PLEASEEXCUSE THE RATHER ROUGH SCAN!

From Paul Smith, Millennial Dreams: Culture and Capital in the North (Verso, 1997)

pp18- 48

old North carefully designates the appropriate degrees of darkness within its penumbra. And it is in the South that the narrative of globalization is most clearly a lure as capitalism seeks to carry on its lost colonial power by other means. In other words, the current capitalist watchwords of integration, unification, and globalization all address exclusively the existence of a particular span of capitalist nations across the top part of the globe from where the world can be demarcated much as has been hoped for since the Enlightenment. Millennial capitalism in that sense finds the rhetoric of its future in the rhetoric of its past.

A Certain Kind of Capitalism

Capitalism now claims an isochronic command over the space of the globe as well as territorial control over all its economic processes. Yet in material terms the globe is marked by differentiations in time and space that belie such simultaneity and integration. At the same time, there can be no doubt that the certain kind of capitalism which the millennial dream foreshadows or desires has produced significant shifts in the economic organization of the world. Equally, those changes spill over into all other arenas. Political and civic systems around the world are now fully occupied with the business of the deep structural adjustments that need to be made in order to prepare nations to actually accede to the millenarian dream. By the same token, the organic constitution of everyday life and cultures is being transformed for citizens of all countries. Thus, even if this is not (yet) the kind of capitalism it claims to be, the process of annunciating its dream has extensive effects in the formation not just of the material circumstances under which the world labors, but also of the ideological and cultural conditions under which it lives and which have to be made apposite for the desired condition. So exactly what kind of capitalism is this global capitalism realized in ideal form, or what changes have occurred within the mode of production such that it can be proffered as some sort of new and improved global capitalism?

The nature and existence of this "new" global economy have been debated for a surprisingly long time. Indeed, it is clear that Marx considered nineteenth-century capitalism to be already properly global; and for Lenin the internationalization of capitalist accumulation was exactly the underpinning of Northern imperialism. A fundamentally Leninist view of the necessary interplay of international capitalist markets and imperialism runs through the first important

postwar stagings of the issue, as is made clear by Hugo Radice's 1975 collection on modern imperialism and the international expansion of capital.18 The. central datum of the Radice intervention was the evidently increasing tendency of Northern capitalism to send industrial production offshore and thus to take advantage of lower labor costs in the newly decolonized South. As if to meet the increasingly multinational needs of the North's corporations, the 1970s saw the dismantling of various international barriers to capital flow - notably the Bretton Woods currency structure. This dismantling of exchange mechanisms has been seen by many as the crucial factor in the advent of a postliberal economic system, and certainly it opened the way for one of the principal features of contemporary capitalism, namely, the general privileging of financial speculative capital over productivist capital. I'

Such developments are often used to confirm the claim that capital has now fully globalized itself, or is about to. However, it is important to emphasize two things in particular here. First, that capital's tendency to seek lower labor costs offshore is in fact a chronic feature of capitalist development and not simply a novelty of the late twentieth century. The point has been convincingly made by Giovanni Arrighi, who demonstrates that capital flight (and all that it entails in terms of social regulation as well as economic activity) has been a regular local feature within a world-wide system of capitalist exploitation and the current moment gives us nothing more than a new wrinkle in the old habit of reorganizing labor power.2. Second, as I have already suggested, the current restructuring is perhaps most relevantly seen as a particular historical development arising from the

collapse of the North's colonial systems and of American mid-century

hegemony over both economic and cultural realms in the global system. In that important sense, the contemporary, "globalized" form of capital accumulation derives from the moment of direct imperialism and is in many respects the continuation of colonialism and imperialism by other means.2I

The specter of globalization is, then, ushered in by the collapse of

the dependence and interdependence model of postwar international organization and by decreasing American influence. Early analyses of the consequences of the abandonment of direct colonialism and the rise of globalism or transnationalism often stressed the implication of globalism for the economic crises of the postwar period, for the relation of modes of capitalist accumulation to changes in the technological and industrial capability of monopoly capitalism, and

in the increasingly oligarchic power of a limited number of its

enterprises (mostly American - in 1959 all but half a dozen of the 50 biggest world corporations were based in the US)'» This was the line taken by, for instance, Osvaldo Sunkel and Edmundo Fuenzalida in 1979. For them, it seems, the nature of such oligarchic enterprises and the changes they went through were crucial. They claimed that the new "transnational" corporation (or what Radice more simply calls the "international firm") was shifting

"immediate and capital goods, finance, technology, personnel and Information across national frontiers - transnationally, within the boundaries of its organization, largely superseding the market, and therefore, having telative freedom in fixing prices, costs, fees and interest rates in such a way as to maximize profits for the corporation as a whole."

This description remains, as we shall see below, a viable one to account for many of the major corporate players in the current moment. The point, however, is that even this mode of operation is hardly a great novelty within the history of capitalist accumulation: it represents, in fact, a variation on a theme of capitalist response to crisis, one which must be located within a specific history in order to be understood.

It is indeed only a historical view of the habits of capitalism - taken in conjunction with Marx's essential observation that "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society"24 - that can give the lie to the millennial rhetoric of globalization. Thus, many other recent commentators have begun to question the claim that there is anything fundamentally new about this form of global capitalism. Tim Brennan has recently argued that the rhetoric of globalization in Northern public discourse and in the discourse of contemporary management can be construed as part of an "eternal return" of such boosterism in American capitalism, suggesting that the current variation on global rhetoric is all "about making us believe it," while John Eperjesi warns against using such boosterism as a substitute for evidence or data about actual material circumstances in the current conjuncture.2s Similarly, Frances Fox Piven, while allowing for some specific alterations in the epiphenomenal features and procedures of contemporary capitalism, is skeptical of the notion that the actual state of globalization is as advanced as commentators suggest, and in any case makes the argument that the processes of globalization have very particular and very familiar components.2.

Such analyses suggest, then, that the process of globalization does

not represent a radical rupture in the history of capitalism, but, that, it is rather a sort of outgrowth of familiar capitalist concerns; it is a notion bound up entirely in the history of the varying degrees and kinds of capitalist accumulation. It is in other words not some drastic new phenomenon but a historically explicable one whose peculiar forms are dependent on the specific series of crises that capitalism has engendered within and for itself in the continual process of revolutionizing the means of production. What can be said to vary or to be subject to reorganization with each and any such crisis is the internal relation of capital to labor, and the external relation of capital to the state. Thus, for, instance, the rise of the oligarchic multinational corporations after decolonization altered capital's relation to labor by increasingly 'a king advantage of low-cost labor in the South instead of the normally unionized and often highly paid labor force in their home nations. More recently, the capital-labor relation has been further altered by a progressive proletarianization of knowledge and skills in the North, along with the reintroduction of labor practices here such as sweatshops and child labor.

