Book Review: Global Capitalism: Selected Essays

For more than three decades over which these essays were originally published, Hugo Radice made significant contributions to a Marxist understanding of an evolving capitalism. He provided fundamental critiques of mainstream and heterodox political economy approaches to understanding of globalization. The essays in this collection retain their power due to their combination of historical specificity, theoretical consistency, and the solidity of critique.

Significantly more than in the work of other political economists, the centrality of class contradictions is the touchstone revealing emergent contingent characteristics around which there was, when the essays were written and continue to be, much debate. His ability to apply Marx’s methodology to a solid grounding in globalization-related literatures, and a capacity to distinguish the crucial elements in the extended present, are major improvements.

Radice insists that separating both the realms of state and market, and the national and the global, are theoretically misplaced. The market is a political creation. Because class analysis is usually absent from such narratives, these artificial and misleading separations are made that neglect to appreciate their dialectical unity. The state is a capitalist state. The capitalist economy is global. He further suggests the historical contingency of the nation-state, asserting it is not inherent in the nature of capitalism as a mode of production. It was only for a certain historical period (1870 to 1970) that there was a coincidence of the model of accumulation and the geographic boundaries of the nation-state. Now, the interpenetration of capitals, the internationalization of production and investment and financial markets, cross-border takeovers, and such, suggest this coincidence to be contingent.

As the author uses the term “normal capitalism” in the contemporary context, it includes periodic financial crises, grotesque inequalities, gated communities and tax havens, downscaling of the welfare state and privatization in providing many of its functions, the atrophy of democratic practices, and the possibility of state failure and state collapse, all of which he discusses. It is a new normal of stagnation, instability, and insecurity.

Given such a reality, he maintains that nation-state-level solutions congenial to working class interests are limited, indeed dead-ends, since they require an alliance between national capital and workers in a context that does not support the possibility of autonomous statist development. Globalization has incorporated fractions of capital within countries into a global capitalism in which attracting foreign direct investment and positioning the local economy to be competitive as part of the global commodity web have shaped political economies.

Resisting the pessimism that often accompanies a realization that social democratic national solutions are not possible in present circumstances, more than a century and a half after the Manifesto, he argues that “internationalism is no longer utopian.” Rather, it corresponds to present-day economic and social class interest in ways that are now more widely understood than ever before. The claim is premised on his understanding of the contemporary nation-state and its inadequacies from the perspective of its working class citizens.

The state, he argues, should be seen as a form of capitalist relations. He therefore takes issue with analyses based on a presumed “relative autonomy of the state,” judging the approach antithetical to good Marxism. His critique of “labor’s alternative economic strategy” (that had echoes in the 1970s deindustrialization debate in the United States in that decade), and more recent incarnations of alternative development strategies, reflects his view that efforts to revive embedded liberalism are unrealistic. This is the case because they are theorized within a national economy framework. Contra much liberal and some left thinking, the effort to revive a national social democracy innocent of change in the global economy is utopian and doomed to failure. It avoids the extent to which capital has escaped the boundary of the territorial state and so lacks appreciation of the extent to which governments are structurally required to prioritize accumulation on a transnational scale.

Rather than being capable of a restoration of the class compromise of embedded liberalism celebrated in the social democratic tradition, or serving as a possible transition to a socialist future, the context of present day globalized capitalism means improved national competitiveness. As such, promises a greater dominance of internationalized capital and continued concessions by the working class.

His discussion of this thesis is supported by a consideration of the historical specificity of 1930s capitalism during which Keynes wrote The General Theory, and the contrasting present in which national capitalism is anachronistic. A parallel discussion of the contextual differences of early 20th century Marxism (Bukharin and Lenin) clarifies the uses to which these theorists can usefully be invoked in addressing issues prominent a century later.

Most gratifying to this reader is the author’s clarity that neoliberalism is a class project of capital and not, as Keynesians such as Paul Krugman argue, the mistake of stupid policy makers and pundits. Cutting social spending, taxation of capital, deregulation, and the rest suggest to Radice that a new accumulation regime is in place structured to redistribute surplus more effectively to capital. An effective response requires a decisive break not only from “the easy compromises of social democracy,” but also “the unpalatable elitism of vanguard communism.” Radice’s stress throughout these essays on the lack of attention in the dominant literatures, even on the left, to class agency sets this book apart from much globalization literature.

The collection also contains essays that consider liberal development theory: dependency models of center, periphery, and semi-periphery; world systems analysis; and development state literatures. These remain insightful and of lasting value even as they were written in the heat of earlier debates. Specific discussion of Eastern European post-communism and East Asian state-led development and their evolution to today’s “normal capitalism,” as distinct from its postwar “golden age” incarnation, are especially illuminating.

In his assertion that the role of the state is to mediate between the geographically “unbounded ambitions of capital and the location-specific material world to be conquered by capital,” Radice makes a number of different claims regarding the nature of the state. In doing so he opens himself to the charge of inconsistency. On this, and on other topics, a separation and specification of levels of analysis of capitalism would serve to clarify how seemingly conflicting elements can be reconciled dialectically. There is much in such claims that can seem problematic since Radice, like Marx in this respect, jumps from one level of analysis—capitalism in general, analysis of class society, a specific historic epoch of capitalism, momentary contingent developments—and back to another focal-length perspective. What is appropriate at one of these levels may not seem accurate for analysis at another. (One may suggest, and not only to Radice, that the best guide to organizing levels of analysis used by Marx to clarify an exposition of this sort remains the work of Bertell Ollman. Ollman’s essay in the February, 2015 Capital & Class offers a succinct statement for such guidance.)

There is inevitably a good deal of repetition in these essays as the same theoretical issues are worked through in the context of different circumstances over the more than three decades during which the essays were published. At the same time his interventions, specific to time and place even when they are only a few years apart, lend depth to his theoretical perspective. As contingent factors change and the discourse develops, Radice achieves insightful explication of the evolution of capitalism in our time, its development and potential for future transformation, albeit without offering a roadmap for popular left politics. He does argue that the activism of contemporary social movements offers the prospect of a renewed internationalism and solidarity that speaks to the goal of a socialist future pregnant in the present, unacceptable system.

Disclosure in reviewing: I have known Hugo Radice for close to half a century and I am thanked by him in a number of places in this book. Despite such connections that might be reason to pass, I review this collection because the interventions Radice has made over decades of ongoing debates regarding global capitalism, often take on the dominant views among heterodox political economists and subject them to insightful critique. His contributions have been, and remain, important. Younger political economists would do well to welcome exposure to his discussions of these debates that have shaped present understandings of the political economy of global capitalism; older readers who participated in these discussions may find new grounds for reflection on their significance after reading these essays and considering the framing the author crafted in dialogue with the dominant readings of the time. I think Radice’s perspective and clarity regarding the nature of global capitalism, and the ways globalization has evolved in the era of neoliberalism, mark this as an important book.