In the light of the arguments laid out above, an assumption would be that global class formation would play a central role in the debates on globalisation, especially from the perspective of the world as a system, and globalisation as a disjunction from previous forms of sociality. However, this is hardly the case.
For Wallerstein, classes – despite constituting actors at the global level – are formed within national political and economic frameworks. This is because World System Analysis takes the state as the primary actor within the world system. The global economy creates states within it and these states segment global value chains, leading to a division of labour between the centre, where capital accumulates through the expropriation of surplus-value, which in turn is created
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in the states of the semi-periphery and periphery. The world economy, therefore – in contrast to the idea of global capitalism as a “great leveller” in neoclassical economics (Subramanian and Kessler 2013) – is not thought to homogenise the differentiations between countries, but rather to produce and sustain them. Thus, although their political formation happens on the national level, capitalist classes in their function as dominant classes in countries of the centre, exploit subaltern classes globally through the international division of labour. In this view, global class conflict exists; however, it is seen as being carried out through the transmission-belt of international conflict, couched in a regionally differentiated, rather than homogeneous, world system. In this regard, class for Wallenstein is not situated as a structural element at the global level but acts on it by means of the state12.
Meyer, on the other hand, is hardly interested in classes and class formation, since his focus lies on a generalised set of institutions and cultural dispositions. Treating the world as a system highlights the economic and cultural interdependencies; however, it does not necessarily encompass the issue of global class formation.
“Disjunctive” theorists like Giddens (1990), Castells (2000), and Beck (2000) have elaborated more on the issue of global class. However, they go even further in arguing that class has no place in a global society. According to them, globalisation leads to a separation of place, the “physical setting of social activity” (Giddens, 1990: 18) and space, i.e. the locale of the forces shaping this activity. In the pre-globalisation age, space is said to have had a (more or less clear) boundary, containing the institutions exerting influence on social activities, most strongly articulated in the borders of nation states which gave societies their territories. In the age of globalisation, forces such as the technologies for instant long-distant communications and transactions (Castells), the development of generalised symbolic tokens of exchange such as money and expert systems (Giddens), or simply the emergence of global markets (Beck), are said to create a boundary-less “empty space” (Giddens) or a “space of flows” (Castells), which re-shapes human societies according to its own global logic and lies beyond the influence of the institutions that once regulated social life – most notably, the state.
The result is the “disembedding of society” from its time- and place-bound ways of functioning – the “‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space” (Giddens, 1990: 21). The consequence of
12 Wallerstein’s reliance on the international system as the structuring principle of the world economy has also been criticized from a Marxist perspective by Robinson (2011). Robinson argues, that, while the description World systems Analysis offers has historical validity, global capitalism has now entered a new phase, where the international/interstate system has been replaced as a primary organising principle by transnational circuits of capital, which form the basis for the formation of a transnational capitalist class. This approach is further discussed in Section 4.2.
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this disembedding is the development of a “network society”: the functional institutions of society become dispersed into differentiated, interconnected nodes, connected by flows of capital, commodities, information, and people. In place of centred national economies we now find multiple, interpenetrating economic networks, connected by the overarching flows of the global financial markets.
While the economy of this new global network society can be undoubtedly described as capitalist, Giddens, Castells, and Beck all claim that with the spatial and functional reorganisation, the old concept of class is outdated and does not capture the reality of the social structure in a globalised age.
Castells finds the reason for this in the technological nature of the global financial system:
while on local levels, different individuals or groups may be identified who hold control over the local accumulation process, such as managers of big corporations, of pension funds in their role as controlling investors, public corporations, or post-socialist oligarchs, their actions are ultimately determined by the global financial network:
There is not, sociologically and economically, such a thing as a global capitalist class. But there is an integrated, global capital network, whose movements ultimately determine economies and influence societies. Thus, above a diversity of human-flesh capitalists and capitalist groups there is a face-less collective capitalist, made up of financial flows operated by electronic networks. […] This network of networks of capital both unifies and commands specific centers of capitalist accumulation, structuring the behaviour of capitalists around their submission to the global network. […]
While capitalism still rules, capitalists are randomly incarnated, and the capitalist classes are restricted to specific areas of the world, where they prosper as appendixes [sic] to a mighty whirlwind which manifests its will by spread points and futures options ratings in the global flashes of computer screens. (Castells 2000: 505)
In turn, Castells holds the same technological logic responsible for the disaggregation of the working classes. Under the condition of global, networked capital, the processes of production become fragmented across time and space, which leads to a dissolution of working class identities. In their place, labour, which is in contrast to capital bound to specific places, becomes “increasingly individualised in its capacities, in its working conditions, and in its
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interests and projects” (Castells 2000: 505). The result is that the logic of class becomes obsolete in the face of the technology of the network:
Working life goes on. Yet, at a deeper level of the new social reality, social relationships of production have been disconnected in their actual existence.
