ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2 it was shown that while possessing no autonomous agency as such, as self-valorizing value capital acquires an ‘objective subjectivity’ as a dynamic structuring force – the constitutive mode of power in commoditydetermined societies whose social function is obscured by the formal separation of property ownership and political supremacy in classical theories of sovereignty. Rejecting Marxism from the standpoint of labour, it was shown that an adequate account of capitalist sovereignty must explain not simply the global relevance of corporate capital as a causal variable in international politics but the tendency of capital to develop new economic forms and social structures while continuously regenerating the ‘same’ – that is, continually reproducing contingent yet functionally identical commodity-determined relations rooted in the value form. In this contingent sense, capital creates the social conditions for historical change and the juridical evolution of the national and transnational state, yet adapts its sociopolitical form to reincorporate and neutralize this modernization effect. It is for this reason that capitalist formations structured in accordance with the value relation characterized by equivalence and substitutability cannot be superseded (Mann 2010). This is not to refute the possibility of progress, only to assert that funda-
mental political change cannot take place in commodity-determined societies of self-alienated labour. From this perspective, the global financial crisis promises not the end of capitalism but its reconstitution in a totalizing postliberal form (cf. Liodakis 2010; Crouch 2011; Stockhammer 2011; Hart-Landsberg 2013). Despite limited reform, the value relation has not been superseded; on the contrary, it is running at near full capacity, and critical observers who fetishize a normative distinction between real and fictitious capital ‘overstate the extent and depth of the crisis for capital, and underestimate the virtually uninterrupted consolidation of the rule of the value, i.e. the territorial and historical imperative of equivalence and substitutability’ (Mann 2010: 172). Corporate globalization encompasses two manifestations of sovereignty.
The first is articulated in the timeless anarchy of international relations as a
neo-Darwinian struggle between identity-based communities of fate, articulated most forcefully in the ‘friend-enemy distinction’ (Schmitt 1927), where mere potential for conflict is adequate to activate war between rivals. The statecentric model of international politics is by no means redundant: the national state form of capital matters for the political organization of class power and the cultural mediation of globalizing capital (Hobsbawm 1992). The global hegemony of capital is possible precisely because capitalism is a world system that incorporates and reproduces in itself a plurality of political forms. As Wallerstein argues, ‘capitalism as an economic mode is based on the fact that the economic factors operate within an arena larger than that which any political entity can totally control. This gives capitalists a freedom of manoeuvre that is structurally based’ (Wallerstein 1974: 230). The second manifestation of sovereignty is entailed in the geocentric logic
of corporate globalization and the intensification of capitalist power through its transnational state form: corporations possess non-legitimate power yet their power is articulated through complex structures of global economic governance which confer legitimacy on capital as the real subject of globality. As Davenport argues, interstate relations and global corporate power ‘reinforce and reproduce each other: political fragmentation facilitates the mobility of capital and the uneven development of capitalist production means that dominant classes in core powers export capital to other areas’ (Davenport 2011: 26). This, he adds, restrains ‘core powers from attempting to impose political dominance through conquest’ (ibid.: 26; cf. Chase-Dunn 1981). These twin articulations of sovereignty are typically separated in IR and IPE, yet their intermediation is revealed in the principles of legal nonliability and political unaccountability that underpin the capitalist value form. This phenomenon is revealed most obviously, perhaps, in the corporate
impunity of private security contractors whose exceptional legal status and parapolitical function are articulated via a discourse of security/risk/expertise based on practical authority linked to experience/engagement, a discourse of market rationality based on the efficiency of private firms, and a discourse of acquired authority predicated on the incorporation of governmental functions (augmentation of states’ monopoly of violence) (Leander 2010: 471-81; cf. Krahmann 2012). Parapolitics implies a ‘system of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished’ (Wilson 2012: 1), and with the intensification of war economy ‘the marriage of government, business and military tightens; “privatization” of military functions simply comes with the terrain, as many corporations simply take on greater “battle-field responsibilities”’ (Boggs 2011a: 109). This permanent war system, Boggs adds, ‘legitimates and reinforces state power on a grand scale’ (ibid.: 110), providing additional justification for the security-industrial complex while minimizing the accountability of states for human rights violations and ‘collateral damage’ to civilians and infrastructure (Hoppe 2008). Capitalist sovereignty is also revealed in its opposition to ‘constituent power’ as the popular ground of political freedom – an always potential and recurring force which precipitates
political change at contingent stages in the historical development of capitalism, but which typically exists outside the purview of the constituted state and is therefore indeterminate in form. As Gupta (2002: 163) observes, the ‘capitalist state is such because it colludes with corporate capitalist processes’. Yet it would be misleading to argue that these articulations of sovereignty are identical, for the public authority of the state and private power of the corporation embody distinct forms of intentionality:
