Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton, Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis, Cambridge University Press, 2018; hbk £74.99, pbk £26.99.
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RATING: 65
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Buy this book?
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There is a good book here - a useful contribution to critical IPE drawing mostly on Gramsci and a little on Poulantzas, with a fair range of contemporary reference and a comprehensive perspective. But it is struggling to escape from a broader framing that distracts the reader in two ways. First, every step of the argument is embedded in discussions, in every single chapter, of complementary or contending approaches. As these passages address and return to recurrent themes (state-centrism versus the transnational, for much of the time), and often invoke the same authors (Callinicos and Robinson, for example), it would have been better to deal with relevant literature at the outset. As it is, they detract from the flow of the presentation of the authors' own perspective, and take up a lot of space. Second, and more seriously, the authors uncritically embrace Bertell Ollman's 'philosophy of internal relations' (Ollman, 2015), proposing that 'the conditions of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis have to be understood in terms of their internality' (6), and making this their principal goal. The way this is done is fatally flawed, so readers must have their wits about them if they are to derive value from the book.
The character of the substantive account Bieler and Morton offer is best appreciated in the sequence of three chapters that make up Part II of the book ('Thematic Considerations'): 'Capitalist Expansion, Uneven and Combined Development and Passive Revolution', 'The Geopolitics of Global Capitalism', and 'Exploitation and Resistance'. The underlying narrative is strong: the capitalist world market expands as a consequence of competition between capitalists, mediated by state agency; this gives rise to a process of uneven and combined development arising from evolving class relations in individual states and military and commercial relations between them; as those class relations evolve (class being 'emergent' rather than fixed in advance), pro-capitalist forces are seen, following Gramsci, as modernising the state through a series of reforms in 'passive revolutions' ('concrete historical instances when aspects of the social relations of capitalist development are either instituted and/or expanded, resulting in both a "revolutionary" rupture and "restoration" of social relations’, 101). So 'a chain of passive revolutions called forth by capitalist modernity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may be identified, marking passive revolution as an essential form in the historical sociology of state-making processes. It indicates a description of capitalist modernity where there is a structural inability of the bourgeois political project to realise fully the practice of hegemony, delivering an incomplete process that becomes more the rule rather than the exception of state’ (103). They then draw on Poulantzas' analysis of 'the way a new imperialist world context was emerging through a rearrangement of the global balance of forces between the United States and an ever more integrated European Union', centred on 'the induced reproduction of foreign (international or, in today's parlance, transnational) capital within the various European state forms':
‘It is this induced reproduction of American monopoly capitalism within the other metropoles and its effects on their modes and forms of production (pre-capitalist, competitive capitalist) that characterises the current phase and that equally implies the extended reproduction within them of the political and ideological conditions of the development of American imperialism. ... The modifications of the role of the European national states in order to assume responsibility for the international reproduction of
capital under the domination of American capital and the political and ideological conditions of this reproduction bring about decisive transformations of these state apparatuses’ (Poulantzas, 1974/2008: 227, 254-5, cited 125-6).
So, they summarise, 'globalisation and the related emergence of new transnational social forces of capital and labour have not led to a retreat of the state, a strengthening of the state or the emergence of a TNS [transnational state]. Instead, a restructuring has unfolded through an internalisation within different state forms of new configurations of social forces expressed by class struggles between different (national and transnational) fractions of capital and labour' (127-8).
Against this background, invocation of the concept of the 'social factory' enables a broad view of exploitation and resistance that encompasses class struggle 'beyond the traditional workplace and the mere confrontation between wage labourers and employers', and thereby asserts 'an important feminist perspective on radicalised dialectics', focused on 'the increasing reorganisation of social space structured in view of capital accumulation but dependent on unwaged reproductive labour' (134). The successive case studies of global capitalism, global war and global crisis in Part III, on the rise of China, the Iraq War, and the impact of the recent global financial crisis on the Eurozone respectively, draw on this narrative: China is drawn into the world market under the auspices of foreign capital, and accommodates internally by way of a passive revolution; the Iraq War is explained in terms of the predominance of national over transnational capital in the Bush regime; and 'trouble in the Eurozone' is traced back beyond the crisis to the pattern of uneven and combined development within it. Of course, there are other ways of looking at these issues, but this approach has significant virtues. In view of the standing of Gramscian and neo-Gramscian approaches in international political economy, most of all as a critique of still all too prominent liberal and realist approaches, it is a welcome synthesis. And the core narrative itself reflects good judgement and common sense: class struggle is given prominence, but not to the exclusion of other identities and social relations; national state forms are seen as crucial nodes in the global organisation of capital accumulation, but crucially ones that tend to internalise the interests of transnational capital over time; and the idea of 'passive revolution' fits well with that of uneven and combined development, and provides a far more satisfactory understanding of comparative 'political development' than approaches that abstract away from the underlying conception of contested and discontinuous processes of regime change in the context of class struggle in an emergent world market.
