A Theory of Global Capitalism
Kees Van Der Pijl reviews Willian I. Robinson’s A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and State in a Transnational World
William Robinson has made a name with key writings on democratic struggles in Latin America, on the propagation of electoral democracy as a tool of US contemporary foreign policy and, more recently, with a range of articles on the transnational capitalist class. In A Theory of Global Capitalism he presents his core argument on the process of globalisation of class and state in the contemporary period. The book is set up with a didactic purpose, ‘in a manner accessible to the student of globalization and to concerned members of the lay public’ (p. xiii). In this aim the author succeeds admirably, for the book is a model of accessibility and clarity, a pleasure to read.
Robinson develops his argument in three steps. First, it is not ideas, or politico-military factors which underlie globalisation, but the rise of a global economy (p. 10). Second, ‘transnational capital has become the dominant, or hegemonic, fraction of capital on a world scale’ (p. 21). Third, this entails the formation of what Robinson terms the transnational state. States in his view are not actors as such. ‘It is classes and groups acting in and out of states [that] do things as collective historical agents.’ ‘State apparatuses are those (more…)
