While Van Der Pijl spends a significant amount of time in his critique discussing Robinson’s use of a dialectical-material analysis, he doesn’t mention what I think makes his book truly unique from the standpoint of analysis: the use of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and the state to demonstrate the emergence of a new transnational state.

In this analysis, the state is not something that stands above and outside of class relations, but in fact emerges from the social relations of production, out of the conflict of classes in a given society. In this view, the state’s primary role is to maintain and reproduce the social relations of production–it is an instrument by which the dominant class achieves and maintains its hegemony.

The nation-state is embedded in particular social relations of production and in a particular historical context, the emerging transnational state — by no means uniform, even or fully developed — reflects the emerging new forms of transnational production and accumulation.

In Robinson’s analysis, this is the ascending class — the transnational capitalist class — struggling for hegemony over the older, nation-based capitalist classes.

Carl Davidson’s framework (globalists vs. hegemonists) is a useful one for understanding this conflict.

For example the hegemonists (representing nation-based capital) are in conflict with the globalists in the US (i.e. Clinton, Soros) and elsewhere over the Iraq war, over energy policy, over China’s access to petroleum and other resources, over tariffs on steel, etc. (See Jerry Harris’ article: ‘To Be or Not to Be? The Nation-Centric World under globalization http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2006/10/06/to-be-or-not-to-be-the-nation-centric-world-order-under-globalization/)
Finally, Van Der Pijl seems to see a contradiction in Robinson’s idea of transnational capital and the conflicts among groupings of nation-states in the global economy: i.e. the emerging third world bloc, G8, US-Anglo alliance. To Van Der Pijl this disproves some of Robinson’s theory… but Robinson makes it clear: what has emerged under globalization is much different than either Lenin’s “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” or Karl Kautsky’s “ultra-imperialism.”

Globalization will see plenty of conflict — likely intensified conflict — but not among nation states fighting on behalf of national capital, but among new groupings of transnational capital that are at once developing a new, transnational state while redefining the role of the nation-state in the globalized economy.