Even so, the relationship between the analytical framework laid out above and the three chapter-length case studies leaves something to be desired. The case studies each have a limited focus, and are snapshots in time that are illustrative of aspects of the analytical framework as a whole, rather than more broadly demonstrative of the 'inneraction [sic; a borrowing from Ollman] between global capitalism and the geopolitics of the interstate system' (106). As the arguments they make are restricted and specific to the case, and for the most part familiar, they do not convey the potential strength of the overall approach as much as they might. So, for example, despite the prominence given to the issue of passive revolution, it is discussed in detail only for the case of China (177-85), and is not even mentioned in the case studies of global war and global crisis. Was the US occupation and administration of Iraq not an attempted passive revolution from outside? Haven't the various governing bodies of the EU and their allies in international institutions similarly attempted, in their response to the global crisis, to 'institute or expand aspects of the social relations of capitalist development, resulting in both a 'revolutionary' rupture and a 'restoration' of social relations? If so, isn't it of interest that the agents of passive revolution in these cases have been a ruling Communist Party, an occupying military power, and a supranational organisation respectively? Beyond this, the judgement that 'it is not appropriate to talk about a Chinese alternative to Western capitalism' (179), allied to the view that the Chinese state has internalised the interests of foreign capital along the lines argued by Poulantzas for Western Europe earlier, is questionable, to say the least. So is the way in which Bieler and Morton treat the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a defensive measure, 'clearly intended to absorb the overcapacity, overproduction and excess commodities of the Chinese political economy and here in particular steel and coal resources', concluding that 'this renewed expansion of capitalism will most likely intensify tensions around uneven and combined development in the region. While it will assist in overcoming the crisis of over-accumulation in China, this solution through outward expansion can always only be temporary' (186-7). This is a reductio ad absurdum of Harvey's already flawed concept of the 'spatial fix', which turns the manner in which the world market develops into a reason why it cannot. And it seems contradictory to argue that China's development has been dominated by foreign capital, and at the same time to ascribe the Iraq War to the increasing difficulties besetting the 'peaceful' expansion of capitalism (202). The third case study, on trouble in the Eurozone, is the strongest, making a good case that 'European integration ... can be understood as a class project by capital to strengthen its position vis-à-vis labour', (233), and one in which 'capital has used the crisis to push through restructuring it would have been unable to do otherwise' (238), with the result that the EU's social dimension 'has slowly withered away' (245). It follows that from the perspective of capital, austerity policies, far from being irrational or having 'failed', have strengthened its hand against labour and 'should actually be regarded as a success' (243), and this point is well made.
So, then, to the thorny issue of the 'philosophy of internal relations'. It is apparent early in the introduction that there is a problem. After making the general case that the 'dynamics of Global Capitalism (the rise of the BRICS), Global War (the war in Iraq), Global Crisis (the Eurozone crisis) are interlinked' (5), Bieler and Morton suggest that the three have to be understood 'in terms of their internality'; and that their inner connections 'are best realised through a relational method that captures capital’s internalisation through the states system of uneven and combined development, geopolitics and the global crisis conditions facing humanity that are themselves embedded within world ecology’. 'A dialectical understanding of material conditions and ideational form, of agency and structure,' they say, 'can begin to grasp the internality of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis. This book is a contribution to the critique of ontological dualisms shaping understandings of "the international" and an assertion of the necessity of historical materialism in furthering a dialectical analysis of the inner connections of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis' (6). As they further explain:
‘The philosophy of internal relations implies that the character of capital is considered as a social relation in such a way that the internal ties between the relations of production, state-civil society and conditions of class struggle can be realised. As the hallmark of historical materialism this philosophy of internal relations makes explicit a conception of capital through which connections are maintained and contained as aspects of a self-forming whole. As Karl Marx (1858/1973: 408) put it in the Grundrisse [Penguin/New Left Review], ‘ the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself.’ Through this philosophy of internal relations, the dialectical method of historical materialism therefore focuses on internally related causes and conditions, rather than positing logically independent factors existing side by side’ (9).
