The Worldwide Strike Wave and The Political Crisis of Global Governance:

Challenging Orthodoxies on Both Sides

Steven Colatrella

Orthodoxies Mainstream and Critical

Orthodox approaches tend to see global governance as an aspect of neoliberalism. Mainstream approaches to globalization and neoliberalism in turn argue that in practice no one is in charge – most well-known in Thomas Friedman’s electronic herd. In the liberal version of this formulation, global governance organizations are needed to provide regulation or to address social problems caused by market failure or by the limits of the market, as in the recent writings of ex-WTO head Mike Moore and of economist Jeffrey Sachs. But critics of globalization and global governance have also often seen global governance as a secondary phenomenon with respect to neoliberalism. In this view, global governance serves either as a mopping up operation of problems created by neoliberalism itself, or as a contradiction in which state power of all kinds, and governance itself, are seen as part of the internal contradictions of neoliberalism as ideology, as in the work of David Harvey.

One body of theory that does see global governance as central, that of Negri and Hardt, argues gives, as Giovanni Arrighi stated in his critique of their book Empire “a radical twist” on the thesis that territorial states had given way to a de-centered network of power. This thesis whether of the mainstream Friedman version or the radical Negri and Hardt version, has been attacked by critics both mainstream (Kenneth Waltz[1]) and oppositional (Hirst and Thompson)[2] for mistakenly assuming that globalization and global governance mean the end, or at least the qualitative weakening of the nation-state Further, many radical opponents of globalization and neoliberalism have argued that the opposition to neoliberalism is best understand as taking a multitude of forms and as consisting of an extremely heterogeneous set of actors.

Nearly all of the above mentioned authors see neoliberalism and globalization as discontinuities with any previous secular linear historical tendencies of capitalist development or see now such tendencies in capitalist history in the first place. In this essay, I argue that global governance is best understood through two distinct processes – the secular growth of hegemonic powers treated in the literature on hegemony best exemplified by the work of Arrighi, and as a process of class formation. Further, I identify the current planetary strike wave by workers as a dialectically-related process of self-making by the working class globally and suggest that a new global composition of the working class that is both a cause and effect of the strike wave around the world indicates that the heterogeneous actors of the previous period of anti-capitalist struggle is giving way to a more cohesive set of actors and forms of action indicating a changed power relation that is provoking a global political crisis unprecedented in world history.

Introduction – actors and theory

Critics and supporters of global capitalism have in recent years focused on the diminished role of the state – deregulation, privatization, the global diffusion of production[3] – and seen a highly plural set of actors – a “movement of movements” as the forces to be looked to for an “alterglobalization[4].” This essay argues that in light of recent events, greater attention should be paid instead to the class nature of global governance organizations, the transformation of nation-states in the service of a global capitalist class, and working class activity primarily in the form of a gigantic worldwide strike wave. This class struggle, now on a world scale increasingly takes the form of austerity, expropriation and exploitation guided by or initiated by organizations of global governance in collaboration with national states, and a strike wave by workers unprecedented in its worldwide scope since around 2007.

Further, I suggest here that the understanding of the historical tendencies of capitalism under pressure of class struggle as articulated and described by Marx and Marxists that has seemed confounded by trends in neoliberal globalization instead is best understood as confirmed by the recent trajectory of both global governance and global strike action by workers. While avoiding talk of “stages” that overstates historical determinacy and understates contingency resulting from the unpredictable outcome of class struggles in the real world, we can restore confidence in the possibility of understanding in a coherent way the general direction that events and social structures in capitalist society necessarily take, all other things being equal. This is possible if we can anticipate with some clarity and probability the likely impact of class struggles in reshaping and reconfiguring the structures and institutions of global capitalism. In other words, we may restore the role of theory, not as deconstruction of discourses alone, but as a guide to understanding the likely direction of future development and as a guide therefore to radical action. Nor should this project be dismissed by a facile critique of “teleology” – for I merely intend to remind us, for example, that the world that the Communist Manifesto described, of a world market, worldwide commodity exchange and the radical simplification of classes into owners of capital and workers for wages, hardly described the world of 1848, but rather anticipated key aspects of the world of global capitalism today. Likewise, Marx’s insight in chapter 32 of Volume One of Capital, that the historical tendency of capitalism would be concentration of wealth and power, and centralization of production, with a small elite in control of the resources of a society of expropriated producers, anticipated developments fundamental to capitalism that had not yet happened at the time of his writing. I analyze relevant insights of Marx, Engels and Hegel here to aid us in understanding the meaning of global governance and of the growing strike wave.

