The history of class struggle: from original accumulation to neoliberalism

Kees van der Pijl

The December 1995 movement in France, followed a year later by a truckers' blockade in which the Juppe government did not dare to intervene for fear of a general social explosion, flies in the face of such conclusions. Can we, however, really speak of a class struggle in these (and comparable) social protest movements? This is the question I want to address in these notes.

The Discipline of Capital and Class Struggle

Class formation occurs wherever humanity's interactions with nature take the form of social relations between those who produce and those who appropriate what others produce. In this broad sense, all past history is the history of class struggles, as Marx and Engels claimed in the Communist Manifesto.(1) But something more needs to be said about the specific nature of class formation and struggle in capitalist society.

Let us first establish that, contrary to capitalist ideology and standard economics textbooks, capitalism is not a universal, eternal, transhistorical system which has always existed at least in embryo or in the depths of human nature. Acts of exchange, and even markets of one kind or another, may have existed throughout recorded history. But the subjection of society to the disciplines of the market, to the imperatives of competition, capital accumulation, and increasing labor-productivity, is historically specific, relatively recent, and has required profound and painful social transformations.

Capitalist ideology does not generally acknowledge the historical specificity of capitalism and the social dislocations that were required to subject human practices and social relations to the logic of capitalism. We may take up any economics textbook and read how the market economy ideally works, but we will usually look in vain for the prehistory of capital, the way it penetrated and transformed precapitalist society, separating people from their means of livelihood and mobilizing social wealth as exclusive private property. If a prehistory of capital is acknowledged at all, it usually takes the form of a Robinsonade, an imaginary world of abstract individuals some of whom decide to start a company. The capitalist economy is seen as a self-sufficient entity obeying its own specific laws as if they were themselves the laws of nature, as if there were no human or natural needs or limits independent of the requirements of capital.(2)

We need not imagine an idyllic pre-capitalist community on which the capitalist vulture descends to prey. But we do need to recognize the enormous transformations that take place as capital penetrates to the vital centre of society, as market relations pervade every social practice and nature itself, stamping the commodity form on things, qualities, resources and wealth, and on labor power itself, transforming the labor process and subjecting it to the requirements and rhythms of capital accumulation. And we also need to recognize that this process of penetration occurs not naturally or inevitably but always in conditions of resistance and contestation.

The subordination of society and nature to the reproduction of capital, the imposition of capitalist disciplines, takes place on several levels. In its constant quest for unpaid labor and its constant efforts to raise the rate of exploitation in the actual labor process, capital repeatedly exhausts the available human and natural resources on which it feeds and penetrates ever deeper into its social and natural substratum.

The first level of penetration is original accumulation - the process of stamping the commodity form on social relations including production relations. The second is the capitalist production process, the exploitation of living labor power in which the technical labor process, with all the human autonomy and creativity that it implies, has to be subordinated to the process of expanding value, the "valorization" of capital. The third is the process of social reproduction in its entirety (which I shall call "dally life," to distinguish it from "work"), which likewise has to be subjected to the requirements of capital accumulation. Each of these constitutes its own terrain of resistance and struggle.

Although these three forms of imposing the discipline of capital are intricately connected and the struggles they elicit often overlap, their main impact follows a chronological order. Obviously, original accumulation is primarily a phenomenon of the early history of the capitalist mode of production (although this history is still just beginning in, say, West Irian). As to the other two, the subordination of the labor process to capital and the subordination of the process of social reproduction mutually condition each other, but the deep penetration of capital into the latter sphere is the more recent phenomenon.

In what Marx calls the formal subordination of labor to capital, which subjects the worker to capital but leaves the labor process itself fundamentally unchanged, the reproductive sphere - the sphere in which the worker recovers from the effort of work - remains relatively intact and non-commodified. Under conditions of what Marx calls real subordination, not only is the labor process transformed to meet capital's requirements for increasing labor-productivity, but even the reproductive sphere has become increasingly subject to 'capitalist profit strategies and/or to collective arrangements for social protection which are themselves ultimately subsumed under capital's quest for profit. Under these conditions, recovery/regeneration itself becomes subject to commodification and exploitation (from entertainment to tourism and other leisure industries); and this, paradoxically, accelerates the eventual exhaustion of the social and natural substratum that sustains reproduction. On a global scale, the struggles resulting from resistance to this exhaustion are a recent phenomenon. They signal the passing of a phase of industrial capitalism in which capital had a certain interest in preserving the human/social substratum (though not the natural one).