Invoking Ollman, they then continue:
The first section of this introductory chapter to this book will thus assert the radical social ontology of the philosophy of internal relations ... in order to analyse Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis. Our aim is to stress, in accord with Derek Sayer (1987: 25, emphasis added), that ‘the connection between people’ s productive relations with nature, or labour process, and their productive relations between themselves, or social relations of production, is internal and necessary, not external and contingent ‘ (9).
And in what follows, the focus is primarily on various aspects of 'capital as a social relation':
Our argument is that a historical materialist philosophy of internal relations offers a novel series of vantage points from which to consider the constitution of productive activity in relation to the institutional and social forms of capitalism, allowing a comprehension of the historical specificity of capitalism. … Once capital is established as a social relation in our reasoning we are then directed to its buried history [emphasis original] in treating the political economy of state formation, class struggle and relations of production within a substantive historical sociology’ (Sayer, 1987: 135). ... The revolt against the violence of abstraction is therefore mobilised ... through a focus on the internal ties between the relations of production, state-civil society and conditions of class struggle, which will provide a series of threads that will be woven into the remainder of the chapters that constitute this book' (10, emphasis mine except where stated otherwise).
These threads will be traced, we are told, not only through 'the internal ties between the relations of production, state-civil society and conditions of class struggle', but also in 'a relational conception of capitalist expansion and uneven and combined
development ..., the geopolitics of capitalist accumulation ..., and conditions of exploitation and resistance through class struggle', leading to 'a series of vantage points from which a relational conception of the inner tie of Global Capitalism ..., Global War ..., Global Crisis ... can be advanced and is finally realised' (11). So where have they gone so wrong?
Ollman makes the claim that Marx subscribes to a 'philosophy of external relations' with specific reference to aspects of capital, value and labour, commodity, money and class:
'Thus, capital, value and labour – to which we could also add commodity, money and class, given their importance in Marx’s analysis of capitalism – are all relations that contain their interaction with each other as essential aspects of what they are, the chief difference between them being the distinctive ‘pole’, or vantage point, that each offers for viewing and piecing together the larger pattern to which they all belong' (Ollman, 2015: 11, emphasis mine).
Leaving aside the question of whether there is any basis or need for a philosophy of internal relations, it is clear that the relevant context here is Marx's 'unfolding' of the concept of the commodity in the opening chapters of Capital, to reveal its constitutive relations, or the 'inner essential determination' of its concrete social form (Starosta, 2015: 126). Property and propertylessness, private independent labour and its alienation, the capitalist and the worker, absolute and relative surplus value, competition between capitals, the world market and recurrent crises are all, if you like to put it that way, revealed as 'essential aspects of what the commodity is'. The contradictions that necessarily arise in the process of capitalist development, in other words, are inherent within it. But Bieler and Morton have already gone too far when they take Sayer's argument that ‘the connection between people’ s productive relations with nature, or labour process, and their productive relations between themselves, or social relations of production, is internal and necessary, not external and contingent ‘ as licence to embrace 'state formation', 'state-civil society', and the like. It is telling in this respect that they paraphrase Sayer, as noted above, as arguing that 'Once capital is established as a social relation in our reasoning we are then directed to its buried history in treating the political economy of state formation, class struggle and relations of production within a substantive historical sociology (Sayer, 1987: 135)' (10, emphasis mine). In fact, the passage cited makes no reference to state formation, but is as follows:
'Marx's critique in other words accomplishes a radical shift of historiographic terrain. Once "capital" is reconceptualized as a relation,
not the thing it originally appears to be, we are directed to a buried history, that of class formation and struggle. The possibility is
thereby opened up of moving back again, to the "imagined concrete" of the surface of society, but this time grasped as "a rich totality of many determinations and relations" [Grundrisse: 100]. Instead of operating with analytic categories which replicate the misplaced concreteness of reified forms like value and capital as conventionally conceived, we can begin empirically to recover the material ways in which, through time, these forms were constructed in the intercourse of "real, living individuals". Marx is clear, we should note, that such historical inquiry is "a work in its own right" [Grundrisse, 461] - we cannot deduce the empirical specifics of social formation from its bare concept. This is important; reification of the concepts [sic] of essential relations is as pernicious as fetishism of phenomenal forms, and by no means unknown to Marxism. Recovering the "real history of the relations of production" (ibid) is an ineluctably empirical exercise (Sayer, 1987: 1356, emphasis mine).
