"Globality and Class: Left-Transnationalism and Red Internationalism"

  Amrohini Sahay

Theories of 'globalization' are also theories of capitalism today and
of how best to advance it or struggle against it: they thus have
particular significance for the left--if the left is to be a
transformative force for social change. But the dominant left theory
of globalization is a corporate transnationalist theory which
supports capitalism by occulting its fundamental contradictions,
above all, its "basis" in the exploitation of labor.  To various
degrees, using different languages and multiple and agile idioms
left-transnationalist theories of globalization all claim that we
have entered into a "post-capitalist" epoch.  Echoing the "new
economy" theories of bourgeois managers, left-transnationalists thus
posit the arrival of a phase which is post-work (Aronowitz),
post-imperialism (W.I. Robinson, M. Hardt), and post-socialism (N.
=46raser) and thus in which Orthodox Marxist theorizations of
international class struggle for socialist revolution have lost their
relevance as the horizon of "politics" and been displaced by the goal
of establishing a "compassionate market": a "radical democracy" of
consumer and "human rights" which are supposed to mitigate the
ruthless contradictions of capitalist wage labor.

This paper argues that ALL theories of
globalization-as-transnationalism (whether of markets, culture,
consumption, or of cross-class "new social movements". . .) are an
extension of the reformist Third Way crisis management strategies of
the imperialist metropole to blunt the levels of rising class
struggles and attempt to erase the red spectre of world-revolution.
It contests the corporate globalism of the transnational left (which
is one of the main routes of dissemination of the neoliberal market
propaganda and agenda to workers struggles) and (by way of a close
reading of The Manifesto of the Communist Party and other texts by
Marx, Engels, and Lenin) brings back into contemporary struggles the
Orthodox Marxist theory of globalization.

Globalization, as this essay argues, is not the new political horizon
of the "utopian" hope of (neoromantic) "anti-capitalism" (as writers
from Zizek to David Harvey claim); rather, it is the name for the new
and explosive contradictions of wage-labor in conditions of the
falling rate of profit which can neither be successfully "managed"
nor superceded within the existing capitalist social relations but
need to be transformed. In theorizing globalization the essay does
not only provide a class critique of the dominant transnational
theories but also puts forth a sustained outline of the revolutionary
project of RED INTERNATIONALISM.  It shows that (against all
bourgeois cosmopolitanisms and hybrid projects of class
reconciliation) the only means to emancipation for all from
capitalist imperialism is the socialist project of red
internationalism--which provides the basis for praxis on the global
level by the "workers who have no country."