14

Marxism and Globalisation

SIMON BROMLEY

This chapter will argue that much of the current discussion of the
theme of globalisation suffers from an indeterminate characterisation
of the process and that there is a need for a determinate historical and
theoretical specification of the global system. Such a specification
must be able to account for the particular intensity of modern
globalisation as compared with the more general interaction across
space that has characterised much of world history. We will see that
there are close connections between discussions of globalisation and
those of modernity. Specifically we argue that Marx has some claim to
the status of the first major theorist of globalisation. Against this
background, the chapter argues that, while other approaches have
added refinements to Marx's account and have suggested alternative
lines of enquiry, they all rest on an unacknowledged starting-point-
Marx's. For these reasons, the argument concludes that the work of
Marx and Marxism provide an indispensable point of departure for
the study of globalisation.

What is Globalisation?

The current discussion of globalisation has become exceptionally

difficult, not to say confused, because there are at least two quite
distinct but overlapping positions which are often run together; indeed
in many cases they are not even seen to be different. The positions
share what might be called a general and abstract theoretical definition
of 'globalisation', understood as referring 'both to the compression of
the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a
whole' (Robertson, 1992, p. 8), or as 'the intensification of worldwide
social relations which link distinct localities in such a way that local
280

A. Gamble et al. (eds.), Marxism and Social Science

© Macmillan Publishers Limited 1999
 Simon Bromley 281

happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice
versa' (Giddens, 1990, p. 64). Understood in these general and abstract
terms, globalisation involves the disembedding of social interaction
from particular local contexts and its generalised extension across
space through a combination of abstract mechanisms and the reflexive
monitoring of intentional conduct. This much is more or less common
ground.
The difficulties and the differences begin once we ask, not what in
general is globalisation, but rather what are the mechanisms and
agencies of globalisation, what are its characteristic social forms,
institutions and practices and how it is best understood as a concrete
and particular phenomenon or set of phenomena. On the one hand,
there is a case for saying that globalisation has a long history,
stretching back at least to the interchanges between Europe and the
other major civilizations in the early modern period, if not to the
cultural cross-overs between the great world religions and especially
the three monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. A related
argument is found in the extension of world systems theory backwards
to periods before the emergence of the modern world system in the
Europe of the long sixteenth century, and the postulation of cycles of
regional hegmonies similar to those said to be characteristic of the
capitalist world economy as a whole. On these counts, globalisation is
at least five hundred years old. On the other hand, thereare a number
of substantive characterisations of globalisation which typically relate
it to the incipient transcendence of the modern nation-state and of its
corresponding political, economic and cultural forms. In this latter
sense, globalisation is seen as a relatively recent phenomenon and is
associated with claims that we are witnessing the end of sovereignty,
the supersession of national economies by a transnational global
economic order and the fragmentation of unified nationalisms based
on linguistic and ethnic homogeneity. Globalisation is thus a condition
of at most several decades.

Globalisation and Modernity

Yet another axis of debate around which globalisation revolves is its

relationship to the question of modernity. If globalisation is given a
distant historical reference, there is a tendency to reckon it as prior to
and in part separable from modernity. Globalisation is seen as the
matrix within which modernity is able to develop. Thus Roland