A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World

Extract

A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World. By William I. Robinson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 224p. $46.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

This book intervenes in the contemporary debates on globalization by asking what it means to conceptualize the global economy. Demonstrating the inadequacy of nation-state-based or international-centric responses to this question, it makes a case for conceptualizing globalization as a historically novel form of transnational capitalism. World capitalism, William Robinson argues, has undergone an “epochal change” involving not just a quantitative intensification but also a qualitative reconfiguration of economic, political, and social processes that were hitherto largely international. Taking advantage of technological developments and organizational innovations, capital has liberated itself from the social and political constraints imposed on it by nation-states and reorganized—fragmented and decentralized—the production process on a transnational basis. This reorganization of the productive base has gone hand in hand with the emergence of a transnational capitalist class (TCC), a transnational state apparatus, and a transnational ideological project.