I confess that it is some time since I read Sayer's succinct and beautiful book, but I resolve to do so again, and I recommend it as an indispensable classic - available in facsimile on academia.edu. In short, immanent real necessity, internal relations and inherent contradictions apply only to capital, as theorised by Marx. There is no basis for extending this approach to 'the system of states', to pick one glaring example. In exploring the real history of the relations of production, on the other hand, attention must be paid to the 'rich totality of many determinations and relations' that attend them in the real world. This is the perspective from which connections must be explored, through empirical historical analysis. But connections in this context are conjunctural, in unique configurations from time to time and place to place. They are not internal to anything, in theory or in fact. Bieler and Morton overlook all this, and just as Sayer pointed out thirty years ago, this is important. They generalise the idea of internal relations to cover every real world connection and relationship they touch upon, without any more justification than appeal to the 'philosophy of internal relations'. So, to offer a sample only, it is applied to 'state and civil society' (15), 'agency and structure' (16), 'global capitalism and geopolitical rivalry' (22), race, gender and sexuality as 'internally constitutive of class' (22), (thought they waver on this later, at 133-4), 'ideational and material realms' (51), 'the ideology of austerity and its wider material setting' (58), 'the geographical expansion of capitalist accumulation and the geopolitical dynamics of global war' (58), 'state and market' (85), 'the "economic" and the "political" within capitalism' (86), 'a continuing states system and the changing configuration of global capitalism' (123), 'the interstate system and globalisation' (127), 'the integration of rising powers into global capitalism and the new geopolitical challenges of the global order' (176), 'the state and geopolitics' (189), 'geopolitical' and 'economic' logic (194), 'the tie between global crisis and the trajectories of different territorial state forms' (219), and, of course, Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (i, 6, 9, 132, 191, 242, 251-6). It is not that these things are not related, or that they cannot be explored in relation to the determinations of capital. It is just that it makes no sense to describe them as internally related.
As it is, their insistence on doing so has the unfortunate consequence of making their approach appear more rigid and deterministic than it need be. Their case study chapters are actually examples of theoretically informed empirical analyses of specific situations which are 'rich totalities of many relations and determinations'. The particular configuration of relations and determinations in each case, to be teased out by theoretically informed empirical research, is unique to it. So in the case of the rise of China, they connect the prominent role of state officials in the absence of any dominant class fraction or class alliance in support of restructuring, an authoritarian regime of labour subordination, and entry into the world market as a final stage low value-added manufacturer at the service of transnational capital. In the case of the Iraq War, they connect the policy of 'Bomb & Build imperialism' to the ties between the Bush regime and 'national capital', and the obstacles to the valorisation of the latter. In the case of the Eurozone crisis, they focus on a neoliberal offensive conducted by the EU on behalf of transnational capital, reflected in imposed restructuring and austerity in the EU periphery in particular in response to the legacy of low productivity and debt-led development. Then, having substituted the rise of China for global capitalism, the Iraq War for global war, and the Eurozone crisis for global crisis, they reverse the substitutions in their final chapter, offering a rigid and reductionist model of the 'internal relations of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis' (Figure 10.1, p. 251) that is fundamentally shaped by the unique configurations of relations and determinations in their three case studies, and most strikingly so in reducing 'global war' to Bomb & Build imperialism. When they depict these 'internal relations', then, the inherent contradictions of the 'capital relation' on the one hand and the infinite range of possibilities for concrete developments in the real history of the relations of production are both lost from view.
The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself; but the hegemony of US capital, the tendency for other states to internalise and reproduce its interests, the repeated and largely failed episodes of US-led 'global war' from Korea and Vietnam onwards, and, indeed, the structural dependence of capitalist accumulation on the unpaid domestic work that women have provided (which they also see as a fixed and permanent feature of capitalist accumulation, 155) are not. In short, there is more in the future unfolding of the determinations of capital than is dreamt of in Bieler and Morton's philosophy.
