Using Social Theory to Leap over Historical Contingencies: A Comment on Robinson Fred Block Theory and Society, Vol.

30, No. 2. (Apr., 2001), pp. 215-221.

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Using social theory to leap over historical contingencies: A comment on Robinson

FRED BLOCK
University of California, Davis

It can be useful for a scholar to push a theoretical perspective to its outer limits, since the exercise can help to clarify broader empirical and theoretical debates. Hence, William Robinson deserves our gratitude for going out on a theoretical limb. Although Robinson is ingenious and lucid in developing his argument, his position is ultimately unpersuasive and he provides a textbook case of the dangers of embracing a reductionist approach to the analysis of state power. The irony is that while Robinson claims to be faithful to historical materialism, the viewpoint he elaborates is actually more Hegelian than Marxist. In his account, a concept - the new transnational bourgeoisie - effortlessly and ineluctably produces a Transnational State. Robinson starts from the current scholarly debate about globalization. Social scientists have been struggling to make sense of the tensions between the historic role of the nation-state and processes of economic globalization that are undermining the nation-state's ability to shape its own economic and social policies. Robinson agrees with these scholars on the basic "facts" of the situation. Around the world, the increasing international mobility of capital has strengthened the hand of business groups and helped fuel a powerful ideological offensive against regulatory and welfare policies that have benefitted workers and the poor. Neoliberal policies have been in the ascendant; the usual mix includes privatization, welfare cutbacks, deregulation, lower wages, and higher levels of unemployment. International financial institutions have had increasing opportunities to impose draconian structural adjustment policies on countries that get into financial difficulties. All this is not in dispute; Robinson is simply offering a new interpretation of these facts. But curiously Robinson's new theory does not address a number of the important political questions that have been raised by recent debates
Theory and Society 30: 215-221,2001.

02001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

about globalization. These issues include: how strong are these pressures of economic globalization and how effectively can protest and resistance within states be in resisting the neoliberal tide? Can we really assume that all nations are converging toward a common neoliberal future? Why have some nations moved less far in the neoliberal direction than others? What kinds of alternatives to the current neoliberal direction are possible at this historical moment? Can transnational social movements construct a viable alternative to neoliberalism and what would be an effective strategy for achieving that end? What role can protests like those in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Prague play in forcing the IMF, the World Bank, and the Group of Seven to change their policies? Robinson goes in a completely different direction; he seeks to show that existing scholarship has failed to perceive the reality behind the apparent conflicts between states and globalization. In his view, the basic facts are best understood as reflecting the emergence of a Transnational State (TNS) that is rooted in a newly unified global bourgeoisie. This TNS is gradually being formed through a joining of global institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, and WTO with portions of national state apparatuses that have been effectively colonized by representatives of the new global bourgeoisie. For him, the shift to neoliberal political programs is not indicative of tensions between the nation and the global economy, but of the successful conquest of power in those countries by a fraction of capital that is integrally linked to this new global class. National states have not been weakened; their energies have been redeployed. They are no longer attempting to bolster accords between labor and domestically-oriented fractions of capital; they are instead carrying out the programs of the global bourgeoisie. It is useful to think through, briefly, the political implications of Robinson's position. If we assume for a moment that Robinson is correct about the emergent Transnational State, what consequences would follow for social groups struggling against neoliberalism? Robinson is fairly explicit about two points. First, largely electoral strategies of contestation are unlikely to be successful because:
Power passes upward to supranational structures, including financial networks, as this supra-national political integration proceeds. There is a loss of whatever democratic control, or at least influence, the citizenry may have been able to exert over policymaking and resource allocation.

It follows that traditional reformist strategies of seeking to win concessions from the national-state are now unlikely to work. His second point

is that under these new circumstances, Marxists can no longer adhere to the Marx and Engels argument that "the proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle maters with its own bourgeoisie." Instead, subordinate classes must now transnationalize their struggles against this new transnational bourgeoisie. Robinson hints that there might be strategies of contestation other than a worldwide revolution, but he seems oblivious to the practical consequences of these two points. These practical consequences have been outlined by J. K. GibsonGraham who has argued that, in the current era, Marxist arguments have the actual consequences of disempowering the very people who are supposed to challenge capitalist rule.' By depicting capitalism as a globally unified system that cannot possibly be reformed, Marxists make challenging capitalist rule seem impossibly difficult. And this problem is even greater with Robinson's analysis since he insists that capitalism is globally unified and is effectively coordinated by a Transnational State. The political implications of Robinson's analysis are not grounds for rejecting it. But his claim about the limits of struggles waged only at the national level should make readers uneasy precisely because Robinson's arguments so closely echo the position of neoliberals. Whether he intends it or not, Robinson ends up making every specific neoliberal campaign to deregulate or reduce social protections more powerful by treating it as a local instance of a global project to restructure the entire capital-labor relation.

The global bourgeoisie

But the heart of Robinson's position is the assertion that:
class fractions from different countries are fusing together into new capitalist groups within transnational space. This new transnational bourgeoisie or capitalist class is that segment of the world bourgeoisie that represents transnational capital.