So each of these phases - original accumulation, the transformation of production, and the penetration of capital into the sphere of reproduction - generates its own forms of resistance and struggle. We can call these three types of struggle class struggles because the imposition of the discipline of capital can, of course, only come about by the action or collaboration of an interested social group; and this group, the ruling class of capitalists, will draw on the power resources available to it in the state as well as in the sphere of ideas to enforce discipline and restrict dissent to manageable proportions. At the same time, the resistance to the discipline of capital inevitably brings forth experiences and insights that challenge the dominant ideology, shaping an alternative perspective which is likewise collective and rooted in social practice. The cohesion of these forces of resistance is much more fragile and fleeting, and as we will see, the form of resistance varies under the three modes of imposing capitalist discipline.

Let us now look at the three different arenas of class struggle.

Original Accumulation and Proletarianization

In pre-capitalist societies, "economic" relations are inseparable from non-"economic" relations, that is, from relations not driven primarily by private gain.(3) In original accumulation, economic relations are "disembedded" from this non-economic social context. Certain aspects of people's lives, ultimately including their labor power, are turned into commodities for the first time. The conflicts involved in original accumulation constitute a first, and usually violent, form of social struggle elicited by capitalist discipline. It has even been argued that this struggle of expropriation/appropriation, and not the regular struggle over wages, is the only real class struggle in capitalist conditions.(4) The very fact of being disinherited from one's more or less independent means of subsistence and the destruction of the entire life-word with which they are entwined, with its natural/traditional time-scales and rhythms, drives people to resistance.

Although original accumulation is the earliest stage of capitalist penetration, such processes are still continuing today. The English enclosures preceding the industrial revolution and the contemporary clearing out of Central American peasants to make their land available for commercial agriculture and cattle breeding, in this sense, belong to the same category. The assassination of the Brazilian rubber tapper, Chico Mendez, or of Iqbal Masih, a 12-year-old boy who organized some of the estimated 10 million child-workers under age 15 in Pakistan, and many other instances of extreme "disciplinary" violence, illustrate the severity of the clashes involved.

Original accumulation has effects on the formation of classes, and here too we can distinguish several phases or forms of expropriation and expulsion, appropriation and occupation. In its earliest forms, the dominant expropriating classes were likely to be landlords and their capitalist tenants. In other times and places, the relevant capitalist classes might be merchants, and this kind of merchant capital has often assumed piratical, criminal forms - the "robber-baron" of old, or the contemporary ex-Komsomol functionary privatizing the organization's real estate in the former Soviet Union.

On the workers' side, there is also a very differentiated picture. Depending on the varying degrees to which the commodity form is imposed on labor relations, workers may be semi-proletarianized people or hired hands, etc. Wage workers may be employed in a family setting, they may be recruited as vagrants into work-house labor forces, or they may be former artisans and their apprentices dislocated by new forms of factory organization of work, and so on. The different phases of original accumulation, and the deepening control of capital at every stage, have been expressed in various forms of struggle: the early formation of trade unions in response to the destruction of the autonomy of artisans, the Luddite revolt against early mechanization and the laws against combination to quell it, or the resistance to the introduction of Taylorism and Fordism in Europe under the Marshall Plan.

To the degree that original accumulation proceeds in a shock-like fashion, there occurs what sociologists call anomie. People subjected to the new discipline experience a loss of normative coherence which creates a susceptibility to new forms of collective consciousness. This normative vacuum, affecting large masses of people who find themselves driven into the unknown, creates the opportunity for intellectual vanguards to try and steer the mass movement towards some new pattern of organized existence.

We can still observe this process today: for example, the Islamist doctrine that triumphed in the 1979 Iranian revolution has a "proletarian" connotation because "Islamic ideology became a substitute for the lost communality of the oppressed masses."(5) Indeed the Iranian revolution has been compared to the Bolshevik revolution, at least in the sense that both found their mass base among "former peasants streaming into the city."(6) The great differences between these two cases arise not only from the obvious historical and material differences between pre-revolutionary Russia and Iran but also from the fact that, in cases like these, where an intellectual "vanguard" steps into a normative vacuum, the particular nature of that vanguard has a disproportionate effect on the movement's orientation.

