van der Pijl: Transnational Classes and International Relations

van der Pijl, K., 1998. Transnational Classes and International Relations, Routledge.

Van der Pijl provides a Marxist cut on globalization and capital accumulation. He looks at how the structure of international capitalism has grown and changed over time. He begins by looking at original accumulation and moves on through liberal internationalism, state monopoly tendency, corporate liberalism eventually landing us in our current state of neo-liberal organization. In this understanding of globalization, we can see that fractions of capital eventually create class fractions with one fraction being the hegemonic system of structuring and organizing global capitalism due to contingent circumstances.

Van der Pijl analyses systems of capitalism using two tools: commodification and socialization. The commodification of things is what originally created classes and is what shapes capitalism. In original accumulation, the earliest form of capitalism, van der Pijl points out that, “the primordial process in which capital itself crystallizes as a quasi-independent social force, imposing its discipline on a pre-existing social infrastructure by penetrating and transforming it, is commodification…This implies that the use value aspect of an element or item of social production…has to be subordinated to the exchange value aspect” (van der Pijl 1998:37). This initial subordination of use value to exchange value is the very first movement towards a globalized world.

Van der Pijl would claim that commodification has become ubiquitous in our society. When coupled with fetishism, defined as the phenomenon in which modern society resembles the most primitive community and the ascription of animate spirit and magical powers to dead objects, commodification becomes a divine tool allowing people to justify and ethically adjudicate between decisions using the mana and taboo of the market (van der Pijl 1998 11-4). This is a world where everything is either already commodified or in the process of being commodified, a world where everything is a product and every decisions comes from the deified market. This creates an atomized society.

This process of commodification also creates classes. Van der Pijl notes that classes form from exploitative social relationships. With the increasing intensity of commodification, there are more opportunities to create wealth. Through these increased opportunities to create wealth, there are also increased opportunities to exploit workers through the appropriation of unpaid labor. This process of increasing ability to exploit workers and appropriate unpaid labor is a class producing process.

The ameliorating response to this atomized society is socialization . This is defined as, “the planned or otherwise normatively unified interdependence of functionally divided social activity” (van der Pijl 1998:138). This planned activity must be carried out to reunite society again after the commodification of everything. Van der Pijl points out that the result of commodifying, land, labor and money, the three most difficult things to commodify, a process of socialization must occur to bring unity, calm and balance to society. Van der Pijl sees the process of socialization to be undertaken by a group of people that he refers to as the cadres. These people seem to fulfill two functions in van der Pijl’s account: they are the technicians who run the increasingly complicated process of capitalist production and those who, from a position of elite authority (though under the authority of the capitalist), control the mitigating processes of socialization.

Van der Pijl’s interpretation of the increasing speed and intensity of global interconnection has to do with his fractions of capital creating class fractions. “It is our thesis that the capacity of fractions of capital to appropriate a share of the total mass of profits shapes the sense of identity of a particular segment of collective capital with the momentary functioning of the system, short-circuiting the general interest with the special one” (van der Pijl 1998:58). When this general interest is short-circuited with a special one, a hegemonic economic structure emerges. This is taken, in van der Pijl’s example, to then be represented in the Lockean heartland. However, there are also contender states that question the legitimacy and challenging the preeminence of the hegemonic states. This dance between the hegemonic and contender states is represented in what van der Pijl calls a natural tendency, “towards global unification represented by capital, and by the fact that every concrete state/society complex is ultimately held together by a specific structure of power and authority mediating its relations with other such complexes” (van der Pijl 1998:64).

The Lockean heartland, representing the hegemonic economic structure of the time, is not entirely contingent or deterministic. Van der Pijl says that, “the internationalization of capital, then, historically does not evolve as an economic process in a fixed landscape of sovereign states. It is an aspect of a process of expansion of the state/society complex in which capital crystallized under what proved to be the most favorable conditions” (van der Pijl 1998:83 emphasis added). Whatever the most favorable conditions for capital at the time were contingent on the prevailing fraction of capital. The deterministic aspect of this function is that capital will always flourish and be attracted to the most favorable conditions for its reproduction.

The van der Pijl view of increasing speed and intensity of global interconnection, or globalization, can be seen as a mixture of determistic and contingent factors. Fractions of capital create class fractions which end up controlling hegemonic economic regimes and thus Lockean states. Their control is contingent on whatever fraction of capital is hegemonic at the time. Their control is also determistic because the logic of capital accumulation is such that it will always search out increasingly complex forms of exploitation and appropriation of unpaid labor, thus, in van der Pijl’s model, creating class distinction and class conflict. Also, the determistic process of commodification leading to fetishism creates the need for the quasi-contingent process of socialization undertaken by the cadre class. This cadre class is the ultimate protector and technician working for the global capitalist order, but also, in the eyes of van der Pijl, the class that can eventually lead us beyond the natural contradictions that occur within a global system of capitalism.