ABSTRACT
To make sense of neoliberal global capitalism in the interstate system, it is necessary to examine the contradictory relation between capital as a selfvalorizing value prone to crises of overaccumulation, and the multilevel regulatory and disciplinary structures that transcend territorial states yet simultaneously articulate/augment the particular interests of the West – a hegemonic transnational entity that achieved unrivalled global power in the interimperial wars of the twentieth century. The notion of ‘capitalist sovereignty’ seems to imply the decline of the nation-state, yet the enduring presence of the state in capitalist society suggests that capital is dependent on its state form to reproduce the conditions necessary for the production of value. The modern state evolved as a solution to the ontological contradiction
between: (i) the universal and the particular, to allow for plurality and diversity within a universal state system; (ii) space and time, to organize and contain time within domesticated spatial contexts; and (iii) the self and other – the need to distinguish friends and enemies based on a spatial demarcation of identities (Walker 1993).1 From a Marxian perspective, on the other hand, the state is also understood as an epiphenomenal expression of bourgeois class power – although Marxists recognize that all historical formations leave an enduring imprint on future societies and that the territorial unit remains a vital instrument of social control. Although the geopolitical logic of accumulation in the age of absolutism
(acquisition of territory to enhance the prestige of aristocratic/religious elites) is distinct from accumulation in a global economy – where transnational capital is relatively independent of the territorial logic of state power – as Callinicos (2007) argues, the global capitalist system is nevertheless determined by a dialectical interaction between capitalist and territorial logics of power. For this reason there is necessarily a ‘realist moment in any Marxist analysis of international relations […] such analysis must take into account the strategies, calculations and interactions of rival political elites in the state system’ (ibid.). Yet contemporary geopolitics is determined less by pursuit of
power for its own sake than by the specific form of intercapitalist competition in the world system (Pozo-Martin 2007) – that is, by the competition between capitals whose capacity to dominate markets is positively or negatively affected by their alignment and relative proximity to the nexus of financial and military power controlled by states. Geopolitics is not a ‘means to its own end’, a ‘pure power politics aimed at power for power’s sake [because] in geopolitical actions and concerns there always have prevailed mostly economic interests’ (Adamo 2001: 490). What, therefore, does it mean to speak of ‘capitalist sovereignty’? As we
saw in Chapter 1, this issue is inextricably tied to the core problematic of globalization, namely the transition from imperial state hegemony to global corporatism in a posthegemonic order where sovereign power is diffused through new structures of global capitalist integration and control necessitated by the transnationalization of production, trade and investment. Although this economic order has its political origins in colonial relations of domination established by Europe, the logic of corporate globalization lies not in empire building but in the diffuse articulation of capitalist sovereignty through a pluralistic structure of global governance which attempts to transcend the Hobbesian antinomy of disorder and sovereignty through the logic of synarchy, and thus to escape the ‘classical categories of political authority, resting instead on the dialectical fusion of segmental autonomy and collective policy formation’ (Chryssochoou 2009: 131). As a response to the exhaustion of state-democratic capitalism, globalization points towards new forms of coordinated social management which originate in, yet potentially override, the prerogative power of sovereign states which collectively defined the spatial and legal order of international law and politics in the early modern period. On the one hand, capitalist sovereignty resolves at a global level a tension between equal sovereignty and material inequality in a world system mediated by finance: sovereign equality is ‘interdependent with the historical development and universalization of capitalist social relations by which the formal separation of the purely “political” states system and the “economic” sphere (the world market) was effected’ (Spronk 2004: 1). On the other hand, it ‘deterritorializes social forms and liberates flows of desires from restrictive codes. As it deterritorializes and decodes, it creates artificial neo-territorialities that reconcile the liberated flows from the requisites of surplus accumulation’ (Gammon 2010: 368). This problematic was examined by Hardt and Negri (2000) in a ground-
breaking yet ultimately flawed study in which the authors posited an abstract conceptualization of empire as a global network of ‘biopower’, which dominates life in its entirety leading to a ‘perpetual and universal peace outside of history’. Brilliant as their intervention was, however, the authors not only prematurely announced the death of the state (failing to anticipate the enduring relevance of spatial and legal boundaries for globalization in the absence of a single binding juridical value beyond the capitalist logic of equivalence), but failed to specify how capitalist sovereignty – as an immanent
and deterritorializing constitutive force expressed through the homogenizing, centralizing force of striation (patterning/rendering/homogenizing) – is reconciled with the transnationally constituted geopolitical power of the Anglosphere as it struggles to delay the inevitable transition to a multipolar global growth system presupposed by corporate globalization. Whether advanced by cheerleaders or critics of the Washington consensus, however, accounts of global order as a seamless totality without an exterior governed by a single disciplinary logic must be rejected if we are to explain the interrelationship between state territoriality and corporate power, and the persistence of space for the valorization of financial capital (Mezzadra & Neilson 2013). To explain the emerging institutional form of transnational corporate
