Capital writ large

The first is that we have a world made up almost entirely of capitalist states integrated into the world market. In the whole of the previous history of capitalism there have been many countries which have been dominated by pre-capitalist ruling classes and pre-capitalist modes of production, and tied into the capitalist world market in very limited and specialised ways. And, of course, for much of the 20th century there was the Stalinist bloc. But now, in almost all countries, there are true-blue capitalist states well integrated into the world market.

Secondly, almost all countries are integrated into the world market in complex ways. They include substantial sectors integrated into complex production networks stretching over several countries. For a large part of the history of capitalism, the pattern of world trade was one of raw materials being exported from less capitalistically developed countries to the metropolis in Western Europe or the USA, most of manufacturing industry being based in the metropolis, and manufactured goods being exported back to the less capitalistically developed countries. That pattern has pretty much broken down. Manufactured goods predominate in world trade, and in the exports of less capitalistically developed countries. The biggest exporter of bulk raw materials is the USA, the most developed country.

Thirdly, there has been an enormous cheapening and speeding-up of transport and communications. Almost anything that can be traded, can be traded internationally. There are very few items for which the cost of transporting them internationally is prohibitive. This is also the era of mass international air travel, mass international telephone communication, and the Internet.

Fourthly, the wage-working class, defined as those who sell their labour-power to capital and are exploited by capital, together with the children and retired people of that class, is probably the majority of the world's population for the first time ever. It is difficult to say precisely, because in many countries many people are 'semi-proletarian' who have bits of jobs or casual jobs and subsist partly on wage-labour and partly on begging or petty trade. Nevertheless, there has been a tremendous expansion of wage-labour. Indonesia, which is one of the less capitalistically-developed countries in the world, a country where many people live not far from malnutrition and starvation, has probably a higher proportion of wage-labour than Germany did in 1918, when the Bolsheviks would cite it as the epitome of a highly-developed capitalist country.

How did all this happen, and what does it mean for us? It did not happen all at once. Capital did not suddenly flip over into new forms in 1990, or at any other particular date. All the developments I've listed are culminations of tendencies which go back a very long time. For example, I talked about the speeding-up of communications. One major technology is the fax machine. It was invented in 1842! But in the 1990s the four developments I've mentioned reached a sort of 'critical mass'. That happened mainly through two processes.

Firstly, the economic crises of the 1970s and '80s. The period from the Second World War to the early 1970s was one of the gradual knitting-together of world trade, the gradual development of autonomous capitalist centres in many of the ex-colonial countries, and the gradual rise of transnational corporations. From the early 1970s there opened up an era in which the relations of capitalist states to the world market became a cause of tremendous economic crises for them. The ruling classes were faced with options. They chose the option of reorganising their affairs to attune them better to the gradually-more-powerful world market, instead of the one of raising economic barriers and erecting siege economies on the model followed by capitalist states in the 1930s.

The interests within the ruling classes who looked towards the world market turned out to have hegemony, and to be prepared to pay a high price, not only in working-class suffering but also in the ruination of large sections of capital. In Britain, about one quarter of manufacturing industry was trashed in a few years, in the early 1980s. Those 'globalist' sections were able to establish their outlook as the new 'common sense' of capital. One representative development here was the response of what was then the European Economic Community from the early 1970s to the increasingly troubled state of world capitalism. It was not to fall apart, but on the contrary to strengthen its links and even to push through measures like the single currency in what was, from many capitalist points of view, a very reckless way.

Another was the response of governments in less capitalistically-developed countries to the Third World debt crisis after 1982. Instead of defaulting on the debt and turning to a self-centred course of economic development, instead of emulating the economic nationalism of the 1930s, they responded by privatisations, anti-inflation policies, welfare cuts, deregulation, export drives - whatever was necessary to restore their credit with the international banks.

Alongside the response to economic crises of governments in West and South, the other essential process was the collapse of the Stalinist bloc and of the Stalinist model for industrial development. That in turn was very much tied up with the involvement of the East European states, in particular, in the world market from the 1970s onwards.

Through those two processes we had the speeding-up, and the achievement of a 'critical mass', by the four developments I have listed. Also important is that all this happened in a period of working-class setbacks. It happened when the ruling classes had regained the initiative after the big working-class struggles of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. In some countries there were big set-piece defeats for the working class - in Britain, the miners' strike of 1984-5 - and, in other countries, simply a petering-out of the struggles of the 1970s in disarray and disillusionment. The capitalist classes were eager and able to take their revenge. And that has shaped a lot of the detail of how 'globalisation' has proceeded in the 1980s and 1990s. A push towards inequality, destruction of social provision, ecological damage and mass pauperisation is endemic to capital, but the working-class setbacks allowed the capitalist classes to add extra bite and sharpness. Although almost all capitalist countries are now complexly integrated into the world market, that is by no means true of all the world's population. From the point of view of global capital, vast millions of people are simply disposable surplus.

Capitalist globalisation is capital writ large. It is not a number of other things which it is said to be. It is not capitalism turned financial. The financial markets have expanded enormously, but all the essential developments I have talked about were well in train before that expansion of the financial markets. They have proceeded in the last 20 years in close intertwining with the expansion of financial markets, but that is not to say that finance was the essential driving force. Evidence here is the European Union's push - reckless, as I have said, from many capitalist points of view - towards a single currency. The single currency eliminates many financial markets, and reduces the disciplinary effect of world financial markets on individual countries in the European Union. Nevertheless the capitalist classes of Europe thought it worthwhile in the higher interests of international capitalist integration.

It is not capitalism turned stateless. It is not a capitalism where the nation-state is withering away and markets, or transnational corporations, decide everything. Although it is a capitalism much more attuned to the world market, that attuning is carried out by the nation states. Capitalist globalisation is a process largely carried out by capitalist states. A precondition for its development is the emergence in less capitalistically-developed countries of capitalist states of a weight that they did not have previously, which have the power and confidence to carry through the policies of globalisation.

It is not capitalism turned American. It is not a world where instead of the old European empires we have semi-colonial rule by the United States. The USA is the biggest capitalist power. But the long-term trend, operating since 1945, for the USA's relative dominance to decline, has not been reversed fundamentally. The USA does not have the same position in today's world order as Britain had in the British Empire.

Capitalist globalisation is capital writ large, capital raging across the world. The challenge for us, in response, is to rewrite working-class struggle on an equally large scale - to rewrite it on a scale which matches the new outreach of capitalism.

We have difficulties, in that we face now a broader and in some ways more intangible enemy. One of the problems in the 'new anti-capitalist movement' after Seattle is how to go beyond demonstration after demonstration against one after another symbolic world capitalist organisation - WTO, IMF, World Bank and so on. How do we go beyond the symbols to hit the substance of global capital?

We have advantages in the expanded size and scope of the world working class, and in the fact that almost everywhere in the world workers are now face-to-face with capital in a sense they were not even 20 years ago. We also have advantages in our expanded ability and facility of communication between different sectors of the world labour movement, so that when there are big strike movements in Korea, for example, we can hear about them immediately, directly from the strike organisers, through the Internet.

Our problem is to try to recompose an organised movement of global working-class solidarity out of the moods and the one-off actions now emerging across the world. To that we have to rediscover the ideas of internationalism, of consistent democracy, and of the political independence of the working class. And, like every rediscovery of old ideas in a new context, our redevelopment of those principles will in part be a development of new ideas, to match up to the new developments of capital world-wide.

* Martin Thomas was speaking at the Workers' Liberty 2000 summer school