The Relationship Between International Organization and Industrial Change - Essay Example

Kajal Basu What is the relationship between international organization and industrial change from a neo-Gramscian perspective 10 December 2005 In the early 1980s, with the nearly uncontrollable accretion and swelling of Latin America's "post-dependency" era, which was called, from the following two years onwards, the "Debt Crisis", transmogrifying then, semantically for the better, into the "debt situation" (which continues to flay it alive as only American "situations" can)-with the maximum haemorrhaging in Argentina and the recent Leftist truculence of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez-Robert W Cox formulated a theory that encompassed, among other things, hegemony, world order and historical change (Cox 1981; 1983). In his 1981 exposition, Cox asks for an informed, open-minded critique of International Relations (IR) that had so far depended solely on "problem-solving" theories that obsequiously deviated in no manner from mainstream diagnoses and prognoses, but embraced states as being immutable and the scheme of things-including individual and institutional relationships within and between states, parastatal organisations and the so-called private players-as Kantian Dinge an sich (literally, "things as they are"). Cox's effort in 1983 was to expand on his earlier thesis: to prove how neo-Gramscianism can take apart and syncretise into new understandings and, thus, modalities of action to subvert the power superstructure of the Global Political Economy, a complex trelliswork of governmental, individual and institutional actors. Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci's macrosociological concept (1971) was of "Historic Blocks"- influential and imperious corporate-government cultus embodiments and manufactories of abilities, ideologies and institutions as moulds and super-planners for individual and collective action-and of lites collaborating as "organic intellectuals" to establish and continuously invigorate Historic Blocks. Cox's then somewhat amphibological argument of social-rather, societal-transformation was based largely on the seminal work done earlier by Gramsci, who posited that it was hegemony-statal, parastatal, private and increasingly purely corporatist-and its attendant issues that explained the global roil. "Hegemony" is simplistically defined as "dominance, especially by one state or social group over others" (Oxford English Dictionary), but is furthermore "understood as an expression of broadly-based consent, manifested in the acceptance of ideas and supported by material resources and institutions" (Bieler and Morton 2003). The term "world order" was of a different class altogether from Immanuel Wallerstein's "world systems theory", a profoundly disturbing assault on development and modernisation theory, in which he said that he aimed to achieve "a clear conceptual break with theories of 'modernisation' and thus provide a new theoretical paradigm to guide our investigations of the emergence and development of capitalism, industrialism, and national states" (Skocpol 1977). Wallerstein (1987) declaimed that the world systems theory was "a protest against the way in which social scientific inquiry is structured for all of us at its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century". Criticising the then prevalent bimodal Dependency Theory, which argues in favour of a bipolar metropolis-satellite structure, he held that it was too simplistic to have a functional worldview organised around it: the meaning that can be read into it is that it would have to be, in a sense, future-proof against times that would only get more-and less-interconnected. In a sense, too, Wallerstein's trimodal world systems theory has been bypassed by current events: mergers between transnational corporations from disparate political dispensations have led to the creation of megacorporations that have turnovers that put the GDP of many developing world economies in the shade. Parastatal organisations, usually non-governmental organisations (NGO), that owe their loyalty either to themselves and their agendas or to "corporates", are in the process of becoming Herculean political players in production and policy domains that have, so far, been the prerogative of governments alone. Where both the neo-Gramscian and Wallerstein's approach-although chronospatially separated in intellectual development and thoroughness of broad-based academic study-met was in their belief that August Comte's positivist system to repudiate metaphysics and theology in favour of the human mind (by which Comte meant astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology), was fatally flawed, in that, despite its factoring in the last discipline-still embryonic during Comte's time, since he was the one who had coined the term (Comte 1830-42) to replace the current expression, physique sociale (or social physics)-it was in denial of the anthropomorphic drive towards constant inequity and primordial conflict. Raymond Carr had, in fact, clarified, "Positivism became the 'scientific' base for authoritarian politics, especially in Mexico and Brazil." A form of positivism became the basis for the US' hegemonic chokehold over Latin America as the Colossus of the North, a superlative now pinpricked by the very same Latin America as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank become synonymous with obsequiousness-indeed, a policy of collaborationism with the US. The Colossus of the North nonpareil-however deserved or otherwise it might be-fit in beautifully with the US' nascent