Similarly, the relation of Northern nation-states to corporations undergoes regular changes. For instance, at the moment of increased corporate offshoring in the 1970s, the relation between the US nation-state and its corporations shifted radically, with widespread effects in the cultural and civic life of the nation. Robert Reich has described

this shift in terms of a collapse of what he calls the postwar "national

bargain," whereby the state and capitalism had colluded in setting the

social and economic conditions for mass production of standardized

commodities; this consensus broke down with the crisis of falling

rates of profit in the post-Bretton Woods moment and entailed increased tension between the state and capital - tension which

Reich's vision of the state supplying the newly global economy with

human capital in the form of knowledge and skills is intended to

allay. In a darker view, Immanuel Wallerstein locates the collapse

of the postwar consensus as a function of the failure of a liberal

ideology whose history he traces through from the French Revolution

to the fall of the Berlin Wall; for him, this failure has by now deeply

invalidated the state's peer relation to capital and its functional role

of controlling and regulating national economic practice, leaving

nation-states with only the role of controlling and increasingly

dominating their populations by force.28

Despite their differing perspectives and agendas, Reich and Wallerstein both recognize the need to consider, even if schematically, the

kinds of factors pertaining to the history of capital development which alone can account for the emergence of millennial capitalism. Crucially too, they both recognize that the shifting motion of capitalist accumulation entails and is implicated in a continual process of structuring and restructuring of state and civil society which is anything but epiphenomenal; the structural and historical necessity of these changing relations in turn involves changes in the everyday life and cultures of capitalist societies. Millennial capitalism is in that limited sense not remarkable, but a symptomatic moment in the history of a logic; at the same time the changes that it induces can be read at all levels of the social.

That means that some features in capitalist relations have changed while the habitual processes of capitalism have continued in their mechanical ways. Thus, particular historical changes within the capitalist mode of production can be grasped accurately only as functions of specific crises of capitalism and its continual need to reinvent itself. The moment of globalization or of what I am calling millennial capitalism is most usually described in ways which deny or simply ignore this underlying and underpinning logic. By and large, the mainstream media, as well as the professional discourses of policymakers, managers, business people, and academic commentators, are determined to divorce the features of globalization from their historical formation, while at the same time they indulge in flights of fancy (or else in complaisant assessments of those flights of fancy) which both presume globalization and ignore its historical constitution. In the discourse of academic business journals, for instance, even self avowed historical explanations for the rise of globalization are in fact at bottom ahistorical. One typical article in one typical academic business journal argues that there are three principal causes or origins of globalization: "the triumph of market economies and capitalism" attendant upon the collapse of actually existing socialism at the end of the 1980s; "the explosive growth of technology" with its worldwide application and its promotion and intensification of instantaneous communications across the globe; and the "rise of knowledge and skills as principal sources of competitive advantage. "2'

Each of these factors, offered as causal explanation, is in fact merely a symptom of exactly the kind of historical movement of capitalism that I want to claim is most important here. The collapse of socialism in the former Soviet bloc is no doubt primarily a function of the pressure put on the communist economies by the increasingly transnationalized capitalist economic activity which was, as we have seen, already in motion by the 1970s. One not incidental effect of the first claims of these three is to obfuscate the way in which the idea of globalization functions as a development of those modes of Northern exploitation of the South which went under the rubrics of colonialism and imperialism. In other words, there is little reason to imagine that the collapse of communism has materially facilitated globalization only, perhaps, that it has opened up more semi-peripheral space for a process that was already being annunciated, while also acting as a historical screen to block out the longer history of capitalist development.

By the same token, the claim that the radical expansion of technological means IS in part responsible for globalization is both brazenly ahistorical and profoundly undialectical. Within the history of capitalism the development of technological power has always been both a necessity and a symptom, responding to the needs that are produced by crises and also helping to provoke those crises. That is to say that in all cases ,technological expansion enters the capitalist process as a function of its requirements at specific moments and thereby restructures capital's relation to labor. Thus, technological expansion has always been the capitalist norm - part of the process of continual revolution in the means of production. The profound ,elation of technology to labor and to capital's requirements is deliberately hidden in the ideological claims made for technology's catalytic role; such claims are always mystificatory, implying that technology somehow magically appears as an independent and determining factor.

Marx himself attempted to demythologize such teleological narratives of instrumental progress when he spoke of the nineteenth century development of industrial machinery, and his remarks would seem to apply equally to the claims made for the "explosion" of technology which meets the requirements of millennial capitalism today: "The development of the means of labor into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping

of the traditional, inherited means of labor into a form adequate to capital."3O Technology is, in short, not in itself a cause of anything,

and the propensity even of commentators on the left to buy into or

assume such a teleological function for technology inhibits an understanding not just of the current conjuncture, but equally of the whole history and workings of capital.

A similar point can be made about the third claim, about skills and knowledges, which is perhaps amplified with the most fundamentalist zeal by Peter Drucker:

The basic economic resource... is no longer capital, not natural resources (the economist's "land"), nor "labour." It is and will be

knowledge. The central wealth-treating activities will be neither ,he allocation of capital [0 productive uses, nor "labour" - ,he two poles of nineteenth and 20th century economic theory. . . Value is now created by "productivity" and "innovation," both applications of knowledge [0 work. The leading social groups of the knowledge society will be "knowledge workers" .. ."

While it is indubitably the case that, especially within the Northern economies, knowledge and skills have become a pre-eminent means toward "competitive advantage," this development can hardly be considered a determinant in the establishment of millennia I capitalism. It is, rather, just one component caught up in the dialectic eddies of cause and effect within the millennia I project. In this case too, that information, knowledge, and specialized training should be shaped precisely for the benefit of capital is normal procedure. Such qualities are not innocently donated to subjects within capitalism, and nor are they natural qualities that subjects bring to capital - even if the ideologies of the center and the right respectively would prefer to have things appear in one of those two ways. On the contrary, knowledge and skills are produced exactly in order to respond to the needs of capital and they thereby help sustain the movement of the process of accumulation.

At the same time, it should be said that something has indeed changed in the current conjuncture. With core labor being undertaken more and more in the periphery, Northern labor has also had to be reorganized. During the postwar period, Northern core labor could be said to have been relatively privileged - and in some accounts its very privilege doomed it to displacement. Certainly, the reorganization of labor power over the last decades in the North has been marked by a deprivileging of labor. In the US context, Mike Davis has mapped the process throughout the 1970s and 1980s whereby "low wage employment, far from being a mere periphery to a highwage core, has become the job growth-pole of the [US] economy," and he shows to what extent this proletarianization process is in fact closely associated with the expansion of technological means. Not only does skilled work and work involving the use of educated knowledges become downgraded, but there is also an "explosion of menialized jobs associated with the diffusion of the most advanced information technology."32 The Reagan administration's early mass firing of PATCO (air traffic control) workers was emblematic in this regard. Even though the particular situation of those workers was complicated by US federal-worker laws, their dismissal spectacularly demonstrated,

as It was indeed intended to do, the fungibility of even skilled and trained workers.

Such a downgrading of skilled work and the proletarianization of all kinds of work that might once have been considered the domain of the middle classes has subsequently had, of course, a profound effect on the structure and kinds of education in the US and indeed in other Northern nations. In true liberal fashion, education in those nations has traditionally been the almost exclusive property of the upper and middle classes - especially education at the tertiary level. At this juncture, education systems essentially or predominantly train future workers in the kinds of technical skills and knowledges that are needed for basic operations of the service industries - the old American motto, "education for democracy," has now to be replaced by "education for capitalism." The point here is finally, however, that the claims made about knowledge and skills are obfuscatory, first of all in the sense that they hide the normal and habitual practices of capitalism, and more particularly in the sense that they deny the downgrading of labor that we are experiencing as capitalism seeks to drive down the costs of variable capital.