Global Governance – the state form of global capitalism

Global Governance is arguably the name for what might pass these days for “a committee for the management of the affairs of the bourgeoisie as a whole” – though we should recall that the much repeated phrase by Marx and Engels stated that “the executive of the modern state” filled this role, not, for instance, the legislature or other state institutions. If not quite state forms, Global Governance institutions, such as the G20, the WTO, World Bank, IMF, UN Security Council and at an intermediate level the European Commission, as well as at least the key national central banks certainly constitute some significant change in the way states work in a global context. In acting often as Hegel’s “universal authority”, something between an executive committee and a bureaucracy that sets the agenda for and coordinates state policies throughout much of the world, Global Governance institutions are where the real power seems to be politically in the capitalist world today. These institutions embody Arundhati Roy’s crucial insight that globalization means not that national sovereignty is at risk, but rather that democracy is[5] – especially if by democracy we mean a democratic content and agency, and not merely a procedure.; second, Global Governance institutions, as Marx made clear regarding state bureaucracies in his critique of Hegel’s theory of the state, are not universal, neutral institutions, rather they occupy a universal space, as public power, but they represent particularistic, indeed class interests. Representing capitalist interests, and particularly finance capital, global governance organizations use the present crisis to call on states to enact as public policy austerity, budget-cutting for social services, just as in an earlier cycle they called on states to privatize, deregulate and liberalize. These policy requirements, coming as they do from beyond the level of national governments, are not in themselves a negation of national state power, but rather a transformation of it in class terms. National states, complex creations that express the complicated class relations and outcome of class struggles historically in each national territory, are, through the imposition and mediation of Global Governance, liberated from the local class struggles that have heretofore shaped them, expanded and/or limited their policy options and structures. They are instead increasingly interrelated globally as instruments of an ever-more coherent global capitalist ruling class, by outlook and by unity in action, that is by consistent purposeful action in the interests of their own class globally and nationally.

Opposing this renewed wave of austerity and neoliberal globalization is a host of movements, organizations and protests, at times uniting in action a diversity of class actors. But increasingly, in the past two years since the financial crisis broke and turned into a global recession, the opposition has been spearheaded by the working class in country after country. Since Spring 2010 increasingly purposeful strike waves have directly opposed the austerity imposed by national governments, and the austerity called for by Global Governance institutions. Put differently, the past few months as I write have seen the rise of a new concrete universal in the form of mass strikes against the abstract universal of Global Governance. These strike waves, from China and India to South Africa and Egypt, from France and Britain to Jamaica and Cambodia, from Vietnam to Greece, from Bangladesh to Spain, have also challenged austerity as class rule. This planetary strike wave by a world working class, is so far the most direct, and impressive obstacle to realizing the austerity program of global capital in the face of a crisis itself resulting from the limited options for profitable investment around the world. It is the meaning of the trajectory, and interaction, of these two main class forces, as understood and anticipated by Hegel and Marx, that I will explore in this article.