References
Ollman, Bertell (2015), 'Marxism and the philosophy of internal relations: or, How to replace the mysterious "paradox" with "contradictions" that can be studied and resolved', Capital & Class, 39 1, 7-23.
Poulantzas, Nicos (1974/2008) ‘Internationalisation of Capitalist Relations and the Nation-State’, in James Martin (ed.) The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law, and the State. London: Verso, pp. 220–57.
Sayer, Derek (1987) The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism. London: Basil Blackwell.
Starosta, Guido (2015) Marx, Capital and Revolutionary Subjectivity, Leiden and Boston: Brill.
The character of the substantive account Bieler and Morton offer is best appreciated in the sequence of three chapters that make up Part II of the book ('Thematic Considerations'): 'Capitalist Expansion, Uneven and Combined Development and Passive Revolution', 'The Geopolitics of Global Capitalism', and 'Exploitation and Resistance'. The underlying narrative is strong: the capitalist world market expands as a consequence of competition between capitalists, mediated by state agency; this gives rise to a process of uneven and combined development arising from evolving class relations in individual states and military and commercial relations between them; as those class relations evolve (class being 'emergent' rather than fixed in advance), pro-capitalist forces are seen, following Gramsci, as modernising the state through a series of reforms in 'passive revolutions' ('concrete historical instances when aspects of the social relations of capitalist development are either instituted and/or expanded, resulting in both a "revolutionary" rupture and "restoration" of social relations’, 101). So 'a chain of passive revolutions called forth by capitalist modernity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may be identified, marking passive revolution as an essential form in the historical sociology of state-making processes. It indicates a description of capitalist modernity where there is a structural inability of the bourgeois political project to realise fully the practice of hegemony, delivering an incomplete process that becomes more the rule rather than the exception of state’ (103). They then draw on Poulantzas' analysis of 'the way a new imperialist world context was emerging through a rearrangement of the global balance of forces between the United States and an ever more integrated European Union', centred on 'the induced reproduction of foreign (international or, in today's parlance, transnational) capital within the various European state forms':
‘It is this induced reproduction of American monopoly capitalism within the other metropoles and its effects on their modes and forms of production (pre-capitalist, competitive capitalist) that characterises the current phase and that equally implies the extended reproduction within them of the political and ideological conditions of the development of American imperialism. ... The modifications of the role of the European national states in order to assume responsibility for the international reproduction of
capital under the domination of American capital and the political and ideological conditions of this reproduction bring about decisive transformations of these state apparatuses’ (Poulantzas, 1974/2008: 227, 254-5, cited 125-6).
So, they summarise, 'globalisation and the related emergence of new transnational social forces of capital and labour have not led to a retreat of the state, a strengthening of the state or the emergence of a TNS [transnational state]. Instead, a restructuring has unfolded through an internalisation within different state forms of new configurations of social forces expressed by class struggles between different (national and transnational) fractions of capital and labour' (127-8).
Against this background, invocation of the concept of the 'social factory' enables a broad view of exploitation and resistance that encompasses class struggle 'beyond the traditional workplace and the mere confrontation between wage labourers and employers', and thereby asserts 'an important feminist perspective on radicalised dialectics', focused on 'the increasing reorganisation of social space structured in view of capital accumulation but dependent on unwaged reproductive labour' (134). The successive case studies of global capitalism, global war and global crisis in Part III, on the rise of China, the Iraq War, and the impact of the recent global financial crisis on the Eurozone respectively, draw on this narrative: China is drawn into the world market under the auspices of foreign capital, and accommodates internally by way of a passive revolution; the Iraq War is explained in terms of the predominance of national over transnational capital in the Bush regime; and 'trouble in the Eurozone' is traced back beyond the crisis to the pattern of uneven and combined development within it. Of course, there are other ways of looking at these issues, but this approach has significant virtues. In view of the standing of Gramscian and neo-Gramscian approaches in international political economy, most of all as a critique of still all too prominent liberal and realist approaches, it is a welcome synthesis. And the core narrative itself reflects good judgement and common sense: class struggle is given prominence, but not to the exclusion of other identities and social relations; national state forms are seen as crucial nodes in the global organisation of capital accumulation, but crucially ones that tend to internalise the interests of transnational capital over time; and the idea of 'passive revolution' fits well with that of uneven and combined development, and provides a far more satisfactory understanding of comparative 'political development' than approaches that abstract away from the underlying conception of contested and discontinuous processes of regime change in the context of class struggle in an emergent world market.