Struggles in Production and the Historical Proletariat

The development of capital beyond its earlier forms into industrial capital goes hand-in-hand with the generalization of the commodity form and the wage relation. Having imposed this formal discipline (and continuing, as we saw, to deepen it), capital is now driven by the need to raise the rate of exploitation. The discipline of capital here means that the technical labor process is subordinated to the process of value expansion or valorization. Human labor power exists as part of the natural/social substratum on which the mode of production rests. Now, the human capacity to produce tools and food, to have ideas, etc. is turned into a commodity (labor power) which becomes part of the material inputs of capitalist production and accumulation. This drive to transform labor power into a commodity like any other requires a constant reimposition of capitalist discipline on human beings, who are, of course, resistant to commodification in a way that inanimate material objects are not.

This contradictory process is the mainspring of capitalist social development, the contradiction in which its self-movement originates. As Sohn-Rethel writes, "the basic and decisive impulses to social change must be seen as emanating, not from the economics of the profit making process, but from the developments of the labor process evolving under the impact of the profit making process. The replacement of living by dead labor - that is, machinery and work organization - and the changing technical aspect of society which is its result, cannot be understood without understanding this fundamental tension.

This tension, too, is the source of resistance and struggle in the uneasy mutual adjustment between capitalist discipline and the mental/physical process of work. Worker resistance, mediated by trade union organization or expressed directly, at this stage is directly incorporated into the normal functioning of the capitalist economy. The workers now try to evade the discipline of work because it does not fit with their bodily rhythms and mental make-up or, more positively (but also reflecting a more commodified understanding of work), they merely seek to improve their bargaining position over wages. Employers respond to worker unionization with their own organizations. The relations between the two classes have been more or less regularized, even routinized, in the process of collective bargaining; and in the course of the twentieth century, labor and capital have seemed to engage in a pas-de-deux in which wage concessions have stimulated the spread of industrial production, increasing productivity, and an expanding circuit of industrial capital.(8)

By the time this apparently self-sustaining system began to operate on a regular basis, an entire superstructure of unions, cooperatives, and political parties had come into being which lent credence to the idea of a historic proletariat amassing its forces for a transition to socialism. Today, especially now that the Soviet bloc has collapsed, there seems to be very little left of the "socialist" vocabulary; but a self-conscious proletariat continues to emerge wherever the first form of class struggle (resistance to proletarianization, or any struggle accompanying original accumulation) overlaps with or still strongly resonates in the second form of struggle "at the point of production" (shop-floor resistance/labor market bargaining). In other words, where people are still going through the initial commodification and subordination to capital, involving a degree of anomie as the labor process is socialized, they are more likely to assert themselves as workers against capital; because here they experience capital as a visible, alien, and hostile force, rather than as an impersonal, comprehensive, inescapable but fetishized reality which is socially amorphous - not a capitalist class but the "economy," the "market."

Once the "real" subordination of labor takes place, vanguard radicalism may also tend to subside and give way to regularized bargaining; but this is not so much a question of an ideological shift to the right as it is an expression of the social reality of the bargaining structure. In such a setting, the very nature of industrial organization, and the corresponding "socialized" class relations, mean that bureaucratic routine must to some extent be allowed to replace abstract utopianism. But even so, for capital this "equilibrium of compromises" in the long run undermines the discipline it must impose on the labor process. From the mid-1970s on, neoliberal productivity experts, convinced that lagging industrial giants could no longer afford any such compromises, have agreed with Ross Perot, the computer services tycoon brought into General Motors: companies like GM could no longer tolerate a situation in which "tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people...are quite insulated from the harsh realities of the competitive marketplace."(9)

Struggles For Survival

The third way in which the discipline of capital is imposed and resisted has to do with the capacity of the whole social and natural substratum to sustain developed, comprehensive capital accumulation. Here, we are talking about the reproduction of labor power in the broadest sense. In the earlier stages of capitalist discipline, the object is first to obtain a hired work-force and then to have it perform its tasks according to the required job descriptions, on time-scales decreed by management, etc., Now, in the third phase, we are speaking of the conditions - in a fully developed capitalist economy - under which labor power will be available at all in the longer term. There is also the question of the earth's resources and the life-sustaining capacity of the biosphere.

The effort of work itself can already lead to such exhaustion that there is no chance of recovery. Japanese production methods in particular have tended to stretch to the limit the total occupation of the personality by the labor process. "The collective work in teams is a method to harness peer pressure to the point of nightmare surveillance."(10) Karoshi, dying on the shop floor, is the ultimate consequence of this particular way of organizing the labor process, which replaces direct management supervision by "teamwork" to achieve the near-impossible.