The above three particular claims about the rise of globalism have become shibboleths within the greater shibboleth of the notion of globalization itself and they help obscure the objective conditions of capital today, as well as the history of capital. It seems to me important that these kinds of explanations for globalism be resisted,

not just on their own terms qua explanations, but because they are

central components of the imaginary of globalization that constitutes millennial. capitalism. If my suggestion has any merit - that globalization is in large part an ideological formation annunciating a fundamentalist version of capitalism which has not yet arrived - then the nature of the political battles that must arise around this globalization project can be clarified. Thus my point in stressing the ahistorical and undialectical nature of these three claims is not simply to gainsay the dominant versions of globalization's genealogy, but rather more to

underline the way in which such genealogies and explanations are

constructed by both proponents and putative antagonists of the

process: that is, they proceed by and large without reference to the

fundamental processes of capitalism, and to the condition and

function of labor power in particular. At a moment when millennial zeal infects not just the globalization cheerleaders but also many on the left, and when the shibboleth of globalization is given credence in all quarters, unreflexive adherence to the discourse almost automatically elides crucial factors and components of the actual state of capitalist

domination - factors that in my view still need to be considered as proper analytical objects if we aft to understand and be able to resist the certain kind of capitalism that is being foisted on us- I want, in other word" to stress the continuities represented by millennial capitalism within the history of capitalist formations. Such a notion is intended to counter not just the discourse of the millennial dream's

many proponents, but also the discourse of those parts of the left what we might call the postmodern left - which want to see in globalization a huge rupture or historical break."

I have been proposing, then, that the annunciation of millennial capitalism is in a material sense premature, and that at the ideological level it constitutes an irrational formation of oneiric wish-fulfillment; furthermore, its imputed components bespeak not some huge rupture within the history of capitalism but a set of continuities which need to be discussed and understood exactly in their historicity. The proposal can be strengthened by looking in turn at several of the factors to which the millenarian discourse of globalization most often attributes radical agency and ruptural effect. Each of these will turn out to consist in a strange and contradictory fusion of ideological wish-fulfillment and practice on the ground (capitalism's chronic admixture of magic and positivism once more). Each of them attaches to the general descriptions of globalization that currently abound (though of course to differing degrees) at all points of the political spectrum in the North:

(1) the question of economic competition;

(2) the contemporary shift to so-called service industries and sectors;

(3) globalism's reconstitution of capital such that finance capital predominates over productivist capital and that the role of debt has become more important;

(4) the emergence and empowerment

of the .stateless corporation" and of its supposed supranational regulation, along with the consequent eclipsing of the nation-state; and

(5) the conduct of the Northern nation-state in relation to its subjects, which for me takes in the question of the reorganization of production and consumption. With the partial exception of the last point, these are all elements of the practices of globalization that are emphasized by supporters and opponents alike but whose objective structure is more complicated - indeed, less obvious - than often assumed.

1. Competition

Probably the single most important ideological keyword for millennial capitalism is competition. For Marx, already in the 19^th century, competition was the essence of capitalism, since "competition is nothing other than the inner nature of capital."14 Marx proposes that the nature of nineteenth-century capitalism was determined by competition and he equated competition with the fact of there being a private property system at all. Thence, in Grundrisse, he explicates the logic whereby the system of private property establishes a set of interrelations amongst "many capitals. . . [whose] self-determination therefore appears as their reciprocal interaction with each other." That interaction is mystified by the claim that it is driven by an external force, the logical (and practical) necessity of capitalist competition." Within the North over the past decades, governments and capital have connived in trying to align economic, civic, and cultural life with the prospect of the millennia I dream and in this project they have frequently appealed to the logical necessity of competition as if it were a force external to capital itself. Habitually, governments and economists have either deployed the term "competition" as a justification for the desired changes, or annunciated it as an inevitable and inevitably beneficent result of such changes, or they have done both at once. Competition appears in these exhortations as a mysterious but natural force which can be either the underpinning to, or the result of the interaction between, different forms of capital, or both, consonant with Marx's description of its logic.

In his critique of the rhetoric of this logic, Marx pointed out ,hat competition was invariably defined only as the negation of something else, rather than avowed as the central formation of capitalist ideology that it is. Competition, he says, "has been understood only negatively: i.e. as negation of monopolies, the guild system, legal regulation, etc. As negation of feudal production... [but] competition is nothing other than the inner nature of capital." In the current conjuncture, that form of Marx's definitional template is fulfilled by contrasting the annunciated era of competition and free markets with the command economies of the Cold War era and with (to mimic Margaret Thatcher's perpetual cry) the "socialist" tendencies of postwar welfare states. In other words, competition is both defined and announced as desirable because it is not another system; it is not that older system or tendency which is undesirable because of its obstruction or denial of competition. A perfectly circular logic.

But if we .look at the actual constitution of competition in millennial capitalism, It appears to be full of contradictions. Competition is, as I have said, used as a justification for various measures taken to deregulate and denationalize industries in the North and to establish the conditions for optimally free trade and the mobility of capital,

commodities, and workers. Thus, for instance, during the Thatcher years in the United Kingdom, it was with the purported aim of increasing competition that the nation's collectively owned assets were gradually sold off to private investors. Similarly, we are familiar with the way that the watchword .competition" subvents free trade, an institution which is then promoted by the use of tariffs and protectionist strategies (the US being particularly masterful at this particular sleight of hand). It is more than simply an irony that competition has to be legislated for in that sense: this is one of the central contradictions of contemporary capitalism (and it speaks to the continued relevance and power of national governments in ways I will address below).

At the level of corporate activity, the notion of competition has to he used with some skepticism. The current forms of operation within corporate capitalism certainly include a rhetorical reverence for the principle of competition, but actual practice (while obviously varying from corporation to corporation) is often contradictory to such rhetoric. Indeed, corporate activity has become less driven by the necessity of competition perhaps than ever before. This is slue, it would seem, to three main shifts in corporate strategy: (1) the rise of consortium production and marketing; (2) increasingly frequent strategic alliances between transnational corporations (TNCs); and (3) intense takeover activity which tends toward the establishment of both transnational and national monopolies.

Consortium activity describes the new interaction of parent corporations with their overseas subsidiaries whereby the latter are effectively independent even though their activity is co-ordinated at the parent-company level. This mode of organization is effectively a way of controlling competition while maintaining the appearance of independent and competitive capital activity. The appearance of competitive activity is increased when consortium corporations engage in the practice of what I call outselling, where core company functions (such as, typically, data processing and computer functions) are contracted to small companies in local contexts, generating local competitive activity but effectively hiding downscaling within the corporations.

Like consortium formations, TNC alliances, and the various forms of

TNC co-operation which occur more and more frequently under the rubric of globalization, often hide the increasingly oligarchic ownership of the world economy. Such alliances are often pointed to as instances of the beneficent features of globalization, but in fact they clearly tend toward the establishment of monopolies. A case in point would be the alliance between Toshiba in Japan and the European

TNC, Thorn-EMI, for the production of compact disks - a commodity whose development was crucial to the expansion of the means of production in the 1980s and which is now totally under the control of these TNCs. Such alliances are perhaps more visible in the automobile industry (where company names are a more crucial component in sales) and have often been forged as ways to circumvent not just legal but also social barriers to production; Honda's forging of alliances within the US is especially telling here and has been so successful that Honda can now advertise its products as American made in order to allay cultural biases against Japanese car manufacturers. The point of all such alliances, however visible or hidden, is that TNCs such as Honda, Thorn-EMI, and Toshiba can decrease competitive activity, while at the same time claiming that such alliances are necessary to increase competition.

