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 excerpts are taken from an interview published in the Spring 2010 issue of Socialist Strudies. The title above (which I could not resist stealing from the interview as published in Socialist Studies, although it’s only tangentially relevant to the contents of the interview) refers to a really sweet song which Carroll wrote for the birthday of one of his sons in 2004, and can be heard on YouTube.
But really, in a world in which private appropriation of wealth – capital – holds back human development in so many ways and keeps us on this unsustainable treadmill of production, the class struggle is not about higher pay. It is about ending the dominance of capital in human affairs.
From an interview with William K. Carroll
Can you explain your response to nationalist political economy, but also your distance from some other left-intellectual traditions, including both post-modern identity politics and a narrow Marxist approach that identifies progressive struggle with the struggles white, unionized, working class men…
…. What I have found fascinating is how dependency theory and left nationalism persists, despite its having been discredited on an intellectual level. I think this is because, from the Waffle foreword, the dependency framework has been the theory that informs the practice of left social democrats — intent on incremental reforms that can humanize capitalism in Canada…. We still see this in recent work by Mel Watkins and Jim Stanford, as in the critique of the ‘hollowing out’ of corporate Canada — the recent foreign takeovers of companies like Inco….. I debated the issue of hollowing out with Mel at the Canadian Political Science Association meetings recently. I recall that at one point he remarked that the problem with the Canadian bourgeoisie is that they are not very bright — that is a close paraphrase….
I would take the exact opposite view. The Canadian capitalist class is entirely unexceptional. Within the logic of capitalist rationality, it responds to, and of course shapes, the specific accumulation situation in which it is dynamically embedded. Capital based in Canada is internationalizing at least as quickly as Canadian firms are being incorporated into transnational empires based abroad. So-called staples are produced in Canada under conditions that feature highly advanced, capital-intensive technology and relatively high wages. The composition of capital is skewed in the direction of resource extraction because these are the most profitable sectors for industrial capital, not due to some logic of dependency.
I made these arguments in my 1986 book, Corporate Power and Canadian Capitalism. In my view, there is little point in putting great effort into the critique of foreign control, which in Canada is not particularly higher than in several other advanced capitalist countries. The emphasis should be on democratizing control of economic life, from the shop floor to overall investment decision-making and budgeting. Jerome Klassen and I have an article in the next issue of the Canadian Journal of Sociology that presents a detailed analysis of hollowing out and the continuity of corporate power in Canada.
On the other issue, I have criticized both the economistic view that class struggle is the only game, partly because this conception simply leaves out the social justice claims of most of humanity, and partly because it misconstrues what class struggle might be about in our era. The typical equation of working class with organized labour is a contributing factor to the confusion. The noble image of workers fighting for higher pay is a very poor template for these times, which is not to say that labour’s resistance to its immiseration is unimportant in the class struggle. But really, in a world in which private appropriation of wealth – capital – holds back human development in so many ways and keeps us on this unsustainable treadmill of production, the class struggle is not about higher pay. It is about ending the dominance of capital in human affairs. Given that the commanding heights of industry and finance are controlled by a miniscule fraction of humanity, class struggle from below is, effectively, the struggle to bring wealth under public, democratic control. The idea is to replace alienated social relations with those of mutual support, to break the class power of capital – power over — while fostering new forms of community and power-with. This is the class struggle, and it necessarily intersects with a raft of social justice and ecological issues and movements.