In his current article, Robinson does not amass evidence to support this critical lynchpin of his argument, nor does he provide theoretical guidance for thinking about transnational class formation. Robinson suggests an analogy between the historical processes by which different capitalist class fractions achieved unity at the national level

and a parallel process by which national class fractions unify at the global level. But we know that in historical cases such as The Eighteenth Brumaire, the Civil War in the United States, or the rise of fascism, Marxists generally see capitalist class unity at the national level as tenuous and contingent. For example, in France in the 1850s, different fractions of capital could not agree on a common form of class rule and ended up ceding power to Louis Bonaparte. In the case of the U.S. Civil War, the conflicting interests of Southern and Northern fractions of the bourgeoisie could not be peacefully resolved. But if achieving unity among class fractions has been contingent at the national level, surely the process must be considerably more problematic when we discuss different national fractions of an emergent global capitalist class. Moreover, we would expect these problems to be greatest when that global class is still only in its nascent phase. But while Robinson acknowledges that we are at an early stage of the process, he ignores the barriers to achieving class unity. Imagine, for example, that increasing strains were suddenly placed on Robinson's emergent transnational bourgeoisie by a global depression and a dramatic intensification of global class struggle. Why would anybody assume that class unity would prevail over fractioning along national lines? It is easy to imagine national fractions rushing to secure the conditions of their particular rule and ignoring previous commitments to a new form of global rule. In fact, before the First World War, a version of Robinson's argument was elaborated in Marxist circles. Kautsky argued that the growing commercial, financial, and social ties among the major capitalist powers was creating a new unity among the international b o ~ r ~ e o i s i e . ~ The resulting system that he termed "ultra-imperialism" would eliminate the threat of inter-imperialist war. Certainly, much has changed over the past century, but it is still a huge conceptual leap to go from evidence of growing transnational cooperation and integration among capitalists to the claim that such a class-in-formation will be able to reach durable agreement on the institutional conditions required for its own rule.

Robinson's state theory But this is the conceptual leap that Robinson makes by insisting that a Transnational State is already taking form as the political expression

of this new globalized bourgeoisie. His initial formulation suggests that the existence of a TNS follows automatically from having a globalized bourgeoisie.
Hence, I submit, the state as a class relation is becoming transnationalized. The class practices of a new global ruling class are becoming "condensed" to use Poulantzas imagery, in an emergent TNS.

But after being quite certain that the existence of this TNS is beyond dispute, Robinson does eventually acknowledge:
The creation of a capitalist superstructure that carries out at the transnational level functions indispensable for the reproduction of capital, especially those that national states are unable to perform, is not to say that a T N S has become consolidated as a fully functioning political, administrative, and regulatory structure. There is a no clear chain of command and division of labor within the TNS apparatus, or anything resembling, at this time, the type of internal coherence of national states, given the embryonic stage of this process. (emphasis added)

But why then should we think of it as a state, since it cannot perform the basic function that we expect a state to play in relation to a dominant class? Robinson could have avoided all of these difficulties had he simply argued that one possible resolution of the current tensions between the national state and economic globalization would be through the emergence of a Transnational State. If he started by making this outcome truly contingent, he could then make a powerful argument as to how the current strength of international institutions and the capture of government ministries by neoliberal forces can help us to see the outlines of that new form of state. But this approach would have required analyzing both the forces that could advance this process of transnational state formation and those that are likely to retard it.

Weber and state theory

Even beyond his fondness for reducing the state to class relations, there is something disturbing and unsavory about Robinson's haste to eliminate any traces of Weberianism from state theory. Marx, as we know, mistakenly imagined that the destruction of the class power of the bourgeoisie would end political domination. Through much of the twentieth century, the defects of the Soviet Union served as a vivid reminder that the military and civilian infrastructure of state power is

itself a material force. As a result, many state theorists in the last decades of the twentieth century tried to integrate Marxist class analysis with the Weberian emphasis on the "legitimate monopoly of coercion." Now that the Soviet Union is no longer, Robinson apparently sees no reason to hold on to the lessons we learned from the failures of the Russian Revolution. But Robinson's effort to banish issues of coercive power also interferes with his ability to think through the complexities of transnational state formation. A true TNS would need to have an effective monopoly on legitimate violence. This requires two rather difficult steps - the first is that nations like the United States would place their troops permanently under the command of some transnational entity. Second, soldiers from the United States, Europe, and Japan would have to be willing to lose their lives to impose neoliberal policies on recalcitrant populations in different parts of the world. Neither of these steps seems imminent. Furthermore, recent history has provided powerful reminders that state power is contingent on a regime's ability to mobilize its repressive forces. In East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and most recently Serbia, regimes suddenly collapsed when police and military forces were unwilling to use force against protesting civilians. Weber's emphasis on legitimacy in his classic definition is very much to the point. This suggests that we should not speak of a Transnational State until we have both transnational military forces and a quite sophisticated - and widely disseminated - ideological justification for the use of that force. To be sure, the United States had cooperation from other nations in recent military interventions against Iraq and Serbia, but such temporary alliances cannot be confused with a transnational military initiative.

Conclusion
To be fair to Robinson, it is worth mentioning that he does offer a number of qualifications to his thesis. He tries to avoid excessive determinism and at one point suggests:
A satisfactory account should not imply an evolutionary notion and should leave open the possibility of historic discontinuities and of contingencies that generate alternative pathways of development, including alternative futures.

In other words, maybe this embryonic TNS will never progress beyond its current stage or perhaps it will continue to grow but it will never

become a real state. But the main thrust of Robinson's account is strongly deterministic. In fact, he does not consider a single factor that might impede the unity of the global bourgoisie or derail transnational state formation. In a sense, Robinson's mistake is that he has tried to derive a theoretical solution to a concrete problem that global capitalism has not yet solved in practice. While it might well be a logical step for capitalist elites to create a Transnational State, it is always risky to attribute too much rationality to an order that is notorious for its contradictions.

Notes
1. J. K. Gibson-Graham, The end of capitalism (as we knew it) (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). This argument is further developed in my essay, "Deconstructing Capitalism as a System," Reconstructing Marxism 12 (Fall 2000): 83-98. 2. Kautsky's essay, "Ultra-Imperialism" was first published in 1914; an English translation was published in New Left Review 59 (January-February, 1970): 41-46.