realisation then that the theory of Manifest Destiny (Sullivan 1845)-"The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness"-could well be extended by an increasingly trenchant America beyond "all the lands to the west, [that] somehow, would have to be taken from England, France, Mexico, and the many Indian tribes" to the rest of a sequentially available world. The hegemony that began in the 1890s culminated in the hurly-burly of World War I that consolidated the US' hold over the Western hemisphere. "(O)nce hegemony has been consolidated domestically it may expand beyond a particular social order to move outward on a world scale through the international expansion of a particular mode of social relations of production" (Cox 1983, 1987). But what both Wallerstein, first, and Gramsci, later, had to struggle mightily with was the dominant 20th century fin de siecle philosophy of functionalism, or functional analysis, a sociological philosophy associated with Emile Durkheim that tried to define institutions as collectives designed to fulfil individual biological needs, which later expanded to include "social needs" and "stability". Its prime proponent became Talcott Parsons (Parsons 1937, 1951, 1960, 1968, 1969), and, lately, Jeffrey Alexander of Yale University. The end of the 19th century and the industrial leapfrog into the next one had seen the growth of US enterprises from relatively small, convivial businesses into Chondrichthyes corporations with agendas, first of untrammelled profiteering within the borders of the nation itself, and then without. Despite the volcanic hiccup-in corporatist terms-of World War II, intellectual rigour of the subject at hand occurred only in the early 1970s. Apart from Gramsci's own malleable and humanist model prognosis, Richard Nixon's delinking of the dollar from the Gold Standard in 1971 heralded the end of a particularly enduring post-war regime: "[] the extraordinary success of postwar international economic liberalisation hinged on a compact between state and society to mediate its deleterious domestic effects-what I have elsewhere termed the embedded liberalism compromise" (Ruggie 1982). Nixon's cunning harbingered sequentially changed military, political, topographic and demographic structures. International relations, doctrinaire politics, and even corporate strategies and structures were forced into rethinking almost all that which had been considered canonical. When Cox propounded his neo-Gramscian approach as being of sustainable relevance to the unpredictability and flux of the times, fresh critiques and critical theories of feminism, historical sociology and post-structuralism were battering-and were given further heart to continue battering by his sometimes recondite "philosophy"-at the fortifications of the mainstream. "(T)heory is always for someone and for some purpose' (Cox 1981: 128). Epistemologically and ontologically different they might have been, but they shared a distaste of positivism's presumption that social science is meant to pinpoint and codify "causal relationships in an objective world" (Bieler and Morton 2003). Bieler and Morton (ibid.) hold: (M)ainstream neo-realist and neo-liberal institutionalist approaches, as well as the more radical alternative of world-systems theory, can be rejected as problem-solving theories. They all assume that basic features of the international system are constant. Neo-realism argues that states are the only important actors, neo-liberal institutionalism regards states as the most important actors using regimes in order to further their interests, and world-systems theory defines the world system as consisting of core, semi-periphery and periphery. As a result, structural change beyond these features cannot be conceptualised. Secondly, these traditional IR approaches contribute to the maintenance of existing social and power relationships, including their inherent inequalities, within the features identified as constant. The methodologies of attributing nations to the core, semi-periphery, or periphery are-undoubtedly much to Comte's posthumous dissatisfaction, since he considered mathematics a tool and not a system-very specific and empirical. Piana (2004) defined the "core" as comprising "free countries" that dominated others without being themselves dominated in any manner, the "periphery" as the dominated nations, and "semi-periphery" as nations that are dominated while simultaneously dominating others, usually "periphery". Based on 1998 data, with some exceptions, the complete list of countries in what Piana rather guilelessly calls "the three regions" can be found at http://www.economicswebinstitute.org/essays/tradehierarchy.htm According to him, the "core" nations are: France, Germany, United Kingdom, United States, Japan; the "periphery" nations are: Ukraine, Portugal, Denmark, Hungary, Slovenia, Morocco, Slovakia, Romania, Poland, The Czech Republic, Norway, Austria, Algeria, the Ivory Coast, Egypt, Finland, Israel, Turkey, Colombia, Ireland, Iran, Nigeria, Cameroon, Canada, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Uruguay, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines; the "semi-periphery" nations are: Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, China, Mexico, Taiwan, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, the Russian Federation, Brazil, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore. Bangladesh finds no mention on Piana's map because it has no trade relations with any other nation-it produces such a negligible quantity of goods on its own that it imports virtually everything, making it probably the most peripheral nation