Consortium activity and TNC alliances are in a sense merely ,he correlative or the continuation of the kind of takeover activity which has been familiar throughout the history of capitalism but which became highly visible in the 1980s, when systematic and extensive deregulation and denationalization became the norm in most Northern nations and when the mobility of capital became virtual. Takeover activity, especially amongst Northern corporations, can perhaps be emblematized by the emergence of the huge media industries which effectively control the global "commodity communications" industries - television, film, music, newspapers, magazines, books. The publishing empires of Rupert Murdoch and the Maxwell family are the most prominent perhaps, and although they exhibit some elements of simple consortium organization, they have more usually favored the strategy of outright acquisition as a mode of decreasing competition. In the US, Murdoch's holdings are enormous in all areas of the industry: publishing dozens of magazines and newspapers; owning the publisher HarperCollins which has been steadily buying out (and often liquidating or downsizing) smaller publishing houses; running

large sections of the Hollywood film industry; and operating a burgeoning television network in Fox. A closer look at the history of

the Murdoch enterprise as a symptom of the current moment would

effectively show not only that the aim is to enter competition in order

to end it, but also that nation-states are willing to encourage and even

subvent such monopolistic activity. In 1995, for instance, Murdoch

was given special exemption by the US government from rules limiting foreign ownership of broadcasting stations."

Similarly, the 1984 break-up of the monopoly of the telecommunications industry in the US had been undertaken supposedly as a way

of increasing competition. The subsequent strategies of the newly formed telecommunications companies might stand as a check-list for what is usually taken to constitute the standard strategies in the globalization process and the structuring of supposedly increased free market competition. These companies - both the spun-off regional "Baby-Bells" and the international AT&T - have leaned heavily on their production of new technologies and automation capabilities; they have taken skills and knowledges as the center of their operations and thence downsized their work forces; they have become deeply engaged in consortium activity, transfer pricing, and outsourcing of tasks; and they have diversified to take advantage of the financial deregulation that occurred at roughly the same time as their Own founding. By 1996, the five putatively regional "Baby-Bell" companies that emerged from the divestiture agreement are now amongst the dozen largest telecommunications companies in the world, growing larger with each new phase of the continuing jubilee of deregulation that the US government has been offering the industry. Ultimately, as Dan Goodman has put it, their "relentless pursuit of 'flexibility' at all levels has nothing to do with decentralization and everything to do with maintaining centralized control through decentralizing tactics."38 These companies show how competition works in the new world order - as the ideological justification for the restructuring of oligarchic corporate interests under the benevolent eye of national governments.

Faced with this contradiction between reverence for competition as a sacred principle and the actual practice of decreasing competition under the millennial rhetoric of globalization, there seems to be no particularly good reason to revise one of Marx's earliest remarks about the nature of capitalist competition: it is, he says "the war amongst the greedy."39 Nor indeed is there reason to revise his later suggestion that competition in fact acts as a "coercive law.""" Central to the shibboleth of globalization, the idea of competition replicates the structure of the processes of globalization and its rhetoric: it is claimed and annunciated as an ideal, while actual practice seems to belie that ideal. In terms of the conduct into which it leads capitalists themselves, and also in terms of the way it effects governmental and national policies, and how finally it thus effects the everyday life and

cultures of subjects, the idea of competition emblematizes the admixture of positivism and magic on which millennia I capitalism feeds.

2.

Service industries

In the discourses of globalization much has been made of the contemporary shift toward service industries and the concomitant deprivileging of industrial production. It is true that service production is one way to modify one of the chronic weaknesses in or obstacles to accumulation in the capitalist procedure: the fact that labor power must be actually consumed as a prerequisite to the production of commodities has always been a damper on fundamentalist capitalist dreams- In the standard production of commodities labor is consumed as itself a commodity - indeed, as the one commodity in the production process that the capitalist actually uses up. Service industries, by contrast, allow capitalists to directly sell the labor power that they have to consume; in other words, they sell the labor that constitutes "service" as if it were the commodity itself: the work is the product and vice versa. This is the basic advantage of service industries, conflating labor and commodity in an overt way.

This conflation is, of course, all the more evident when industries mix the selling of the service with the selling of another commodity such as when a commodity producer gains market advantage by selling a product tailored to a buyer's needs by way of research, sales flexibility, post-sales support, and so on. This often involves more and more service components in production, as in Robert Reich's often cited example of the steel industry.41 Naturally, this increase in the consumption of service represents an automatic reduction in overall capital costs - though this will not prevent the capitalist from complaining that the cost of service wages is too high, or from keeping wages extremely low in certain sectors of service work (such as fast

food work or bank telling), or from resisting minimum wage standards. Part of what is at stake in the trend toward service industries is of course the kind of proletarianization of skilled labor that I spoke about above. But, equally, it is important to see this shift in the

overall context of capital's global reorganization of labor power. The

central and basic labor processes in the actual manufacture of most commodities has for a long time now been offshored, and the

disposition and deployment of labor in the North obviously has had

to be adjusted.

Here we can point to a major novelty in capital's topical procedures while recognizing that the fundamental process of the extraction of surplus value still obtains. Service industries are part of the general move to decrease the costs of variable capital, and the increase in their

importance is intimately tied to an array of other initiatives against labor in both the economic and civic realms, most of which are by no means so new. Most notable in this respect has been the steady downgrading of union activity in the Northern nations through legislation, increasing tolerance of corporate union-busting, and generalized ideological pressure. Equally visible, and a trend that has been made all the more possible by the rubbishing of unions, has been the use of labor practices which it was presumed had disappeared from - and which are still nominally illegal in - most Northern nations, such as sweatshopping, indentured labor, and even child labor.

But, importantly, the very claim that the shift to service production is new affects and effects the whole cultural climate in which people live and work. Vast sectors of cultural and civic life in a Northern nation such as Britain, for instance, have been radically restructured in terms of the possibilities and habits of consumption, income expectations, the delivery of social services, modes of education, and so on. In the US, where as a service industry" McDonalds alone now employs more workers than the entire American basic steel industry,"42 this kind of restructuring began to take place long before it did in Europe and it has evolved an entirely new set of social relations in the realm of consumption. The reorganization of labor, in other words, affects the way in which people understand and conduct not

just their work lives, but their everyday business and leisure.

So there has been a not negligible increase in the importance of service work - whether we define that as fast-food work, or skilled and technical labor in the service components of manufacture, or the

service attached to activities such as advertising and sales, or the labor

involved in the financial industries. However, this shift is implicated in a more general assault on labor and its cost in the North, the contours of which are historically familiar. And this should alert us to the fact that what is at stake here is still the fundamental process of the extraction of surplus labor.

3.

Finance capital and debt

David Harvey, in his impressive synthesis of the economic and cultural aspects of globalization, suggests that one of the central components in the era of what he calls flexible accumulation has been "the financial aspects of capitalist organization... and the role of credit. "4' It is certainly the case that the last few decades have seen a reorganization of the relative importance of financial speculation as

opposed to the productive use of invested capital for manufacturing. In the Northern nations the importance of manufacturing has been on the wane, while in the South and in the semi-periphery the case is the opposite. In the North, financial capital now constitutes the playground in which capitalists seem to want most to disport themselves.

