I’ve started to think that there are some analogies between Negri and Zizek: a similar prolificality of work, and what I’ve begun to see as a similar playfulness (although Negri suffers in this comparison, Zizek being both more prolific and funnier). Be that as it may, this little piece begins playfully enough, but leads into [...]
Posts under ‘Social Theory’
The crisis of the capitalist state and the crisis of the left
What are the parameters of the situation we face today? How serious? What sort of period are we in today: what time is it? What are our political needs? These are the sorts of questions — important and urgent — posed (although not in these words) by the following. Consider the ruling class responses in [...]
Pulling the Monster Down
The following consists of several excerpts from an interview with William K. Carroll, whose work we’ve featured previously on this site. Carroll’s research focus is on the contemporary capitalist political economy and transformative social movements. The author of a number of books, his Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class is due out in December. These [...]
What is the distinction between war and peace?
One of the legacies of the past decade — the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the “war on terror,” the attacks on civil liberties, and now the financial crisis and deepest recession of the post-WW2 era — has been a resuscitation of something like “golden age” thinking: the idea that there was a time before [...]
Transnational capitalist linkages and class formation
Once more on the question of a transnational capitalist class, this time in a more nuanced and qualified manner. Thanks to Nick Paretsky, who brought up this 2007 paper by William Carroll in a comment on a previous post. Due to technical difficulties (more frankly, my own technical deficiencies), the tables in the text are [...]
Empires, ruling classes, and the need for new theory: an interview
I’ve just recently encountered Kees van der Pijl in connection with my continuing reading and research on the transnational capitalist class question, and he seems to be an interesting theoretician. A listing of his books can be found here. The following interview is from Theory Talks, which describes itself as “a forum for discussion of [...]
A global ruling class?
Bad form I suppose, but we’ll follow the interview with William Robinson with an article he co-authored with Jerry Harris. The article has the virtue of fleshing out and arguing for the transnational capitalist class thesis in a much fuller way than anything we’ve posted here previously. The fact that several posts have been devoted [...]
Transnational capital: an interview
One of the central objectives of this site is the investigation and discussion of the contemporary structure and organization of global capitalism. In the following interview, published earlier on ZNet, William I. Robinson discusses the thesis that “transnational capital has become the hegemonic fraction on a global scale.” Transnational Capitalism By William Robinson Interviewed by [...]
What does the present crisis represent?
Immanuel Wallerstein, the originator of “world systems theory,” has been putting forward the projection that we are near the end of the present world system, which he identifies with capitalism, for the past fifteen years or more. In the following essay, published in the most recent New Left Review, he outlines some of the main [...]
A transnational capitalist class?
If capitalism has increasingly become an actual world process, less and less bound by nationally delimited economic circuits and social processes, as some have suggested is the real content of ‘globalization’, and as , shouldn’t there be emerging a capitalist class which is also not delimited nationally but is what Don Hamerquist elsewhere on this [...]
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