Now, the patterns of intensive exploitation and surveillance have gradually penetrated the sphere of reproduction as well. Advanced industrial "lean/mean" production methods are rapidly spreading to this sphere. The industrial-capitalist model is replacing other organizational models of social reproduction, such as those drawn from civil service, church charity, neighborly and family assistance, or other non-industrial sources. After having been standardized by processes of socialization, often under state auspices and in a spirit of social protection, the reproduction of labor power too has become subject to cost-cutting and profit maximization strategies copied from, or directly applied by, private capital.

In this densely organized social economy, time pressures reach a point where no single person can adjust his or her body rhythm to the requirements of the task, and "the sovereignty of [personal] time disappears."(11) Both production and reproduction become subject to a generalized micro-economic rationality modeled on the industrial just-in-time pattern. With the division of labor developed to the utmost, the entire social structure is parcellized into units all committed to meeting near-impossible deadlines set by leading global firms. "Standardization" is the core concept, as exemplified by expressions such as "Toyotization of the banks," "McDonaldization of PTT-Telecom," or "lay-days" and "patient logistics" in health care.

Thus capitalist development has reached a stage in which certain discomforts and even extreme pressures associated with "work" are extending into to the broader sphere of reproduction or "daily life," in the sense originally coined by Henri Lefebvre, the social substratum from which labor is recruited.(12) For instance, in the sphere of biological reproduction and communal interactions, older community traditions may survive; but they are increasingly bombarded by the stimuli of commodification which are affecting social relations in general.

There is no need to idealize this social substratum; but however impoverished it may be, authentic joy, love, and friendship do survive here. There have been various attempts, in the history of capitalism, to recover the losses suffered in this sphere. So, for example, psychoanalysis has been interpreted as an attempt to rediscover intimacy, self-knowledge, sensuous and emotional satisfaction in a context of social relations one-sidedly molded by commodification.(13) In the 1970s, "flower power" and Eastern religions performed a comparable function, just as "New Age" movements do today. The socialization of the reproduction of labor power in the 1950-1970 era, in the framework of the welfare state, gave rise (in North America and Western Europe in particular) to a vast army of "cadres" - (adult) education, neighborhood, health and welfare, or comparable "workers." Now that these are being made redundant under neoliberal fiscal stringency, "daily life" is further exposed to commodification in the most radical way.

So it is not only the natural substratum of the capitalist world economy that is being exhausted (by destruction, pollution and poisoning, and literally exhausted in the case of fresh-water supplies and agricultural yields). A similar exhaustion is taking place in the social, reproductive substratum, in "daily life" and the regenerative capacity it represents. Perhaps American inner cities are the unfortunate "best" example of what an exhausted society looks like - a society under the ultimate discipline of capital. Here we are seeing something new, something distinct from the old forms of poverty related to original accumulation or the reserve army of labor in industrial society. In a setting stripped bare of non-economic social cohesion, capital caters to the last source of purchasing power, the destitute drug addict. And this social exhaustion is a matter of deliberate capitalist policy, of which the attack on welfare provisions promoted by Clinton's government is the final step.(14)

All this is taking place in the context of the "neoliberal" strategies which have been adopted across the whole political spectrum throughout the capitalist world. These strategies have introduced their own controls and disciplines, including various financial institutions which impose conformity on governments through the mechanisms of credit and debt.(15)

Yet this apparently all-powerful, tightly integrated system of controls does not mean that the discipline of capital over the entire reproductive system is beyond resistance. The many different forms in which society and nature are subjected to the discipline of capital do produce anger and discontent, often exacerbated by the "politics of unpopularity," as governments confront their own populations with unpopular policies in the name of "the economy." Under conditions of extreme commodification and individualization, such discontent often assumes individual, non-political forms - family and street violence, etc. Anger may also be mobilized for violent confrontations, in which people are driven not by opposition to unsustainable development, but by opposition to other social groups and states, expressed in various ways, from racism and xenophobia to conflicts over fishing rights.

But there may be signs that resistance to this global discipline of capital is coming of age. Here, the December 1995 mass movement, against the disciplinary neoliberalism imposed on France by a government committed to meeting the entry requirements of the projected EU monetary union, may be considered the landmark event.(16) This movement capped a longer, and extremely varied series of protest movements and actions the world over which have been interpreted as popular movements against capitalist globalization.(17) Struggles have ranged from Indian peasants resisting the forced introduction of hybrid seeds, to German demonstrators and Greenpeace protests against Shell's planned Brent Sparoil rig demolition in the North Sea; from the Chiapas revolt against NAFTA, to the protests of the Ogoni in Nigeria over the destruction of their habitat by the same Shell oil company in collaboration with the country's military dictatorship.