At the national level, most of the Northern nations have drastically deregulated their financial industries over recent decades. In the US, for instance, the last two decades have witnessed a series of domestic measures which have necessarily increased the importance of financial speculation: the removal of interest-rate limits and the liberalization of consumer-debt limits; the deregulation of banking such that the industry has expanded while eliding distinctions between commercial and investment banking and allowing banks access to various modes of diversification; a mammoth increase in the national debt such that the government now pays a huge percentage of its revenues to bond speculators instead of to social programs; the rapid growth of so-called institutional investors (such as pension programs, mutual and trust funds); and so on.44

At the international level, the fact that capital can fly around the globe means, by many accounts, that governments have abdicated their traditional role of regulating the flow of capital within and between national economies and are now powerless to pt<vent massive withdrawals and deposits at any point and a, any moment in the world economic system. The 1992 Mexican peso crisis was an enlightening case in point. An overwhelming amount of speculative capital had entered Mexico to take advantage of high interest rates which, ultimately, the Mexican economy could not sustain, just as it

could not sustain the consumer and credit rush that this influx sparked

off. The subsequent withdrawal of this capital when the government

devalued the peso by 50 per cent provoked an immediate crisis in the

Mexican national economy and necessitated its "rescue" by billions of US government dollars. The crisis underscored the fact that, as is

often remarked, speculative capital can and does often exert considerable control over the network of individual national economies. It at

least has enormous and ever increasing influence over what governments can and will do, just as it has de facto power to encourage or

discourage "confidence" in particular regions and sectors at any given

moment.

This is one sense in which it is indeed correct to talk about the "internationalization" of the world economy and of the increase in importance of the financial realm. The role of debt in that

internationalization of the economy has also grown much larger in recent years. The financiers' response to the so-called Third World debt crisis of the 1970s - which constitutes a whole other narrative, one whose effects on the South will no doubt be profound for many decades to come - was in essence to profit from that debt, turning it into a paramount object of speculation. Thus the indebtedness of nation-states is now in effect bought, sold, and arbitraged on the newly deregulated financial exchanges around the globe. But debt has also had an increasing role to play within the domestic economies of the North, in two registers in particular: the use of debt within corporate financing, and the extension of credit to consumers. The first of these became momentarily hyper-visible in the 1980s with the explosion of so-called junk bonds and their instrumental role in the wave of mergers and acquisitions that essentially characterized corporate restructuring in that decade. The second perhaps does not need to be explained to most subjects in the North, such is the hold of consumer debt over most working people.

So certainly there has been an important material shift in capital process in terms of finance capital and debt, and one which has very real effects. Yet those who simply repeat the shibboleth in support of or in opposition to the idea of globalization tend to forget two things in particular. First, nation-states necessarily collude in this apparently new mode of capital operation. The general tendency - especially during what we could call the Thatcher-Reagan-Kohl era, but also in the 1990s - has been to realign and reinvent the Northern nations in such a way as to enhance the millennial project of globalization. In that sense, the relationship between states and capital has been perhaps less antagonistic than it often appears. Nation-states have, by their own criteria at least, much benefited from the deregulation and

privatization programs that marked the 1980s, partially by using them to cover over the already deleterious effects of de-industrialization in the North, but more importantly to attract and concentrate particular capital activity within their own boundaries. Much of that activity is centered upon large cities - what Saskia Sassen calls global cities, like London or New York. While Sassen concludes that these global cities constitute new "transnational economic spaces" that are designed to function for globalized capital, and while she downplays the role and activity of the nation-state in their establishment and operation, I think it is equally important to consider the way in which such cities operate as boons to national economic development

and how, indeed, they come about as a result of voluntary planning

on the part of both national and regional authorities. That is to say,

nation-states are scarcely victims in the game of capital's shift toward privileging financial capital; nation-states are equally often the instigators and the beneficiaries of such a shift.

Second, and just as important, commentators often speak as if the reorganization of capital toward the financial had become in any case entirely technologized such that financial capital somehow manages to magically circle the globe without the help of human labor. It is often forgotten that this trend, like all the other shifts toward the global millennia I dream that I have been talking about, also involves a reorganization of labor power and not its eradication as the central commodity of capitalist operations. The kinds of activities that attend the ongoing financialization of the world are in fact labor-intensive in many respects. First, there is the simple empirical fact that the finance industries (and the service industries in general, of which the finance industries are a part) demand and command massive amounts of labor which waits upon and indeed carries on the processes of financial speculation. Second, the shibboleth of the total automation and technologization of finance capital belies and hides another sector of labor, that involved in related activities from data gathering and data processing, through office labor and janitoring, to the manufacture of computer and telecommunications instruments, and so on. Simply put, the activities of finance capital are scarcely as discrete from the processes of surplus labor extraction as they are usually depicted to be.

In any case, while it is true that the finance industries are currently the preferred playground of the capitalist, it is also true that surplus value is extracted from the labor of a vast number of workers in the high-tech industries of the finance sectors. The apparent reordering of the relation of speculative to productivist capital is exactly that - a reordering, and not the eradication of the one by the other. It is wise, then, to be wary of the more extremist accounts of the extent to which the world economy has been internationalized and of the way stateless corporations have put nation-states under the avaricious sway of footloose international speculators in finance. Production still

subsists, and in very real ways the activities of the financial capitalist

are utterly dependent upon it.

Indeed, in a way which underscores the continuing North-South division, the Northern economies rely centrally on what I would call

the core labor of the periphery. The central tasks of manufacturing

for Northern markets are achieved more and more as a result of cheap exploited labor in the South. A much discussed case in point is the clothing industry which was the industry to lead the way in

deploying core labor in the South at all stages of the preparation of the commodities that are sold in the North: almost half of the clothing purchased in the US is manufactured abroad. The 1980s expansion of offshore labor in the South, including the spread of export processing zones (EPZs) with the encouragement and even a' ,he behest of Third World national governments, was at first heavily dependent on the clothing industry but the South now undertakes hundreds of different core manufacturing activities, from computer chips and car components, through toys and televisions, to furniture and jeans and sneakers, crossing the whole gamut of consumer goods which are marketed mostly in the North.4. The Northern reliance on such core labor thus becomes evident at all levels, and the proper perspective is made clear in the World Bank's 1995 report, Workers in an Integrating World, which points to the fact that the nations of the South and of the Northern penumbra (those nations that the Bank designates as "low and middle income") "account for almost 80 percent of the world's industrial work force. "47 And if we then recall what sector of the world is the greatest consumer of the commodities manufactured by that labor, then we can not only glimpse the true character of the relations of production within the millennial project of globalization, but also recognize the simple deception built into the project's rhetoric of integration.

4.

Stateless corporations, NGOs, and nation-states

The growth in core labor in the periphery is, as I have suggested, predicated on the need to reorder or even reconstitute the old colonial world and has entailed the formation of a specific kind of exploitation of the South. This tendency, begun essentially by multinational corporations based in the North, has inevitably altered the organization of labor power in the North as well as the South in the ways I have been suggesting. It has also, at the ideological level, spawned the claim that these multinational corporations have attained or are approaching the condition of "statelessness." That is, corporate businesses are said to now be capable of completely eluding the control of the nation-states and of cutting their ties with home nations while disseminating their operations all around the globe; and they have been aided and abetted by their new technological prowess, their conversion of knowledge and skills into commodities - and, of course, by their liberation due to the restructuring of the political world after the collapse of communism.

The condition of "statelessness" allegedly applies not just to the

production aspects but also to the marketing aspects of corporate activity, as suggested in the article in Business Week (1990) which probably had most to do with the introduction to the broad American public of the concept of the "stateless corporation":

Today, dozens of America's top manufacturing names, including IBM, Gillette, Xerox, Dow Chemical, and Hewlett-Packard sell more of their products outside the US than they do at home, and US service companies are close behind. . . The trend IS even more pronounced in terms of profits. In the past three years, Coke made more money in both the Pacific and Western Europe than It did m the US. Nearly 70% of General Motors Corp.'s 1989 profits were from non-US operations. As companies begin to reap half or more of their sales and earnings from abroad, 'hey ate blending into the foreign landscape to win acceptance and avoid political hassles. "IBM, '0 some degree, has successfully lost its American identity," says C Michael Armstrong,

senior vice-president in charge of IBM World Trade Corp."