on Earth. But what Piana blithely ignores is that the nations he calls "periphery" themselves might have-and some do have-small regional trade affiliations and corporate ambitions that might seem inconspicuous in the Western nations' "global" terms that he spotlights. In microdemographic and microeconomic terms, therefore, the neo-Gramscian model holds up a truer mirror to life. Piana's Map of World Dominance Relations (Piana 2004), used extensively in world systems analyses, does not even give cognisance to the probability that zonal exploitation is conceived in a situation of a porous polarisation between nations, rather than each nation being bracketed by Wallerstein's trizonal model. Neo-realist hegemonic stability theory-which makes equal sense if one says that the most powerful kid on the block rules the block and thus brings stability to it, and pox be on the law-holds that international order is entirely dependent on a single national (or, increasingly, transnational corporation) entity as predominant, both economically and politically, and often, as we have seen in the case of Halliburton in Iraq, militarily (although not without the extralegal and extramilitary help of the US Administration, a concept of corporate-government nexus that Cox is liberally [sic] loquacious about). "The state is not unquestioningly taken as a distinct institutional category, or thing in itself, but conceived as a form of social relations through which capitalism and hegemony are expressed" (Bieler and Morton 2003). A standing case is that of "NAFTA which integrates Mexico into the North American market in consequential ways. Pre-NAFTA's studies offered varying predictions concerning NAFTA's impact on employment, yet many projected substantial job increases. The creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs benefitted the automotive, electronics, and maquiladora [assembly plant] industries. Since enactment of NAFTA, however, the economic competition with foreign firms and goods caused 28,000 businesses and two million Mexican jobs to disappear" (Hansen-Kuhn 1997). "Imported commodities that flooded the Mexican market in the 1990s undermined many rural producers" (Wickham-Crowley and Eckstein 2003). NAFTA has been roundly defended, literally to the wall, by the US Administration, which has long shown few or, at best, passing qualms about promoting its own corporatist ambitions. As the former president of Brazil and renowned sociologist, Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), said when he transmogrified from dependentista-a proponent of the Dependency Theory-to proto-neoliberal political star, "the rules of domination have been enforced, and even if the dependent country becomes less poor after the first loan, a second one follows. In most cases, when such an economy flourishes, its roots have been planted by those who hold the lending notes." From a neo-Gramscian point of view, global actors jockey for position using three instruments: materially, corporations manufacture products and devise technology strategies to hegemonise markets, current and future. Discursively, they challenge regulations using scientific data and public relations. Organisationally, they build bridges with competitors, coalitions (now where have we heard that word) crossing sectors and demilitarised zones so as to reach into the very heart of civil society. If the world is not as plague-ridden by corporatism as it seems from the perspective of the developed world, it is because the neo-Gramscian narrative has a powerful hold on the developing nations. But you win some, you lose some: in July 2005 at New York, for instance, Wal-Mart's CEO, Lee Scott, met Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to discuss the modalities of upping the ante on what John Menzer, president and CEO of Wal-Mart's international operations, who had visited India the previous month with a hardsell delegation, said was "huge organic growth opportunity for Wal-Mart". India represents a potential US$ 250 billion retail market for the US multinational (CNN Money, July 2005). The meeting between the prime minister of the second-fastest developing nation in the world and the head of a global corporate giant whose growth is based on undercutting-by dint of hyper-mass retail, subterranean overheads and rapid out-movement of FMCG goods-and squeezing the life out of small businesses, carries ramifications that have not gone uncommented in the furiously combative Indian and South Asian media. "Wal-Mart has requested permission from the Indian government to open two experimental stores in Kolkata, India's second largest city, formerly known as Calcutta. Under the proposals, Wal-Mart would buy locally produced food and general merchandise and transport it for sale in its outlets. The proposals were put to Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the chief minister of West Bengal [] by Marc Rosen, Wal-Mart's senior vice-president for international strategy and implementation" (money.telegraph, October 2005). In point of fact, the government of the Indian state of West Bengal is the world's longest continuously-surviving Marxist dispensation, and its parent body, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), has a history of digging in its heels against the "uncontrolled" ingress of developed nations' foreign direct investment (FDI) into all of India's industrial and service sectors, many of which are profit-making and remain Constitutionally protected by a government that was, till less than a decade ago, largely a socialist-oriented welfare/protectionist state that is today rapidly moving towards an unfettered