These struggles are perhaps too varied to be grouped together under a single heading. In our typology, the Ogoni and Indian struggles could, for example, also be considered as instances of resistance to original accumulation, while the French struggles had an element of workplace/trade union resistance. Still, resistance to the exhaustion of the human and natural substratum appears to be the common factor here, joining various forms of resistance into a broader struggle. This is a class struggle against capital precisely because it is not waged from a narrow, corporatist definition of class, but as a popular struggle uniting a broad array of social forces seeking "the fullfilment of tasks set by interests wider than their own."(18) What we are witnessing are new popular fronts against the discipline of capital, against the World Bank and IMF, and ultimately against the governments subservient to them.

This movement can be considered an effort to establish democracy and popular sovereignty, and at the same time a recherche du temps perdu, a nostalgia for dally life as people once knew it: a life with its moments of respite and relaxation in familiar surroundings - lunch in the neigborhood restaurant, or a children's party in a park, when food was not yet "junk food," lives were not yet "junk lives," when there was time to do things not first ordered by a boss, a work schedule, or the sum total of demands made upon people both at work and at home and in between. This curious combination of progressive and conservative impulses in what is basically a struggle for survival (which incidentally allows the Right to present itself as the champion of dignity and social protection) is evident in the often distorted forms of struggle. In fact, international conflicts over the world's remaining resources, armed posturing by U.S. citizens' militias, and the xenophobic streak on the fringes of the French December movement are all part of the current array of protest movements, however much we deplore their distortions.

Moralistic dismissals of the democratic element in some recent forms of resistance can entirely miss the point. Take, for example, the walk-outs and mass demonstrations in October 1996 against suspected cover-ups and police/government laxity towards the Dutroux child pornography network in Belgium. Bourgeois politicians and newspapers debated registration/castration of pedophiles, and others warned against restricting sexual freedoms. But the real issue was that the market demand for child pornography reaching into the highest circles of government has left the people unprotected against this, as against other more reputable instances of "free enterprise." The fact that Belgian industrial workers participated en masse in the walk-outs was explained by a Louvain sociologist as a protest over the failure of the judiciary to act against the appalling neglect of work safety regulations.(19) The point, of course, is that social protection and a protective society are simply not good for profits.

The ruling class attitude is nicely captured by Business Week (Sept. 9, 1992): commenting on what it saw as a dangerous turn in the 1992 Republican presidential campaign towards a "Father Knows Best" lifestyle (proposals for rehabilitating drug addicts, increasing police forces, and encouraging parents to take care of their children), it issued a warning under the title, "You Want 'Family Values?' They'll Cost Billions."

Exhaustion as a Limit to Capitalist Discipline

Capitalism may have failed to conform to economic equilibrium models and what they tell us about ideal rates of exploitation; but up to now, such failures have constituted only a temporary limit on capitalist accumulation. By means of technical restructuring or spatial expansion, capital has been able to respond, with greater or lesser success, to pressures on the rate of profit, overproduction and underconsumption and related disproportions. If worse comes to worst, the capitalist class may resort to violence to impose discipline, by repression or war. What may have looked to some in recent decades like a terminal decline of capitalism may not have been halted as effectively as other crises in the past; but there has nevertheless been a continuing advance of cammodification and capital accumulation, on a truly global scale and at an unprecedented rate of exploitation of the social and natural substratum on which the mode of production rests.

But if capital still has room for manoeuvre and space to grow, we may be approaching a new kind of crisis, a new kind of limit, in the capacity of nature and society to support its discipline. In addition to the exhaustion of natural resources, which has been a recognized possibility since the early 1970s, we must take into account that capital at some point may also come up against another kind of limit, a limit on its capacity to mobilize and appropriate its social substratum. As Rainer Funke argued in an article published posthumously in 1978, the capitalist mode of production is still growing, but the moment of crisis is becoming manifest in what he calls the mounting incapacity of capitalism to grow into an existing infrastructural basis."(20)

We have already seen some manifestations of popular resistance to capital's increasing penetration into its social substratum, to the growing insecurity of work, the erosion of social provision, and so on. Of course it remains to be seen what the social reverberations of the French and other mass movements against neoliberalism will be in this respect. But it may be worth concluding this short discussion by looking at a recent report of the French organization of young managers (Centre des Jeunes Dirigeants d'Entreprise).