Even so, the relationship between the analytical framework laid out above and the three chapter-length case studies leaves something to be desired. The case studies each have a limited focus, and are snapshots in time that are illustrative of aspects of the analytical framework as a whole, rather than more broadly demonstrative of the 'inneraction [sic; a borrowing from Ollman] between global capitalism and the geopolitics of the interstate system' (106). As the arguments they make are restricted and specific to the case, and for the most part familiar, they do not convey the potential strength of the overall approach as much as they might. So, for example, despite the prominence given to the issue of passive revolution, it is discussed in detail only for the case of China (177-85), and is not even mentioned in the case studies of global war and global crisis. Was the US occupation and administration of Iraq not an attempted passive revolution from outside? Haven't the various governing bodies of the EU and their allies in international institutions similarly attempted, in their response to the global crisis, to 'institute or expand aspects of the social relations of capitalist development, resulting in both a 'revolutionary' rupture and a 'restoration' of social relations? If so, isn't it of interest that the agents of passive revolution in these cases have been a ruling Communist Party, an occupying military power, and a supranational organisation respectively? Beyond this, the judgement that 'it is not appropriate to talk about a Chinese alternative to Western capitalism' (179), allied to the view that the Chinese state has internalised the interests of foreign capital along the lines argued by Poulantzas for Western Europe earlier, is questionable, to say the least. So is the way in which Bieler and Morton treat the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a defensive measure, 'clearly intended to absorb the overcapacity, overproduction and excess commodities of the Chinese political economy and here in particular steel and coal resources', concluding that 'this renewed expansion of capitalism will most likely intensify tensions around uneven and combined development in the region. While it will assist in overcoming the crisis of over-accumulation in China, this solution through outward expansion can always only be temporary' (186-7). This is a reductio ad absurdum of Harvey's already flawed concept of the 'spatial fix', which turns the manner in which the world market develops into a reason why it cannot. And it seems contradictory to argue that China's development has been dominated by foreign capital, and at the same time to ascribe the Iraq War to the increasing difficulties besetting the 'peaceful' expansion of capitalism (202). The third case study, on trouble in the Eurozone, is the strongest, making a good case that 'European integration ... can be understood as a class project by capital to strengthen its position vis-à-vis labour', (233), and one in which 'capital has used the crisis to push through restructuring it would have been unable to do otherwise' (238), with the result that the EU's social dimension 'has slowly withered away' (245). It follows that from the perspective of capital, austerity policies, far from being irrational or having 'failed', have strengthened its hand against labour and 'should actually be regarded as a success' (243), and this point is well made.
So, then, to the thorny issue of the 'philosophy of internal relations'. It is apparent early in the introduction that there is a problem. After making the general case that the 'dynamics of Global Capitalism (the rise of the BRICS), Global War (the war in Iraq), Global Crisis (the Eurozone crisis) are interlinked' (5), Bieler and Morton suggest that the three have to be understood 'in terms of their internality'; and that their inner connections 'are best realised through a relational method that captures capital’s internalisation through the states system of uneven and combined development, geopolitics and the global crisis conditions facing humanity that are themselves embedded within world ecology’. 'A dialectical understanding of material conditions and ideational form, of agency and structure,' they say, 'can begin to grasp the internality of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis. This book is a contribution to the critique of ontological dualisms shaping understandings of "the international" and an assertion of the necessity of historical materialism in furthering a dialectical analysis of the inner connections of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis' (6). As they further explain:
‘The philosophy of internal relations implies that the character of capital is considered as a social relation in such a way that the internal ties between the relations of production, state-civil society and conditions of class struggle can be realised. As the hallmark of historical materialism this philosophy of internal relations makes explicit a conception of capital through which connections are maintained and contained as aspects of a self-forming whole. As Karl Marx (1858/1973: 408) put it in the Grundrisse [Penguin/New Left Review], ‘ the tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself.’ Through this philosophy of internal relations, the dialectical method of historical materialism therefore focuses on internally related causes and conditions, rather than positing logically independent factors existing side by side’ (9).
Invoking Ollman, they then continue:
The first section of this introductory chapter to this book will thus assert the radical social ontology of the philosophy of internal relations ... in order to analyse Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis. Our aim is to stress, in accord with Derek Sayer (1987: 25, emphasis added), that ‘the connection between people’ s productive relations with nature, or labour process, and their productive relations between themselves, or social relations of production, is internal and necessary, not external and contingent ‘ (9).
