INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

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Social Movements for Global Capitalism: The Transnational Capitalist Class in Action Author(s): Leslie Sklair Source: Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 4, No. 3, The Direction of Contemporary

Capitalism (Autumn, 1997), pp. 514-538 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4177237 Accessed: 16-11-2015 20:19 UTC

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Reviewv of International Political Economy 4:3 Autumn 1997: 514-538

Social movements for global capitalism: the transnational capitalist

class in action Leslie Sklair

London School of Economics and Poilitical Science

ABSTRACT

The thesis that ‘Capitalism does not just happen’ is argued with reference to Gramsci, hegemony and the critique of state centrism. This involves a critique of the assumption that ruling classes rule effortlessly, and raises the issue: Does globalization increase the pressures on ruling classes to deliver? Global system theory is outlined in terms of transnational practices in the economic, political, and culture and ideology spheres and the characteristic institutional forms of these, the transnational corporation, transnational capitalist class and the culture-ideology of consumerism. The transnational capitalist class is organized in four over- lapping fractions: TNC executives, globalizing bureaucrats, politicians and professionals, consumerist elites (merchants and media). Social movements for global capitalism and elite social movement organizations (ESMOs) are analysed. Each of the four fractions of the TCC has its own distinctive organizations, some of which take on social movement-like characteristics.

KEYWORDS

Globalization; capitalism; class; Gramsci; social movements; TNC.

I CAPITALISM DOES NOT JUST HAPPEN

The focus of social movement research, old and new, has always and quite properly been on anti-establishment, deviant and revolutionary movements of various types. The aim of this article is to help redress the balance and to show how global capitalism, which I take to be the single most important (though not, of course, the only) global force, is, in many respects, vulnerable. It is a social system that has to struggle to create and reproduce its hegemonic order globally, and to do this large numbers of local, national, international and global

? 1997 Routledge 0969-2290

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GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND THE TCC

organizations have been established, some of which engage in practices that clearly parallel the organizational forms and actions of what are conventionally called ‘new social movements’.

The theoretical-historical foundations of this argument and line of research originate in Gramsci’s attempt to construct a theory of hegemony and ideological state apparatuses (Gramsi, 1971). Much of the voluminous Prison Notebooks written from 1929 to 1935 can be read as a continuous critique of the assumption, not difficult to gather from the Marx-Engels classics, that ruling classes generally rule effort- lessly until revolutionary upsurges drive them from power and make everything anew. As many scholars inspired by, sympathetic with and hostile to marxism have pointed out, the general impression of the marxist classics is of a rather deterministic sociology, a theory in which ‘men make history’ but not in circumstances of their own choosing, where the emphasis is on the latter rather than the former.

It is no accident that Gramsci is associated both with a more ‘cultural’, less deterministic interpretation of marxism and with the concept of hegemony, for they do connect. Gramsci made the connection through the role of the intellectuals in the creation and sustenance of hegemonic forms for the ruling class. He argues:

The hegemony of a directive centre over the intellectuals asserts itself by two principal routes: 1. a general conception of life, a philosophy … which offers to its adherents an intellectual ‘dignity’ providing a principle of differentiation from the old ideologies which dominated by coercion, and an element of struggle against them; 2. a scholastic programme, an educative principle and original pedagogy which interests that fraction of the intellectuals which is the most homogenous and the most numerous (the teachers, from the primary teachers to the university pro- fessors), and gives them an activity of their own in the technical field.

(Gramsci, 1971: 103-4; written in 1934)

While much of this still seems quite valid to me, it suggests too much of a one-way process, the ‘directive centre’ asserting its hegemony over the intellectuals. The reality today is that it is certainly a dialectical process where distinct groups of intellectuals, inspired by the promise or actual achievements of global capitalism, articulate what they perceive to be its essential purposes and strategies, often with support and encouragement from the corporate elites and their friends in govern- ment and other spheres, particularly the media. In an outstanding historical study of this process, which remains outstanding despite its failure to theorize the process at all, Cockett (1995)1 shows how about fifty intellectuals of various types carried out an anti-Keynesian neo-

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