power it is necessary to go beyond the sweeping generalities of post-Marxism to investigate how capitalist sovereignty is instantiated at a regional and transnational level, colliding with older articulations of legal and political regulation embedded in the nation form as a fetishistically constituted territorial unit. As Robinson argues, states are ‘social relations that have historically been territorialized but those relations are not by definition territorial’ (Robinson 2007: 15), yet states fulfil an indispensible function in the reproduction of capitalist power. Contra Hardt and Negri, the theory of capitalist sovereignty must be grounded in a more comprehensive theory of global corporate power supported by state actors, rather than a ‘plane of immanence’ juxtaposed to the transcendental sovereignty of states: as the most advanced form of human social organization, transnational corporate power constitutes an agent of globalizing capital which transgresses historic territorial sovereignties yet cannot exist in unstriated space – that is, cannot overcome barriers to accumulation in unsecured space at risk from a potential ‘deviation from the dominant that enables the generation of new subjectivities and forms of community’ (Gonzaga 2009: 34). While non-capitalist social forms provide fertile soil for the global violence
of capital accumulation, as Luxemburg (1913) argues, capital does not expand without the infrastructural support of non-capitalist structures which it then assimilates and degrades. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1977) work on deterritorialization remains a key resource for explaining the non-linear transition from a ‘primitive socius’ (the despotic machine) which resists decoding/striation to a ‘deterritorialized socius’ (the capitalist machine) characterized by a ‘general axiomatic of decoded flows’. The contemporary form through which the latter is realized is capitalist globalization, yet the world system ‘includes among its elements the various nation-states which play a crucial role in the regulation of capital movements and in the realization of surplus value’ (Patton 2000: 95). Deleuze and Guattari recognized that deterritorialization is ultimately ‘inseparable from correlative reterritorializations’, a geoeconomic process discernible in the spatial fixity, embedding and rescaling which structure capital flows as state space and world space incorporate ‘precapitalist landscapes with specifically capitalist sociospatial configurations’, and where frameworks of capitalist organization
are ‘intertwined with historically specific patterns of uneven development insofar as [this] entails the systematic privileging of some locations, places, territories, and scales, and the marginalization and exclusion of others’ (Brenner 2011: 106). Before proceeding to an evaluation of corporate power (Chapter 3) and its
global state form (Chapter 4), our first task is to define the ‘objective subjectivity’ of capital. Capital is a complex category – a dynamic and selfperpetuating value which constitutes the directionless, nihilistic subject of modernity as value-augmentation for its own sake. In Marxist scholarship capital exists in the process of exchange as a value that expands through circulation, but capital also possesses a relational dimension reflecting the social relations of power which facilitate the production of value through the labour process and through financialization. Van der Pijl disaggregates the self-perpetuating logic of capital into three
phases: (i) original accumulation – the ‘stamping of the commodity form on social relations’; (ii) production – the subordination of labour-power and creativity to the process of expanding value (valorization of capital); and (iii) social reproduction – the subsumption of the biosphere to the requirements of capital (Van der Pijl 2001: 2). Marx theorized capital as a structuring force that subsumes economic and cultural processes to its own determinate logic yet possesses no fixed directionality or rationality beyond the incessant drive to accumulate. Capital is not a static entity or quantity in the everyday sense that an individual may be said to ‘hold’ commodities, equities or securities with definite values; it is, rather, a ‘mode of power’ driven by a logic of accumulation derived from the legal right to exclude – that is to say, from the capacity of capitalists as agents of capital combined in joint-stock ventures protected by the principle of limited liability to remove valued resources from general societal use. ‘Objective subjectivity’ implies volition and cognition, and it is admittedly difficult to attribute volition or cognition to an abstract mode of power, no matter how dynamic or constitutive. Yet capital does indeed have the quality of subjecthood: a form of subjectivity that is simultaneously dynamic yet involuntary and unconscious. In philosophy, subjectivity is typically defined and determined by the lim-
ited range of free actions open to actors, and debates on free will/determinism are concerned primarily with those actions for which we hold individual agents morally accountable. Marx, on the other hand, was interested in the preconstituted structure and constitutive dynamics of commodity-determined societies, and outlined a systematic account of the social and economic processes in history that are determined independently of human moral agency while indicating those aspects of collective existence that might be changed through praxis – although this concept was left for philosophers such as Bloch (1959), Feenberg (2014) and Markovic´ (1974) to develop more fully. Marx’s conception of subjectivity is revealed in The Poverty of Philosophy, where he criticizes Proudhon for romanticizing the artisan as the ‘master of the means of production’:
The producer, the moment he produces in a society founded on the division of labour and on exchange (and that is M. Proudhon’s hypothesis), is forced to sell. M. Proudhon makes the producer master of the means of production; but he will agree with us that his means of production do not depend on free will. Moreover, many of these means of production are products which he gets from the outside, and in modern production he is not even free to produce the amount he wants. The actual degree of development of the productive forces compels him to produce on such or such a scale.