And in what follows, the focus is primarily on various aspects of 'capital as a social relation':
Our argument is that a historical materialist philosophy of internal relations offers a novel series of vantage points from which to consider the constitution of productive activity in relation to the institutional and social forms of capitalism, allowing a comprehension of the historical specificity of capitalism. … Once capital is established as a social relation in our reasoning we are then directed to its buried history [emphasis original] in treating the political economy of state formation, class struggle and relations of production within a substantive historical sociology’ (Sayer, 1987: 135). ... The revolt against the violence of abstraction is therefore mobilised ... through a focus on the internal ties between the relations of production, state-civil society and conditions of class struggle, which will provide a series of threads that will be woven into the remainder of the chapters that constitute this book' (10, emphasis mine except where stated otherwise).
These threads will be traced, we are told, not only through 'the internal ties between the relations of production, state-civil society and conditions of class struggle', but also in 'a relational conception of capitalist expansion and uneven and combined
development ..., the geopolitics of capitalist accumulation ..., and conditions of exploitation and resistance through class struggle', leading to 'a series of vantage points from which a relational conception of the inner tie of Global Capitalism ..., Global War ..., Global Crisis ... can be advanced and is finally realised' (11). So where have they gone so wrong?
Ollman makes the claim that Marx subscribes to a 'philosophy of external relations' with specific reference to aspects of capital, value and labour, commodity, money and class:
'Thus, capital, value and labour – to which we could also add commodity, money and class, given their importance in Marx’s analysis of capitalism – are all relations that contain their interaction with each other as essential aspects of what they are, the chief difference between them being the distinctive ‘pole’, or vantage point, that each offers for viewing and piecing together the larger pattern to which they all belong' (Ollman, 2015: 11, emphasis mine).
Leaving aside the question of whether there is any basis or need for a philosophy of internal relations, it is clear that the relevant context here is Marx's 'unfolding' of the concept of the commodity in the opening chapters of Capital, to reveal its constitutive relations, or the 'inner essential determination' of its concrete social form (Starosta, 2015: 126). Property and propertylessness, private independent labour and its alienation, the capitalist and the worker, absolute and relative surplus value, competition between capitals, the world market and recurrent crises are all, if you like to put it that way, revealed as 'essential aspects of what the commodity is'. The contradictions that necessarily arise in the process of capitalist development, in other words, are inherent within it. But Bieler and Morton have already gone too far when they take Sayer's argument that ‘the connection between people’ s productive relations with nature, or labour process, and their productive relations between themselves, or social relations of production, is internal and necessary, not external and contingent ‘ as licence to embrace 'state formation', 'state-civil society', and the like. It is telling in this respect that they paraphrase Sayer, as noted above, as arguing that 'Once capital is established as a social relation in our reasoning we are then directed to its buried history in treating the political economy of state formation, class struggle and relations of production within a substantive historical sociology (Sayer, 1987: 135)' (10, emphasis mine). In fact, the passage cited makes no reference to state formation, but is as follows:
'Marx's critique in other words accomplishes a radical shift of historiographic terrain. Once "capital" is reconceptualized as a relation,
not the thing it originally appears to be, we are directed to a buried history, that of class formation and struggle. The possibility is
thereby opened up of moving back again, to the "imagined concrete" of the surface of society, but this time grasped as "a rich totality of many determinations and relations" [Grundrisse: 100]. Instead of operating with analytic categories which replicate the misplaced concreteness of reified forms like value and capital as conventionally conceived, we can begin empirically to recover the material ways in which, through time, these forms were constructed in the intercourse of "real, living individuals". Marx is clear, we should note, that such historical inquiry is "a work in its own right" [Grundrisse, 461] - we cannot deduce the empirical specifics of social formation from its bare concept. This is important; reification of the concepts [sic] of essential relations is as pernicious as fetishism of phenomenal forms, and by no means unknown to Marxism. Recovering the "real history of the relations of production" (ibid) is an ineluctably empirical exercise (Sayer, 1987: 1356, emphasis mine).