The bigger issue, I think, is not that of orthodox Marxist die-hards of the Second International; they are no longer with us in any numbers! Rather, it revolves around a dismissal of the relevance of class, based in part on the antiquated stereotype I just invoked, and the elevation of identity and discourse to an exalted status, in concert with an unhealthy scepticism toward the construction of a collective will capable of effecting change beyond local, micro-political contexts. Rather than a postmodern retreat from class, I think we need a broader view of class struggle, along the lines I have sketched. As capitalism’s dual economic/ecological crisis has deepened, we see a reappearance of history’s old mole, and perhaps a disenchantment with 1970s-style Parisian theory, which seems more than a little quaint. This is registered in the popularity of autonomist analyses such as Hardt and Negri’s. Foucault, as it turns out, is most helpful when taken with large helpings of Marx. Foucault had a cautionary tale to tell in his turn away from all big, transformative projects, but in this respect his politics seems to belong to a different era – the climax of post-war Fordism, the failure of state socialism and of the French Communist Party to break from the Stalinist template and so on. The challenges humanity faces today are simply too vast to be addressed within the confines of micro-politics and the ethics of self-care.
I have criticized the postmodern turn away from the concern with building a counter-hegemonic unity in diversity, a broadly inclusive movement/party that could create the cultural and political conditions for transitioning from capitalism to a democratic socialist formation. This scenario seems entirely far-fetched in contemporary Canada, though not in France or Germany, to say nothing of Venezuela or Bolivia. We need to keep in mind the second thesis on Feuerbach — that humanity must prove the this-sidedness of its thinking in practice. As long as the left remains marginal, disorganized into postmodern fragments and social democratic remnants, the vision of a post capitalist world will remain far-fetched, here. And this brings us to the kernel of truth in Canadian left nationalism: Canada shares with the fading hegemon of world capitalism most of a continental landmass, as well as the deep cultural legacy of white settler colonialism. The geopolitics of North America, in my view, preclude any Canadian rendition of what happened, remarkably and to the everlasting credit of the Cuban people, in Cuba half a century ago, or what is happening today in Bolivia and Venezuela. The prospects for socialism in Canada are not easily separated from the fate of the left in the United States. That is a harrowing thought; indeed, it is the repressed underside to left-nationalist complaints about the congenital weaknesses of the Canadian bourgeoisie. Strategically, this asymmetrical dependence suggests that the left in Canada, while vigorously pressing social justice claims locally, provincially and nationally, should also cultivate continental — and broader– solidarities. The Common Frontiers project of the Canada/US/Mexico labour movement in opposition to NAFTA and the inspirational role that Canadian activists played in the Battle in Seattle of 1999 are exemplary. Deep integration, a bourgeois project now on hold but still alive, needs a creative response from the left.
………
Your forthcoming work revisits capitalist networks and some of your earliest work, likewise investigates network relationships amongst the capitalist class. Empirically, can you describe some of your findings, from this book?
I have just completed this book and the working title is The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class. In terms of thinking about what it all means, off the top, I would emphasize the extent to which the decades since the late 1970s have been a time of class struggle from above. You can see this in the comments of insiders like Warren Buffet. You know his famous interview with the New York Times in 2006 where he declared –this is a close paraphrase– ‘Yes, of course there is a class struggle, and my class is winning.’1 It’s a very interesting quote from the third wealthiest capitalist of the world. There is no doubt that capitalists understand that they are engaged in class struggle. Unfortunately, the rest of humanity is confused about it (laughs).
Looking at the actual architecture of global corporate power, certainly you can see that it is a pretty tight world up at the top. There are regional clusterings and still, definitely, national corporate communities, such as Canada’s. These national corporate communities connect into a transnational network of business leaders who are often also involved in transnational policy planning groups, like the World Economic Forum or the International Chamber of Commerce, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and so on. There is what Stephen Gill has called a transnational historic bloc in support of neoliberalism. From a social movement perspective, we need to recognize this as a social movement from above that has been very effective in promoting and consolidating the neoliberal project. In general, we have, then, an era of development and consolidation of neoliberalism as a hegemonic project both within countries and on a global scale.
……….
I should add that we can also see the very tentative rise, partly in response to neoliberalism and its contradictions, of a global left, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos has put it. This global left includes quite a range of groups and activities, yet there is a fragility to it evident, for instance, in the cloud that hangs over the fate of the World Social Forum. Finally I would point to the increasing importance, strategically and ethico-politically, of struggles to democratize communication. Corporate and state control of communication, not simply through ownership but through the instrumental practices of commercialized, profit driven media, is an enormous challenge. It is a pillar of bourgeois hegemony. Again we see variegated responses from movements — culture jamming and media literacy efforts, creating alternative media, campaigns to use state-centered reforms to rein in capital’s cultural power.
