Adam D. Morton and Andreas Bieler are delighted
to announce the Australia book launch of GlobalCapitalism, Global War, Global Crisis, which will be at Gleebooks on 7
December, at 6:00pm and chaired by Elizabeth Humphrys. Having launched the book
in the UK at the British International Studies Association (BISA) annual
conference in Bath and at the independent bookshop FiveLeaves Books in
Nottingham, as well as at the European International Studies Association (EISA)
conference in Prague, we are very much looking forward to this launch in
Sydney.
The originality of
the book lies in its assertion of the necessity
of historical materialist dialectics in rethinking ‘the international’ and,
specifically, in its attempt to grasp the inner connections of Global
Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis within political economy. The book is
therefore a revolt against the violence of abstractions, as Derek Sayer
distinctively argued.
Our point of departure
is a critique of ontological dualisms shaping understandings of ‘the
international’ that commonly revolve around positing distinct spheres or
variables that are treated as externally interacting relations, for example
states / markets; agents / structures; ideational / material; or politics /
economics, which then fail to grasp their always-already inner connections.
We embrace the philosophy of internal relations that we
regard as the hallmark of historical materialism. It is this presence of dialectics
that we see so valuable through an engagement with classical historical
materialism in the form of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Antonio Gramsci, and Henri
Lefebvre, or more contemporary figures such as Bertell Ollman, Derek Sayer, Ariel
Salleh, Silvia Federici, Maria Mies, and Ellen Meiksins Wood.
So, if the
hallmark of historical materialism is dialectics then the argument of the book
is that Marxism distinctively delivers a philosophy of internal relations able
to grasp the inner connections between Global Capitalism, Global War, Global
Crisis. We do so by addressing capital’s internalisation within 1) the
states-system of uneven and combined development, 2) geopolitics, and 3) the
global crisis conditions facing humanity embedded within the political economy
of world ecology.
A radical philosophy
of internal relations and the dialectics of historical materialism thus makes
explicit a conception of capital through which connections are maintained and
contained as a self-forming whole.
Famously, Bertell
Ollman in his book Alienation cites Pareto
as stating that ‘Marx’s words are like bats—one can see in them both birds and
mice’. Embracing this as a positive means that historical materialism can capture
the spiral form of development of concepts, categories and their conditions to
establish the internal relation or inner ties that bind exploitation through
value, labour, private property, class, capital, commodities, the state, nature
and social reproduction.
Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis is structured into three parts. Part I has a set of Conceptual
Reflections with chapters on agency-structure and the materiality of ideas.
Part II has a set of Thematic Considerations with chapters on uneven and
combined development, geopolitics, and class struggle. Part III then has a set
of Empirical Interventions with chapters establishing specific vantage points on Global Capitalism
(focusing on China), Global War (focusing on Iraq); and Global Crisis (focusing
on the Eurozone].
These vantage
points are based on the method of “postholing” (drawing from Richard Sennett)
that invites theory to address the sweep of historical
forces through the richness of detail
stemming from delving into specific moments in space and time.
It was Henri
Lefebvre who stated that we need to focus on:
‘the revolt of the “lived” against abstractions, of the everyday against
economism, of the social and civil society against the “high rate of growth”,
whose demands are upheld by the State’.
By advancing a necessarily
historical materialist approach to dialectics, Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis then finishes on a
consideration of radical ruptures of social transformation shaping the future.
Rather than relegating resistance to future study, then, our book culminates in
a detailed chapter on the relations of force and struggles of resistance shaping the contemporary world.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments welcome!