I confess that it is some time since I read Sayer's succinct and beautiful book, but I resolve to do so again, and I recommend it as an indispensable classic - available in facsimile on academia.edu. In short, immanent real necessity, internal relations and inherent contradictions apply only to capital, as theorised by Marx. There is no basis for extending this approach to 'the system of states', to pick one glaring example. In exploring the real history of the relations of production, on the other hand, attention must be paid to the 'rich totality of many determinations and relations' that attend them in the real world. This is the perspective from which connections must be explored, through empirical historical analysis. But connections in this context are conjunctural, in unique configurations from time to time and place to place. They are not internal to anything, in theory or in fact. Bieler and Morton overlook all this, and just as Sayer pointed out thirty years ago, this is important. They generalise the idea of internal relations to cover every real world connection and relationship they touch upon, without any more justification than appeal to the 'philosophy of internal relations'. So, to offer a sample only, it is applied to 'state and civil society' (15), 'agency and structure' (16), 'global capitalism and geopolitical rivalry' (22), race, gender and sexuality as 'internally constitutive of class' (22), (thought they waver on this later, at 133-4), 'ideational and material realms' (51), 'the ideology of austerity and its wider material setting' (58), 'the geographical expansion of capitalist accumulation and the geopolitical dynamics of global war' (58), 'state and market' (85), 'the "economic" and the "political" within capitalism' (86), 'a continuing states system and the changing configuration of global capitalism' (123), 'the interstate system and globalisation' (127), 'the integration of rising powers into global capitalism and the new geopolitical challenges of the global order' (176), 'the state and geopolitics' (189), 'geopolitical' and 'economic' logic (194), 'the tie between global crisis and the trajectories of different territorial state forms' (219), and, of course, Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (i, 6, 9, 132, 191, 242, 251-6). It is not that these things are not related, or that they cannot be explored in relation to the determinations of capital. It is just that it makes no sense to describe them as internally related.
As it is, their insistence on doing so has the unfortunate consequence of making their approach appear more rigid and deterministic than it need be. Their case study chapters are actually examples of theoretically informed empirical analyses of specific situations which are 'rich totalities of many relations and determinations'. The particular configuration of relations and determinations in each case, to be teased out by theoretically informed empirical research, is unique to it. So in the case of the rise of China, they connect the prominent role of state officials in the absence of any dominant class fraction or class alliance in support of restructuring, an authoritarian regime of labour subordination, and entry into the world market as a final stage low value-added manufacturer at the service of transnational capital. In the case of the Iraq War, they connect the policy of 'Bomb & Build imperialism' to the ties between the Bush regime and 'national capital', and the obstacles to the valorisation of the latter. In the case of the Eurozone crisis, they focus on a neoliberal offensive conducted by the EU on behalf of transnational capital, reflected in imposed restructuring and austerity in the EU periphery in particular in response to the legacy of low productivity and debt-led development. Then, having substituted the rise of China for global capitalism, the Iraq War for global war, and the Eurozone crisis for global crisis, they reverse the substitutions in their final chapter, offering a rigid and reductionist model of the 'internal relations of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis' (Figure 10.1, p. 251) that is fundamentally shaped by the unique configurations of relations and determinations in their three case studies, and most strikingly so in reducing 'global war' to Bomb & Build imperialism. When they depict these 'internal relations', then, the inherent contradictions of the 'capital relation' on the one hand and the infinite range of possibilities for concrete developments in the real history of the relations of production are both lost from view.
The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself; but the hegemony of US capital, the tendency for other states to internalise and reproduce its interests, the repeated and largely failed episodes of US-led 'global war' from Korea and Vietnam onwards, and, indeed, the structural dependence of capitalist accumulation on the unpaid domestic work that women have provided (which they also see as a fixed and permanent feature of capitalist accumulation, 155) are not. In short, there is more in the future unfolding of the determinations of capital than is dreamt of in Bieler and Morton's philosophy.
References
Ollman, Bertell (2015), 'Marxism and the philosophy of internal relations: or, How to replace the mysterious "paradox" with "contradictions" that can be studied and resolved', Capital & Class, 39 1, 7-23.
Poulantzas, Nicos (1974/2008) ‘Internationalisation of Capitalist Relations and the Nation-State’, in James Martin (ed.) The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law, and the State. London: Verso, pp. 220–57.
Sayer, Derek (1987) The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism. London: Basil Blackwell.
Starosta, Guido (2015) Marx, Capital and Revolutionary Subjectivity, Leiden and Boston: Brill.