This report, "The Enterprise in the XXIst Century," was discussed in the Financial Times of November 13, 1996. What strikes the reader is how it departs from the standard wisdom of the last 15 years. The report claims that in relation to labor flexibility, the maximum seems already to have been achieved, and that pressure to go further could backfire. "The more severe the competition," the report notes, "the greater the temptation to enslave man to the economy." Competitive advantages gained in this way will be short-term and superficial. The "imposition of subordination and servitude on the workers" will undermine the autonomy of the workforce necessary in a modem organization. It "[will] hold back the competitiveness of the company, and in time can only jeopardise the legitimacy of the company and its management," etc.

The report goes on to say:

Today, in submitting to excessive constraints of productivity, in downsizing without limit, in seeking to make gains at the expense of society, business is in the process of breaking the social links which it used to build. We are convinced that unregulated capitalism will explode just as communism exploded, if we do not seize the chance to put man back at the centre of society.

There is no need prematurely to announce yet again the emergence of the proletarian subject who will bring about a socialist transformation, as humanity reclaims its alienated self. But let us at least agree that, as the exhaustion of society and nature by capitalist discipline is becoming manifest, the defense of daily life against disruption by overexploitation and crime (which will require a new respect for "tradition" and "values") should not be left to the Right.

NOTES

1. See also G. de Ste. Croix, "Class in Marx's Conception of History, Ancient and Modern," Monthly Review (36, 10) 1985

2. van Erp, H., Het kapitaal tussen illusie en werkelijkheid (Nijmegen, SUN) 1982, p. 180.

3. K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, Beacon) 1957 [1944], pp. 47-55.

4. E. Rosenstock-Huessy, Die europaischen Revolutionen und der Character der Nationen (Stuttgart, Kohlhammer) 1961 [3rd. ed.; 1931], pp. 404-5.

5. R. Nima, The Wrath of Allah. Islamic Revolution and Reaction in Iran (London and Sydney, Pluto) 1983, p. 142).

6. J. Hough, Russia and the West. Gorbachev and the Politics of Reform (New York, Simon & Schuster) 1990, p. 48.

7. A. Sohn-Rethel, "The Dual Economics of Transition" in R. Panzieri et al., The labor Process and Class Strategies (London, CSE) 1976, p. 27.

8. J.D. Maurino, Proces d'internationalization et developpement des luttes de classes (Grenoble, CERES, mimeo) 1974, pp. 54-5.

9. Quoted in Newsweek, June 17, 1985.

10. A. Hoogvelt and M. Yuasa, "Going lean or going native? The social regulation of "lean" production systems," Review of International Political Economy (1,2) 1994, p. 293.

11. W. Buitelaar and P. Vos in De Volkskrant, July 20, 1996.

12. H. Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne (2 vols.) (Paris, L'Arche) 1958/1961.

13. E. Zaretsky, Gezin en priveleven in het kapitalisme (Nijmegen, SUN) 1977, pp. 102-3.

14. M. de Goede, "Ideology in the US welfare debate: neo-liberal representations of poverty," Discourse & Society (7, 3) 1996. At the time of this writing, the question whether the CIA actively aided the introduction of crack into the United States as part of its fundraising for the Contras in Nicaragua, is not settled. There need not be any doubt however, as to the profound interconnection of drugs, intelligence services, and the global ruling class. I only mention P.D. Scott and J. Marshall, Cocaine Politics. Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley etc., University of California Press) 1991.

15. For a discussion of this "disciplinary neoliberalism," see S. Gill, "The Global Panopticon? The Neoliberal State, Economic Life, and Democratic Surveillance," Alternatives (20, 1) 1995.

16. For a collection of interpretations of this movement, see Le Monde Diplomatique, January 1996, "When Society Says 'No.'"

17. De Volkskrant, Nov. 18, 1995.

18. Polanyi, Great Transformation, op. cit. p. 152.

19 De Volkskrant, Oct. 26, 1996.

20. R. Funke, "sich durchsetzender Kapitalismus. Eine Alternative zum spatkapitalistischen Paradigma," in Starnberger Studien vol. 2 (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp) 1978, pp. 227-8.

Kees van der Pijl teaches at the University of Amsterdam and is the author of The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (Verso, 1984). This article is based on his forthcoming book, Transnational Historical Materialism: A Class Analysis of International Relations, to be published by Routledge at the end of this year.

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