You are quite lucid about things that don’t work, for example, with respect to the NDP in power in provincial governments and regarding the organizational limits of social movements, as well as the problems posed by post-modern identities oriented to consumerism instead of progressive activism. But, in your critical methods books, I was struck by your interpretation of Marx’s famous quote about ‘history weighing upon us as a nightmare’, as a hopeful phrase — hopeful since our present activism can mean a different future. We are not simply captured by the past. What we do, right now, can create the conditions for a different, better future. Despite your research, are you ultimately hopeful?
This is certainly one of the biggest questions of all. Of course, I have to say that I am deeply pessimistic about the future. (laughs). In principle, I would defend the position that I take, that certainly the past does not lock us into a future. We can radically remake the world. This can be done. It’s entirely possible. But this nightmare weighing on the brains of the living is Marx’s way of saying that yes, people do make their own history. But they don’t choose the circumstances. It can be very difficult to reverse tendencies that have achieved an entrenched position in the world. What we’re talking about here is the hegemony of transnational corporate capital, of states that are at best minimally, formally democratic. So it is, indeed, an uphill struggle. Nonetheless, the fact that the hegemony is thin, because of enormous inequalities and injustices in world capitalism, creates openings. You can see various movements, the movements of landless workers in Brazil, various actions, particularly in South America. There are very, very encouraging political developments in specific places, which, of course, is how political developments occur.
But, I am, I think, overall, pessimistic. Let me qualify that and explain what I mean, before I get too depressing (laughs). I think that we are in an organic crisis, where as Gramsci would put it, ‘the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born.’ We can recall other deep, protracted crises of this sort. There is the depression of the 1930s, for example, or the 1970s crisis of Fordist capitalism that eventuated in the triumph of neoliberalism. But this crisis we are in now is unprecedented. It is unprecedented because capitalism’s ecological footprint has outgrown the biosphere. John Bellamy Foster recently published a piece in Monthly Review (Foster, 2010) that made an acute observation. The ecological crisis, particularly over climate change, is quite different from an economic crisis in its basic logic. Economic crisis, we know, is cyclical. It’s cyclical under the assumption that no transformation of capitalism occurs. That is to say, if humanity is unable to figure out how to exit from capitalism, what will happen in an economic crisis is that the crisis will be resolved on the backs of working people and the subalterns of this world. You can see how the crisis of the Fordist Keynesian formation was resolved that way. That is what neoliberalism accomplished, for a certain amount of time.
Now, of course, I would say that neoliberalism is in crisis, most visibly since at least 2008. But the point is that ecological crisis is not cyclical, it’s degenerative. That is, there is no future recovery whose condition is being prepared by the collapse. The collapse is a cumulative collapse and it’s ultimately a matter of fundamentally changing humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature. Avoiding this crisis is about avoiding getting to the tipping point. Once the positive feedback mechanisms — which are quite well known now, in terms of the melting of the polar ice caps and the release of methane from the tundra regions as they thaw — once these mechanisms kick in, the long term future is really grim. I think that the situation is extremely urgent. Of course, capitalism has built into it this grow-or-die expansionary logic that makes it incapable of solving this crisis. Yet the window for a solution is pretty narrow. So, I think it’s hard not to be pessimistic, quite honestly. But,
pessimism is not the same thing as fatalism. On intellectual grounds, I don’t think it’s realistic to be optimistic today. But to allow one’s will to be broken by pessimism eliminates all hope for a brighter future, or really any future for most of humanity. So I think collectively, through some complex convergence of many movements and communities pushing out the new, we really have to pull the monster down.
To twist around Margaret Thatcher’s famous phrase, I don’t see any alternative.
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