Friday, April 17, 2020

Global Politics, Capitalism, Socio-Ecological Crisis, and Resistance:
Exploring the Linkages and the Challenges

Mark Tilzey




Abstract
This paper engages critically with a set of broadly Marxian-based approaches to the relationship
between global politics and processes of capital accumulation. This is then used to inform analysis of
the dynamics underlying the multiple but inter-linked crises of food, environment
(energy/climate/biodiversity), and finance. The first section assesses the work of Callinicos in his
focus on renewed inter-imperialist rivalry, in which the USA is seen as wanting to secure access to,
and control over, key resources to secure capital accumulation in intensifying competition with China
and other capitalist powers. This approach is compared to the work of Panitch, Gindin, and Kiely in
which they revive Kautsky’s notion of ultra-imperialism – here US hegemonic power is assumed to
lead other capitalist states in the re-organisation of the global economy. It is argued that, ultimately,
both approaches examine only the external relations between the separate but linked logics of capital
and global politics. They also neglect the crucial role of the biophysical domain in defining key
parameters surrounding capital accumulation.

In the second section, the paper develops an alternative approach to understanding capitalist
expansion, its relation to global politics and current crises. By drawing from Rosa Luxembourg’s
spatial account of the accumulation of capital and expansion into non-capitalist spaces 
through ongoing processes of primitive accumulation, the structuring conditions of capitalist 
expansion are conceptualised. 

Through a critical engagement with William Robinson’s work on the emergence of the
transnational state, and that of Jason Moore on ‘world ecology’, the paper develops a
conceptualisation of the agency of different class fractions within the inter-state system and their
relationship to the crises of food, environment, and finance. In the third section, the paper addresses
resistances to these crises. 

The hegemony of trans-nationalised fractions of capital, often, although not
always, led by the USA through ‘ultra-imperialism’, is challenged by sub-hegemonic national capital
fractions of some BRICS, notably China and Brazil. But this merely perpetuates the crises of
capitalism through policies of neo-developmentalism and neo-extractivism. These are challenged in
turn by counter-hegemonic forces seeking food/land/territorial sovereignty. The dynamics of this
relationship between hegemonic, sub-hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces – between global
politics, the state, and social movements – are examined, particularly in relation to Latin America. 

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