What this somewhat sanguine description omits to mention, of course, is the fact that these overseas profits are largely generated within the nations already constituted as players in the North's global hegemony. Equally, in its emphasis on marketing, the article as a whole symptomatically ignores the issues that I have so far been raising about the reorganization of labor. The fact is that most of the corporations mentioned and many other TNCs conduct much of their basic manufacturing and plant operations In countries which are not their prime marketing targets. That is to say, the core labor of the periphery manufactures most of the products while consumption and profit making occur largely within the Northern nations.

Pronouncements of the newly globalized and integrated stateless corporation, like this early Business Week example, give the impression that corporations have simply fled from the cumbersome constraints of their Northern national bases. The claim bears more rhetorical weight than it can empirically stand, as is shown by various

studies performed by business academics and economists. Christopher

Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal, for instance, have tried to produce a

kind of typology of the different capitalist concerns which currently

operate in the international context and which are often pointed to as instances of the globally liberated concern. Bartlett and Ghoshal have construed a fairly elaborate set of differentiations amongst such companies whose focus is on the international business environment. They reserve the status of genuine transnational corporation to only one of four categories. They first distinguish the following three types of corporation: (1) the global, which has nationally centralized but

global-scaled operations where the latter merely carry out parent company policies that are developed from within Northern headquarters; (2) the multinational, which is partially decentralized with semi-autonomous operations that are geared to exploit local opportunities and labor; (3) the international, which is a mixture of the first two categories in that it centralizes some core competencies while decentralizing others and develops and diffuses essential and centrally developed skills and knowledge...'

Anyone of these three types of concern will be familiar already from the history of Northern corporate activity, and more and more

companies currently would fall into one of the last two categories

as distinct from, say, the 1970s, when most companies would have fallen into the first category. But Bartlett and Ghoshal suggest that a fourth type of corporate form has a unique claim to being the appropriate kind of operation for a fully globalized economy. The transnational corporation, that is, would seek to be globally competitive "through multinational flexibility and worldwide learning capability." Organizationally the proper transnational corporation (what I shall now call the truly transnational corporation - TTNC) would consist of dispersed, independent, and specialized units which would contribute in different ways to integrated world-wide operations, and which would co-operate with other units in the production of skills and knowledges. In Bartlett and Ghoshal's terms, then, the TTNC would not concentrate or even originate its efforts in a putative or given home country but undertake research and development wherever necessary, possible, or appropriate. Second, and relatedly,

it would develop and sell products and services in and specifically for a number of different national and regional settings, rather than attempting to sell the same goods or services in all nations.

Third, its management personnel - and increasingly its other skilled workers - would be hired and promoted from outside any prespecified national origin. One might list several other characteristics for such a company. For instance, often its central - sometimes its only - operations are concerned with digital information. Equally, this kind of company often will be a start-up business which actually begins life on the global level rather than developing from a given national base.

The research of Bartlett and Ghoshal, as well as that of other observers, has demonstrated that there are actually relatively few such TTNCs, especially when compared to the huge numbers of companies which occupy the other categories and which tend to be mutations of long-established Northern MNCs- In fact most corporations that are

pointed to under the rubric of globalization are in fact heavily concentrated in and dependent on particular national contexts. Some of this dependence is played out in relation to legal factors such as taxation (even though corporations use transfer pricing and various other accounting tricks and legal maneuvering to minimize such liabilities). Another way in which such corporations remain essentially tied to a given national base is in terms of their complex relation to the bodies of corporate and international law - legal ownership is still an important localizing factor, for instance. Or else - and to their own benefit - they protect their own patents and technologies through the benefits offered by national domicile, and equally by taking advantage of the protections offered by most Northern nations regarding technology transfer." Most corporations, even while they pronounce themselves globalized, still maintain a primary or preeminent relation to a single national economy in another important respect: that is, by cultural ties and significations. Brand names and logos, for instance, tend to be culturally meaningful, and those of many of the largest corporations are especially laden in this respect: in Japan or elsewhere in the world, Toshiba or Honda will always signify a national origin, just as Ford or IBM or Levi-Strauss will.

Ultimately, in terms of geographic spread and scope, legal ownership and control, management and work-force practices, established legal nationality and cultural history, as well as core tax domicile and patent location, it is clear that most corporations operating within the so-called globalized culture do not fulfill the conditions that Bartlett and Ghoshal argue are necessary for the status of transnational. Most are derived forms of the familiar Northern "parent" company that Bartlett and Ghoshal call the global company. But many have become

international or multinational, devolved in several important respects

from the multinationals of the period of monopoly capitalism and its

transition to a global frame. Thus the TTNC is in fact a rarity, and

this is not accidental: in many obvious and overt ways, TNCs benefit

from their fundamental national identities even while they persist in

their mission of evading particular aspects of national regulation.

Within the typologies that Bartlett and Ghoshal propose, then,

there is room for a variety of different corporate approaches to the

global economy or to the much vaunted phenomenon of transnationalization, but very few companies have made the kind of radical break that would warrant belief in the realization of the millennial dream. Nonetheless, the claim is often made that the manner in which these

huge corporations operate is essentially without regulation or

responsibility and that this aspect of the millennial company has

essentially disempowered nation-states, which find themselves unable to control or even influence the globalized economic activity. Nation states are in that sense supposedly powerless in ,he traditional role of advancing and protecting national interests in the face of the liberated stateless corporation and the simultaneous empowerment of financial capital.

The frequent left-liberal response to this part of the millennial dream is to raise the alarm about the increasing liberation of corporations from responsibility to their home base. Thus Richard Barnet, for example:

As mega-companies search the world for bargain labor, sell their stock on exchanges from London to Hong Kong and pin more and more of ,heir hopes on customers in the emerging markets, most of them in Asia, they are walking away from the enormous public problems their private decisions create for American society."

The same kind of point is made by other commentators, perhaps most vehemently by Christopher Lasch who thinks to see in the US the formation of a kind of super-elite class made up of individuals who are not only liberating themselves from responsibility to their national origins, but are indeed also often openly antagonistic to the idea of national interests. In good American style, Lasch attempts to show that their misguided and dangerous behavior can be solved by way of increased personal benevolence. 53 Ironically enough, it is left to the more conservative approach of Francis Fukuyama (he of the end of history) to analyze the matter more structurally and historically rather than as a function of individual benevolence.54

These different kinds of alarm about certain dangers inherent to the millennial dream are scarcely a matter of simple disagreement or of misreading the evidence. What is ultimately at stake in each of these discussions - in Barnet as much as in Fukuyama - is the need for the

forces of globalization and of the state to have each other's help. In one sense the long-standing tensions between state and capital have been mollified in the face of the globalization project since the two parties are not in fact in serious dispute; rather they are both locked into the same oneiric logic of global integration- It is not for nothing that nationalist and protectionist rhetorics - such as that of Pat Buchanan during his 1996 candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in the US, or that of the Euro-sceptics in the Conservative Party in Britain - are in a minority and currently sound extremist

within the encratic nations of the North. Often they are persuasive only in warning about the loss of national sovereignty, since one

current concern of the nation-states is to lessen the impression that they are simply handing over power or selling off their functions to capital. Meanwhile, the continual cheerleading for globalization and integration, conducted by governments and capitalists alike, drowns out that concern as the beneficence of the dream is annunciated over and over again.

