by slothrop
We’ve had some tit for tats here whether there exists a global capitalist class. I want to argue there is such a class, even
though doing so requires occasional leaps into abstraction. There is a class of hyper-globalized elites. The caricatures
have changed, though. The Man was once the traditional monocled, bejowled fatcat in spats and beaver high hat, crushing the
head of a worker under monstrous black wingtips. Today it is the time-space displacement of capitalist power shared by waning
and waxing fortunes of virtually itinerant wealth: think Brian O’Blivion with a Carlyle Group investment account. Stateless,
temporal-less capitalist accumulation built on leveraged finance, speculation conducted less by strategy, least by
entrepreneurialism, and more by exparte bureaucratic contact and insiders with no historical memory. Long live the new flesh.
Finding this class is important, because according to comrade citizen
k, if we don’t find it, then all we have left to explain power is the
Nietzschean uberman. Same as it ever was. Sadder still, without this
class, there is no normative politics, because there is no target.
We
need to locate this class to also begin to settle another argument once
and for all–the one reproduced in unspelled jeremiads from grand
signor rgiap: no globalist capitalist class, only good French
Capitalist and evil American capitalist; the world here divided between
a classic gemeinschaft of greed represented by tasteful capitalism
defending when it can family wineries and national cinema, and a
gesellschaft of rapacious assholes who watch the wrong kind of football
and wouldn’t know Babylon from Budapest.
Origins of the Power Elite
A touchstone of the sociology of class analysis was surely C. Wright Mills’s Power Elite. What Mills found in
mid-century America was an old-money "metropolitan 400" (the world of knickerbockers and debutantes) combined with the rising
status and power of celebrities, corporate managers and bankers, military-industry players, and odd parvenu.
The glue holding all this together was the American corporation. For Mills, the historic transformation of the power elite
is marked first and foremost by the corporatization of economic and political power. This entailed the capture by
corporations of what Schumpeter called "the entrepreneurial gale of innovation,"–the concentration of resources and
theoretical knowledge needed to spin the consumer treadmill. To be sure, as Uncle noted recently, this concentration of power
is assured by the 14th Amendment providing the corporation the rights of the individual. And the effect of this transition in
the power elite was to make more opaque the existence of a ruling class, hidden as it is behind the legal fiction of a
sovereign corporation.
But, as Mills notes, it was hidden only. And this was and is the ruling class’s greatest trick, coinciding with the
usual justification of inequality by the ideologies of patriotism, Horatio Alger bedtime stories (see the wrteched "Pursuit
of Happyness" at a bittorrent near you), and xenophobia.
The shifting character of the power elite, Mills thought, was political, economic, militaristic. One had only to locate
empirically the confluence of wealth and prestige in these spheres to locate a ruling class.
The Third Technological Revolution
But things change. Mills wrote at the apex of the Taylorist labor management revolution and the triumph of Fordist
rationalized mass production and consumption. The power elite of this social formation was the product of specific time and
space constraints. The speed of the mobility of capital was impeded by plain old telephone communication and inadequate
transportation infrastructures in even the US itself. The space of capital’s operation was reduced by the scarcity of raw
materials and labor. The combination of these constraints fettered industrial capital to impel a coordination and compromise
with labor and the state. Capital made concessions with labor to divide the surplus more fairly. In the attempt to exclude
the costs of these concessions, capital conspired with the state to create social guarantees for retirement and healthcare.
Well, as fast as you can say "packet switching," the global scope of capitalist exploitation exploded. Digital communication,
air transport, improving infrastructure (power, roads, etc.) improved the physical mobility of capital. Most importantly,
manufacturing was progressively deskilled and Detroit turned to rust while the Maquiladoras sprouted. To put it country
simple, capital junked the New Deal because the former no longer needed to mollycoddle labor. Capital in fact hardly needed
the state any longer to fatten or starve the industrial reserve army of workers. What was needed from the state was muscle to
pry open potential markets and provide a guaranteed rate of return on investment, commit to a permanent fiscal crisis by
starving government revenues offset only by borrowing, and create legal regimes sustaining the status quo.
Global Capitalist Workers
The result of this long revolution is what Castells calls "informational capitalism." Capturing the benefits of digital
communications and global mobility of investment is a supposed stratum of workers in the (de)industrialized core including
the "symbolic-analysts" of Reich’s Work of Nations who deploy their computing and management skills from anywhere on
the planet. Yet, the world in 2005 was still one in which 1.4 billion workers labored in agriculture (40%) and industry (21%)
and services (39%) of which the latter included a tiny fraction of the high-value knowledge work located primarily in the
OECD. To the extent that workers find a liberated mobility in the flows of "timeless time" in cyberspace, the world’s workers
are chained to the timeclock.
Similarly, the symbolic-analytic productivity made possible by the "flow of spaces" created by information technology, is
realized by a tiny fraction of workers mostly in the OECD, Southern India, and a scattershot of privileged Asian locations.
It is no doubt true that networking work can expropriate ("disintermediate") capitalist commodification of knowledge
products. We see a lot of what Benkler calls "peer production" in software development and even MoA blogging. Yet, the
benefit of this kind of production for most of the world’s workers trapped in menial ag and manufacturing jobs is currently
dubious.
But, this globalizing workforce is undeniably expanding. It might be hard to see just where "service economy" ends and
"informational mode of production begins," but the distribution of this work, and arguably knowledge, proceeds.
No More Capitalist Class?
So, all this capital mobility and labor immobility must benefit someone. For Castells, the globalized knowledge work can
(sort of) level the capitalist field of play by reproducing a globally distributed meritocracy. Rewards are doled out to
information society workers based not on inherited, dynastic class position, but by the quality of each contribution to the
networked global economy.
And as for the capitalist class, this is diffused by the distribution of productive knowledge resources. Class conflict is
replaced by the autonomous construction of self and the repeated exploitation of power distributed by networks. No class
without class consciousness; no class object available for contemplation when the unit of analysis in the "information
society" becomes the "network." Sure, incomes will be uneven in similar occupations across sectors, and run-of-the-mill
discrimination will persist. But generally, the meritocracy of distributed opportunities will erode classism.
The Global Capitalist Class
The global capitalist class is therefore, according to the sociological logic of "informational capitalism," virtualized as
the global "flows" of production, consumption, and wealth differentially captured by agents. In this configuration of
assumedly immediate social relations, Mills’s "power elite" begins to look like the product of a Borgesian lottery. It’s all
there for anyone and no one. As Garnham puts it, the problem is no longer the direct expropriation of wealth from one class
by another, but a problem of the distribution of wealth created by financial speculation. In this plexus of opportunity, the
system is primary, even a reified operation of wealth creation beyond the control of clever individual capitalists.
Well, take this as far as you want. I’m chary of this view, though admit the "virtual" character of this developing
globalization of work and capital obviates traditional analyses differentiating the interests of the state, culture, class.
The critique of globalization by Peter Gowan, John Scott, Frank Webster and others is greatly relevant, but there is truth to
the evolving interdependency of work, investment, conflict implicating French pensioners and German and Indian bureaucrats in
the global production of wealth. Acknowledging this developing fact helps some of us better connect this to the contradictory
tensions of development, like overaccumulation, which no "informational capitalism" can escape but only distribute among transient losers and winners in the global marketplace.