Capital tends to escape in its hyperspace of pure circulation, while labor dissolves its collective entity into an infinite variation of individual existences (Castells, 2000: 506).
Beck (2000) and Giddens (1990) argue in a similar vein: in the face of simultaneous technological possibilities and the fragmentation of social institutions, the class identities of the industrial age give way to “life politics of self-actualisation” (Giddens 1990: 156f). The argument of social relations being transformed in the light of globalisation is in turn married to Beck’s argument on individualisation:
[…] the social cement has grown porous through the secular trend of individualization, […] society has been losing its collective self-consciousness and therefore its capacity for political action. The quest for political responses to the great issues of the future no longer has any subject or any locus. […] In other words, as social-moral milieux have faded away, foundations have developed in the lifeworld for a cosmopolitan republicanism centred on freedom of the individual. (Beck 2000: 8ff)
That our world has become more interconnected, that the world market has become more competitive, and that social relations now stretch over larger distances than even a few decades ago, are hard to dispute. For the disjunctive theorists, however, the consequences of this disembedding of society are that humanity now faces its own social world akin to how it in pre-modern times faced nature: as a chaotic, dangerous, even hostile environment, lying outside the possibility of human control. Life under the conditions of globalisation therefore resembles a ride on a “juggernaut”, as Giddens (1990: 151) terms it in reference to the Chariot of God Krishna in Hindu mythology. In the light of the declining social efficacy of states, the emerging world society is said to be “a world society without integration” (Beck, 2000: 10), held together only by the economic web of the market and the existence of global risks threatening humanity as a whole.
The consequence for the analysis of social structure according to these theorists is that, in spite of the undoubtedly increasing gap between rich and poor, one should abandon class
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analysis as meaningless and look for other forms of political identities to carry on with emancipatory politics: individual reflexivity and the fight for individual human rights on the one hand, or social movements that confront the generalised threat of various global risks, be they ecological, economic or political in nature, on the other. Class, in other words, falls
Summarizing the conceptualisations of globalisation discussed in this chapter, the impression emerges, that the discourse on globalisation is caught in a strong dynamic of either absolutely privileging the forces of globalisation (or global capitalism) over local forms of sociality or states, or, vice-versa, renouncing the autonomy of the global level altogether. When looking at it from the question of global class formation, neither approach has much to offer.
The latter perspective denies the existence of non-local actors, whereas the former portrays globalisation as a “force of nature” external to human action.
What therefore remains is Therborn’s suggestion, not to focus on the a-priory definition of what globalisation may be, but rather treating the issue as an empirical matter. In this regard, the question whether global classes are forming actually represents a contribution to the discourse, as it would reflect, that the global indeed produces actors beyond the nation state.
However, with accepting the claim that a truly global economy exists, and that this economy still produces inequality, the literature on globalisation comes into conflict with the literature on class. Taking the assumption of class analysis that a (capitalist) economy is generating social inequality necessarily along lines of class differentiation into account, in turn the issue of global class formation can be seen as an empirical test for the question whether the global economy should be conceived as a system or a stage. In this regard, my research represents a contribution to the literature on globalisation, despite disagreeing with many of its assumptions.
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4 Towards Conceptualising Class on a Global Level
In the previous chapters I have discussed the prevalent approaches to class, as well as the most prevalent theories of globalisation. In Chapter Two (pp. 15-41), I identified the factors leading to an alignment between class as a category of inequality and the conception of society as congruent with the nation state. In search for means to overcome the obstacles I identified, in Chapter Three (pp. 42-51) I turned to theories of globalisation. My investigation of the most prominent conceptualisations led to the conclusion, that the globalisation literature is not particularly helpful in addressing class on the global level, because it disengages from class analysis altogether. This disengagement from debates about class stems from theoretical a-priori assumptions about the nature of globalisation.
Despite the obstacles against a global class analysis within both, the discourse on class and the discourse on globalisation, there have been some attempts to apply the approaches discussed in Chapter Two to the global level. In the following section I engage with these studies in order to develop an understanding of the empirical reality of studying class on a global level.
4.1 Global Income Inequality: Individual Attributes and the Inequality between