In this light, it would seem that, even though they are said to be disappearing or becoming irrelevant, the Northern nation-states are far from losing their importance as we approach the millennial moment. Indeed, even their role of safeguarding their national economies seems not to have diminished much at all. The long-standing notion of national economies, differentiated from and competing with all other national economies, is still a central component in the economic processes of the world and is particularly crucial for the conduct of trade. There is much prima facie evidence for the continued efficacy of the nation-state in supposedly globalized economic processes. For instance, even at a moment when finance capital is privileged and its transnational movement appears relatively unimpeded, the major stock markets around the world are still predominantly funded by investment from their national bases and have a direct and binding relation to nationally determined money supplies and nationally imposed interest rates and taxation. In addition, we can see that the current post-Bretton Woods system of currency exchange validates the identity and strength of particular national currencies which, even if they are traded all over the world with great abandon, are still a function of nation-state governance and indeed of national cultural signification. And in another realm, even while we are being assured of the benefits of liberalized trade and deregulated international capital, tariffs and barriers of myriad sorts continue to impinge on international transactions - usually to benefit the interests of particular nationally identified corporations and industries. Furthermore, most Northern national governments still (in fact, now perhaps more than ever) stress and appeal to narrowly national interests in their political rhetoric, over and above any international or transnational interests. One has only to peruse

the US debates over the North American Free Trade Agreement

(NAFTA), where the arguments of both sides were predicated upon a view of what was best for America, to see some evidence of this.

The argument concerning the demise of nation-states often also points to what might at first sight seem like countervailing tendencies: the establishment of international trading blocs and national partnerships, and the expansion of supranational non-governmental organizations (NGOs). But these tendencies in fact provide evidence of the continuing importance of nation-states and national economies. The case of the European Union is indicative here. The EU is primarily a trading bloc, fundamentally an attempt to construe a "single market" across Europe, and it has also established a whole array of supranational governmental and regulatory organizations. However, the difficulties that the EU has experienced in fully instituting that project demonstrate the strength of national government interests, one of the main instances being the British government's "opting out" of the EU's social chapter which guarantees an array of labor and other civil rights and benefits to EU workers. Equally, the reluctance and indeed inability of member nations to implement a European currency derives from the issue of national sovereignty as much as the weaknesses of particular national economies in relation to others. The EU still falters regularly when faced with the ability of nation-states to put forward their own interests as non-negotiable; equally, the growth of EU co-operation is fully dependent upon the particular strengths of individual national economies. The case of NAFTA is somewhat different, but underscores the continuing vitality of nations in other ways: one of NAFTA's central intended effects is to increase the hegemonic power of the American economy in the region and thence to subvent the contested legitimation of principally the Mexican government but also Chile's, and even Canada's. One might even suggest that blocs such as that formed by NAFTA are currently among the biggest obstacles to any putative capitalist project of "globalization." This is the case because, at least in part, tensions continue to exist within them between their national and supranational projects, neither of which is completely identical to capital's interest but both of which claim to represent some part of that interest.

Thus the implementation of fully co-operative transnational organizations founders, not on the age-old tension between the nation-state and capital, but on the tension between the nation-state which is protecting its sovereignty and the supranational formation which threatens that sovereignty. Again the EU provides many examples of how this works: the sometimes showy insistence on national sovereignty (at stake, for instance, in Britain's resistance to various EU social protections, or differently in Germany's political and even military view of the former Yugoslavia, or in France's decision to continue nuclear testing) underscores the general unwillingness of

Northern nation-states to give up on their traditional task of regulating and governing economic and civic activity from within their borders, however much they promulgate the millenarian rhetoric of

transnationalization. Just as productive capital still subsists while finance capital announces itself as triumphant, so too the nation subsists even while globalization is annunciated. We should be clear that what is at stake is precisely the proper positioning of national economies in the race toward the millennia I goal of a fully implemented transnational capitalism.

I have suggested that in this struggle for position nation-states do in important ways appear to cede some capabilities to the forces of globalizing capital. One development that appears to support that notion is the seemingly rampant spread of NGOs and related kinds of supranational bodies which attend sometimes to economic relations but also to defense, health, the environment, labor practices, and so on. The most visible of the organizations that we can include under the NGO rubric are perhaps the oldest: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, but also the UN and its various agencies; more recently the new World Trade Organization has become an exceptionally powerful economic player since it was formed to assume the functions of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) in 1995. These larger organizations often appear to be in the business of coercing national governments in the South into the policies and procedures that will facilitate the new modes of Northern companies and help force the realization of the fundamentalist principles of millennial capitalism.

The argument is frequently made that such bodies contribute to the deficit of sovereignty in Northern nation-states, even though it is quite obviously the nations of the South that most frequently bear the brunt of their activities. But in any case, one might equally suggest that these organizations actually compensate for the Northern deficit of sovereignty: many of them are indeed established as a way of maintaining control over and input into policy issues which nation states legitimately see as international concerns (environmental issues are a good example). In many cases it is the very idea, rather than the reality of transnational ism that is aided and abetted by the proliferation of such organizations which take as their business any particular aspect of the regulation of economic activity but which are not visibly or primarily attached to any particular national government. These NGOs are often the object of great nationalist suspicion which can

take the form of extremist paranoia. On the right this paranoia is

directed against, for instance, the UN and its supposed plans for

world government and domination; and on the liberal-left against the

way these bodies are assumed to be merely the amanuenses of some great capitalist conspiracy called the "Corporate Agenda. " Other kinds of objections are laid at the door of bodies like the World Trade Organization, once again on the grounds of national sovereignty: the WTO for instance is commonly seen as a mechanism to usurp US trade prerogatives. Vivien Schmidt has offered the typical argument to show how such organizations pre-empt national power and policies:

Because the international and regional organizations in no way constitute supranational governments, and because they quite narrowly focus on trade, 'hey are freeing business from ,he traditional constraints Imposed by national governments and societal interests without substituting some equivalent at the supranational level. The result is a strengthening of business, with transnational corporations less tied to nations and national interests, and a weakening of the nation-state

overall, in particular of the voice of the people through legislatures and' nonbusiness, societal interests."

Leaving aside Schmidt's touching faith in the possibility that "the voice of the people" might be heard within existing nation-state contexts, hers is still not quite the way to put the matter. Many of these supranational bodies do in fact attempt to act as regulatory agencies beyond the immediate beck and call of national governments, and certainly many of them operate far beyond the immediate contexts of trade - the European Union has proliferated a huge number of such agencies, not least the European Court and the various regulatory watchdogs which do have increasingly important powers over the activities of nations. But this development does not in itself argue for the weakening of the nation-state. Indeed it is precisely the strength of the nation-state that it can weaken the civic realm in the way Schmidt suggests. In other words, it is crucial to recognize that the millennial dream is one for which nation-states are prepared to outsell some of their functions. The general fear of such NGOs and of what we might call meta-states is that they are fundamentally geared to the interests of the corporations, and this is really not the case: they are in fact geared to the interests of the Northern nation-states as they attempt to act out their global fantasies. In this sense it might be more useful to look at these organizations with a cue from Saskia Sassen in her work on global cities. Sassen suggests that the NGOs are not for the exclusive use of, nor do they exist to serve the exclusive interests of, the MNCs or TNCs. She attempts to demonstrate their status as new sites of

production which can be seen as offering services not just to corporations but to national and regional governments, to financiers, and

increasingly important - to small businesses. In relation to the NGOs all these clients are both competitors and coliaboralOrs.57

Sassen's description of this supranational layer of service production is important for the way in which it relocates the processes of globalization in actual material practices. But at the same time Sassen downplays the role or indeed the collusion of the nation-states in the development and operation of these global spaces; she claims, for instance, that this is "a whole arena of economic activity where governments participate only minimally, and in this sense we can think of these cities as containing transnational economic space for the operation of both domestic and foreign firms."58 One problem with this assertion is that it overlooks the benefits that accrue [0 the nation-state from the existence of these spaces - benefits ,hat Northern governments and nations actively seek and maintain. Indeed, Sassen's work usually assumes "the declining significance of the national economy as a unitary category. To some extent it was only a unitary category in political discourse and policy."" What is hidden in this perspective is the active way in which Northern nations still cleave to that merely discursive "unitary category" and exercise control over the processes which allow them to turn all economic activity toward the possibilities of the millennial dream.