and often indiscriminate "globalisation" and privatisation binge. The US, of course, remains the primary beneficiary, despite several fiascos among which number Enron's eight-year-long attempt to nail the coffin of the indigenous electrical energy sector. Under the 1995 Enron-Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB) power purchase agreement-which had, incidentally, already been renegotiated because Enron's financial imperatives had gone off the Indian government's five-year plan chart-the MSEB had to cough up to the Dabhol Power Corporation, set up by Enron, a minimum of US$ 220 million a year for 20 years, whether or not the power the DPC produced was used-or even needed. "The contract, which is controversially counter-guaranteed by both the state and federal governments, threatens to bankrupt the MSEB and the state exchequer itself. The deal is also designed to pass on the effects of rupee devaluation and rises in international petroleum prices to the MSEB. Over the past year, both of these things have happened, making DPC power increasingly more expensive" (Allison 2001). While the Indian government kept pushing for Enron's inclusion in the country's rapidly growing energy sector, both the World Bank and the government's own Central Electricity Authority (CEA) concluded that the agreement was "one-sided in favour" of Enron, and the World Bank refused the Indian government a loan. Also of "much concern was the fact that the tariff for power was denominated in US dollars. Thus, regardless of fluctuations in the dollar-rupee exchange rate, the project will always earn the same amount" (ibid.). Thus, notwithstanding shortfall in demand or the lack of it-in terms of a developing nation that had to suffer the "growing child" infirmity of economic fluctuations-the power purchase agreement (PPA) guaranteed Enron a steady stream of billions of dollars. The state government of Maharashtra, which was once the leading unions-led state in India, went one further: it waived sovereign immunity in its counter-guarantee, upholding Enron's right to seize any state assets for the repayment of arrears if the state government, for any reason, justified or not, reneged on its payments. The problem with regulations of any kind is that the responsibilities they entail tend to percolate down from, say, MNCs to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and then on to the common person. A case in point-the case in point, in fact-is the US' insistence on not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, the consequent passing down of environmental responsibilities to Third World SMEs, who then, in order to escape the punition of regulations enforced on governments by the MNCs themselves, or by their handmaidens, the World Bank and the IMF, blame everything from the "natural" pollutants in groundwater to the burning of wood fuel by the impoverished for cooking. Within most polyarchies, such as those in the US and in India, the trimodal model is a reality-if so fluid as to be neo-Gramscian-integral to their internal socio-economic dispensations. In the US, the "core" is located in suburbia and the "semi-periphery" among the downtown urban populace or race-specific ghettoes: the metropolises are segmented into core and semi-periphery. The extreme peripheries are represented among the American populace that is reported to be living below the poverty line-America's poverty rate rose to 12.7 per cent last year, encompassing roughly 35 million people, but to be BPL in the US is to be rich elsewhere (Williams 2005). By that definition, even India's semi-peripheral population, concentrated for the most part in its mofussil areas, is peripheral by Western standards. In "developing" and "underdeveloped" nations, by Gramsci's standards, the periphery would fall off the chart. This is why Stephen Gill's concepts of New Constitutionalism and Disciplinary Neo-Liberalism are harrowing (Gill 1993). It is "the move towards construction of legal or constitutional devices to remove or insulate substantially the new economic institutions from popular scrutiny or democratic accountability" (Gill 1992: 165). It is New Constitutionalism that is at the heart of the ongoing US neo-liberal drive not just towards a global oil hegemony, but the forceful propagation of the seductive idea of a worldwide market communion that has as its plinth a quasi-ideology of capitalist anabasis and exclusionary and/or hierarchies of social relations (Gill 1995: 399). In 1993, an editorial in London's conservative Financial Times was tickled pink by "the most capitalist Christmas in history". Equally, it showed a distinct apprehension about the effect that the growing competition from "the younger, harsher, more robust capitalism" of the Asian economies would have on the Atlantic nations: "Even the middle classes, who have benefited most from economic growth, fear that they may lose what they have, while those outside note that however rich the super-rich may get, large-scale unemployment persists. Lower down the income scale the picture is far worse." Ironically enough, Gramsci would agree: lower down, in other parts of the world, the picture is far worse. Works Cited 1. Allison, Tony. "Enron's eight-year power struggle in India." Asia Times Online. 18 January 2001. http://www.atimes.com/reports/CA13Ai01.html. Accessed on 8 December 2005. 2. AskOxford.com. http://www.askoxford.com/results/view=dict&field-12668446=hegemony&branch=13842570&textsearchtype=exact&sortorder=score%2Cname. Accessed on 8 December 2005. 3. Bhatnagar, Parija. Wal-Mart CEO to meet with Indian PM. 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