented. The war on terrorism provided a cover for the introduction of a new coercive dimension to the globalist project 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 justice movement will ally with the more reformist (as opposed to conservative) wing of the TCC to push a reformist project or global redistributive project, along the lines of what Gramsci (borrowing from Croce) called transformismo, whereby actual and potential leaders and sectors from the subordinate groups are incorporated into the dominant project in an effort to prevent the formation 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 times of great social crisis such as the one we appear to face in early 21st century global society sound theoretical understandings are crucial if we hope to intervene effectively in the resolution of such crises. The task is certainly daunting, given such a vast and complex theoretical object as emergent 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 this endeavor by suggesting one way forward in gaining a more nuanced theoretical understanding of emergent global social structures.

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