Global Governance and Hegemony

A major weakness of the realist school of international relations theory is that it confuses instruments with actors. National state governments, which are complexes of institutions shaped by actors, primarily classes in struggle both domestically and internationally, are treated as actors in their own right, with a presumed “national interest” as a guiding motivation. Giovanni Arrighi’s work on successive hegemonies in historical capitalism by contrast, treats classes as actors, through primarily ruling capitalist classes who, through political exchange with state rulers, enabling them to acquire political and military protection for their capitalist interests, gain the organizational capacity and the resources to organize global capitalism as a whole, exercising hegemonic leadership as well as domination over other national capitalists and workers as a whole. Each hegemonic power has reorganized capitalism’s form and content globally, transforming the system and expanding its geographic reach in accordance with the need of capital’s ever-growing need for surplus value, profit and accumulation. Each hegemonic power – Venice, Genoa, The Dutch, Britain, and the United States - has thus had three crucial characteristics distinguishing it from the one that had come before it. First, each was larger in geographic scale as a “container” of power and profit; second, each rested on a wider social base, accommodating or incorporating the social struggles that burst forth during and as both cause and effect of the crisis of the previous hegemony, and finally, and though Arrighi never states this as a reason arguably as a result of the need to meet the second of these criteria, each hegemonic power was a paler imitation of the purer form of capitalist logic, of embodying an “executive committee of the bourgeoisie” exemplified by the first hegemonic power, Venice.

For Arrighi, the problem is that the current, fading hegemonic power, the United States, is too powerful militarily to be overcome by a new power, and no power embodies a qualitatively larger scale – China, for instance being the same continental size as the US but no larger – so that the renewal system of capitalism may be blocked, the US’ political power blocking the ability of mobile capital to transfer its allegiance to a new political ally. A world-market oriented ruling class, instead, perhaps such as that theorized by globalization theory, would lack the state protection needed by capital, leading to a world market society that was non-capitalist. It is, instead, my contention that the dominant factions of global capital, finance capital in particular, have found, in global governance organizations and their actors, a new class alliance of political exchange that does not sacrifice the political control, nor the military power it historically found in territorial states. That alliance is with the bureaucratic rulers of global governance organizations and the organizations at the national level of each state with which these organizations have privileged relationships, and whose transformation into local units of global governance on behalf of finance capital they have facilitated, especially central banks and treasury ministries. Further, this strategy enables capital to overcome the growing tendency for less logically capitalist hegemonic powers by allowing a considerable and increasing overlap and merger between the two classes of global financial bourgeoisie and global governance bureaucracy, through the process of “elite socialization” and interpenetration of personnel between the two, leading to the formation of a more homogeneous global ruling class. To better understand this process, we need a brief excursion into Hegel’s theoretical understanding of bureaucracy and governance. While Arrighi is more generous in acknowledging somewhat a Hegelian influence in his work than say Negri and Hardt, he does not specifically treat his themes in a Hegelian language. But it is through a discussion of Hegel on bureaucracy, and Marx’s critique of Hegel’s theory, that we can also re-establish some sense of the historical tendency of capitalist political development.

The Universal Class – and Not

Hegel traced the development of modern society and came to a similar conclusion to that of Max Weber: modern society would be governed by bureaucracy. However, for Weber bureaucracy is the end result of a long process of instrumental rationalization of society that is a product of capitalism but not fully reducible to it. For Hegel instead, bureaucracy is an organic part of modern society based around the need for law to regulate the competition and fragmentation of civil society. Hegel sees the bureaucracy as a form of “rule”, of political power in itself, that encompasses the executive and judicial powers[6]. This is possible, and according to Carl K.Y. Shaw is compatible with liberal doctrine despite Hegel’s opposition to formal separation of powers, because both the executive and the judiciary have the same basic task: to concretize the abstract universal of a society embodied in its code of laws and norms, into particular judgments and practices in concrete, real world situations involving civil society. Without such judgments, and such concretization, society and the state would become detached from one another, as the particular interests (in Marxist terms the class interests) of civil society would atomize society, pulverizing it, and in the process destroy any possible universality, that is, any possible connection of human members of society with each other and therefore any larger purpose or common interest as well[7]. Thus the bureaucracy, and the executive and juridical power it wields, provides for the possibility of modern bourgeois civil society with its market economy and capitalist relations: