Transeconomic Capitalism

Abstract

The hyperglobalist thesis covers a multitude of sins: for although it is generally associated with a neo-liberal approach to the scrapping of national constraints on the mobility of capital, we have seen that this particular vision of the wealth producing, democratizing effects of the market is not the only way of theorizing the shift from a regional-industrial to a global-postindustrial organization of the world economy. Indeed, the orthodox Marxist position is that the very processes which are identified by neo-liberals as the means to international justice and equality — that is, the expansion of new media technological systems, the increasing mobility of virtual capital, the shift from ‘heavy’ to ‘light’ manufacturing — simply intensify the logic of exploitation which Lenin set out in his account of the imperialist stage of capitalism. As Hardt and Negri have pointed out however, this line of argument tends to underplay the transformative effects of new technologies on the geopolitical space of capitalism, and, as a consequence, to impose a model of class struggle upon social, political and economic relationships to which it is no longer appropriate. And so the project which they pursue in Empire and Multitude attempts to redetermine Marx’s account of the revolutionary potential of capitalism through the techno-scientific processes (virtualization, digitization, prosthesis, informatics, etc.) which have globalized the commodity form of production.