None of this is to deny that in some respects the credibility and legitimacy of national governments in the North have been undermined in recent decades. Although I have just suggested that national governments are alive and kicking on the world economic scene, at the same time - and we see this most especially but not only in ,he US - there is an increasing tendency toward devolution of national government functions to the local level provoking what has to be recognized as a crisis of the state and of state legitimation. In the US one can think of this as another symptom of the nation's founding constitutional contradictions - the clash between federalist and antifederalist projects; but even in that context, where a fierce historical battle is being fought, the response to the crisis is in general the consolidation of state functions at the level of civic and cultural

control. Elsewhere, in Britain or France for instance, the same kind of devolution is evidently occurring, but in those cases it is equally clear that it is designed to strengthen the everyday functions of the nationstate and relegitimate its authority in contexts where it is perceived (on the right especially) that the state has lost its grip on moral, cultural, and civic authority in the contemporary transition toward the global. As Andrew Gamble has claimed, in Britain the Thatcher-Major years are in part characterized by an ongoing effort to disencumber the nation-state of expensive social obligations but at the same time to reauthorize its general legitimacy and power. In the shadow of the liberation of Northern capital, Northern subjects find themselves more and more circumscribed by national state power. In that one sense at least, the presence of nation-states is dialectically enhanced by the millennial project.

5.

Regulation and consumption

1 have been arguing so far, then, that the project of realizing the fundamentalist capitalist dream of globalization is in fact a contradictory phenomenon in most of its features. Arising from the terms that the millennial dream embodies - globalization, transnationalism - is perhaps its central dialectical issue, namely, the contradiction between the nation-state and the global structure or system. I have suggested that in the North this dialectic is marked by the collusion of capital in the process of transnationalizing itself and the nation-state as it positions itself in the global arena, and it seems to me that one part of the dialectical movement between these two entities necessarily involves the control of citizenries and subjects, of indeed the whole civic and cultural life of the Northern states. Of course, at an overarching level I am intimating that the annunciation of globalization itself is part of the ideological battery used to interpellate subjects in the current conjuncture, and at the more specific level I am alluding to the array of ideological forms which attempt to regulate the moral and cultural practices of subjects, as well as the more repressive forms of persuasion such as ever increasing policing and criminalization and other "direct" forms of social control in the Northern states. But more specifically, I want to point now to one important way in which the relations of production and the means of production have been altered to accommodate the new constitution of capital and the new consensus between capitalism and the nation-state.

David Harvey builds a goodly part of his account of the current

conjuncture by exploring the so-called regulationist school theory of capital's transformations. Rejecting "cyclical" theories of capitalist transformation, the regulationists show how capital shifts from one "regime of accumulation" to another by changing the relation

between conditions of production and conditions of reproduction.

Briefly, regulation theory suggests that any reordering of capital's mode of accumulation, such as we are seeing now in the millennial project, entails or includes the construction of ways of ensuring social and cultural compliance; to put it another way, subjects need

to be called into place and kept there in order to achieve the transformation to a new regime of accumulation. The work of Michel Aglietta - variously supported by Alain Lipietz, Roger Boyer, Mike Davis, and others - points up capitalism's recurrent need to develop systems of social control -:- in political, civic,. and cultural life which will be consonant with the particular regime of capital accumulation. The argument shows, in Alain Lipietz's terms, that any given "regime of accumulation [is] materialized in the shape of norms, habits, laws and regulating networks which ensure the unity of the process and which guarantee that its agents conform more or less to the schema of reproduction in their day-to-day behavior and struggles. "6.

This is not the place to enter into a detailed account or consideration of the particular claims of the regulationist school - that has been ably undertaken eIsewhere.61 What I want to pick up on, however, is one element of that work which seems to me particularly important at the moment of millennia I dreaming - an element which, although it would seem to be of immense promise in construing the theoretical connections between the North's economic processes and its cultural processes right now, has not received much elaboration. In his groundbreaking work, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, Michel Aglietta proposes that the current regime of accumulation has depended upon the rapid expansion of the means of consumption as part of a response to the crisis of overaccumulation that "Fordism" occasions. Aglietta is clear that this notion does not intend to "deal with individual consumer behavior, but rather with the formation and transformation of the conditions of existence" for wage-earners, a proposition which points to the "very foundation of capitalist accumulation, the material content of the generalization of the wage relation. "62

Aglietta's stress on the economic expansion of the means of consumption is consonant with the attention given to the cultural

effects of consumerism in much cultural analysis today, but it has the

advantage of allowing for an effective dialectical relation between economic processes and everyday life, a relation which does not simply construe cultural and civic life as a superstructural byproduct

of economic processes but which regards those realms as part of a

Structured whole wherein capital's relation to labor power is the shifting focal point of all transformations.

The expansion of the means of consumption is related to the use of consumption as a form of social regulation and the reproduction of appropriate social subjects for capital's relation to and transformation of labor. It is exactly this kind of possibility that most contemporary accounts of cultural consumption are unable to countenance. In other words, whereas many contemporary cultural analysts want to stress (sometimes to the exclusion of any other data) the resistant and pleasurable aspects of consumption, it might be as well to intercede with the insistence that consumption forms a particularly powerful mechanism of social control in what IS often called "post-Fordism." Some of the particular ways in which the expansion of the means of consumption operates will be discussed in subsequent chapters. For now it is perhaps sufficient to suggest that the explosive growth in the North of what I call activity-commodities (such as travel, tourism, and sports) and the massive expansion in the catchment of the electronic and print media, along with the commodification and privatization of many aspects of the postwar consensual state, all constitute just one component in capital's response to the crises of the postwar period. In that sense they are completely consistent with the project of globalization which is the overarching response to those crises. Both of these formations come under the purview, then, of Marx's reminder that capitalism's responses to the crises within itself can normally only "pave the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. "

A Certain Kind of Marxism

I do not pretend that the features I have discussed in the above sections of this chapter in any way exhaust the many and multifarious components of the globalization process. They are simply elements that appear frequently in accounts of globalization, whether those accounts be for or against the process. However, as elements of the current conjuncture, they tend to exhibit the contradictions which mark our era as we in the North move toward the millennium propelled by the rhetoric of globalization and the material practices that the rhetoric both illuminates and hides. Part of what I have been objecting to in the idea of globalization - quite apart from the horrific effects that the attempt to install it is having on the ground, as it were - is the way in which so many commentaries seem unable to recognize its contradictions. In other words, globalization is frequently offered as an all-or-nothing proposition, a process that is posed in a completely positivistic manner. My own aim has been at least to suggest that the positivism is accompanied by a goodly chunk of magic.

AND THE AUTHOR GOES ON FOR MANY MORE PAGES IN THIS VEIN.