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Introduction
This study investigates the process of capitalist
class formation in the North Atlantic area in the period between the launch of
Woodrow Wilson's 'Crusade for Democracy' in 1917 and the world economic crisis
of 1974-75. The crisis, from which capitalism so far has found no way out, and
which in the absence of a clear revolutionary dynamic has only raised the level
of violence in the international system to a point where the threat of nuclear
annihilation seems all too real, terminated an era of American hegemony and
Atlantic integration. In this era, the specific form and content of the
internationalization of capital allowed the bourgeoisie in the North Atlantic
area to regroup and develop a series of comprehensive concepts of control by
which it could reinforce its hegemonial position both nationally and, in the
confrontation with extra-Atlantic challenges, internationally. From either
perspective, the dominant feature of the era of Atlantic integration was the
supranational framework in which bourgeois class rule was organized and
legitimized: Atlantic, European, or various combinations of the two.
Class formation in the North Atlantic area, understood as a continuous
process of redefining the coordinates of bourgeois rule in response and
anticipation to the dynamic of the internationalization of capital, passed
through several stages, reaching well back into the nineteenth century.
Beginning with the post-Civil War American railway boom, an Atlantic circuit of
money capital developed, the epicentre of which at the time of World War One
shifted from London to New York. Interrupted and partially disorganized in the
1930s and 1940s, when national productive capital reasserted its pre-eminence at
the expense of internationally circulating capital, the Atlantic circuit was
restructured after the war in the context of the Pax Americana. As
international finance capital, in which the circuits of money capital and
productive capital were tendentially integrated at the Atlantic level, the spread of American
multinational firms and banks opened a third, synthetic stage of the
internationalization of capital.
In each stage, specific trans-Atlantic
configurations of interests crystallized, which were acted upon by a segment of
the ruling class formulating its concept of control in terms of the requirements
of the capital fraction specifically engaged in the internationalization
process. Thus, the liberal-internationalist bourgeoisie associated with
the development of an Atlantic circuit of money capital at the turn of the
century developed its specifically Atlantic cohesion around a concept of control
reflecting the vantage-point of the money capitalist. On the other hand, the
bourgeoisie protecting industry in a national (or, at most, regional) context in
the interwar years carved out sphere-of-interest arrangements with its
trans-Atlantic counterparts primarily from a productive-capital standpoint. At
the outset of the actual era of Atlantic
integration - coincident
with Lend-Lease
and Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter -
this fraction of
the bourgeoisie, which I term the state-monopoly tendency, was counter-
posed in most West European nations to the liberal-internationalist fraction as
contending poles of bourgeois hegemony.
The synthetic ruling-class class strategy which
transcended and subsumed this antinomy was corporate liberalism. Shaped
in the specific conditions of the New Deal, it became the hegemonial ideological
expression of the US-led internationalization of finance capital in the Atlantic
area. As a heuristic concept, 'corporate liberalism' was widely used by American
New Left historians in the 1960s to characterize the dominant ideology both in
the narrow sense of the structural bias towards corporate power, and, in the
broader sense, of the co-prosperity alliance between big business and organized
labour in the modem practice of American 'liberalism'. In the present study, the
term more particularly denotes the synthesis between the original laissez-faire
liberalism of the liberal-internationalist fraction (the definition of
liberalism still current in Europe) and the state intervention elicited by the
requirements of large-scale industry and organized labour, which in the period
between the wars accompanied various forms of class conciliation generally
referred to as corporatism. (The reader, should therefore, be forewarned that
'liberalism' is not used in the common North American sense as the
opposite of conservative!)
The American bourgeoisie during the New Deal,
and its subsequent Atlantic extrapolation through several US politico-economic
offensives, was able to develop corporate liberalism into the guiding concept
for shaping a specifically Atlantic cohesion of class relations. The class
fraction leading the way in this process could draw on two major experiments in
American social and political history which had hitherto remained disparate,
although they had been recognized separately for their potential contribution to
meet the challenge of socialism. The first of these was Fordism, a productivist
class compromise based on the synchronization of relative surplus-value
extraction with the expansion of effective demand, especially for consumer
durables. Fordism, with its implications for the macro-economic determination of
wage levels and the standardization and regimentation of working-class life, was
resorted to by the Roosevelt forces when deflation, carried over from the Hoover
administration and dictated by the orthodox money-capital concept, threatened to
jeopardize the very structure of capitalist society in the United States.
The second heritage which the New Deal
eventually mobilized was the democratic universalism pioneered by Woodrow
Wilson. Wilson's universalism, which presumed an integration of domestic and
foreign policy, had been shaped even more directly in response to the challenge
of socialism. The Crusade for Democracy, by which Wilson led the United States
into World War One at the side of the Allies, was meant to outflank the
Bolshevik Revolution by co-opting those demands that could be digested by the
capitalist system, such as national self-determination, and by aiming to
moderate rather than suppress socialism. At the same time, the American
intervention was intended to shore up the regimes of bourgeois Europe in which
American bankers had invested a large part of the savings entrusted to them by
the propertied classes of their country.
When in the context of World War Two, a
comparable conjuncture again presented itself to the American ruling class, the
Roosevelt forces seized the opportunity to reorient the New Deal from its
national-corporatist format to a more liberal-internationalist strategy of
expansion, in which domestic working-class demands could be in part evaded, in
part compromised, while American economic power was brought to bear on both the
British Empire and the Soviet Union in order to force them into compliance with
US preferences for an open world.
The Lend-Lease policy, then, inaugurated an era in which the two
elements in combination - the
generalization of Fordism and an offensive diplomacy of Wilsonian inspiration -
materialized as a process of class formation on the North Atlantic level, guided by
successive formulations of Atlantic unity. Through recurrent offensives of the
United States, and concomitant accelerations of the internationalization of
finance capital, a restructuration of Atlantic class relations was brought about
which ultimately eliminated the lag hitherto separating the pattern of capital
accumulation and internationalization in Europe from that of the United States.
In the era of Atlantic integration, three
offensives of this type were launched: the Roosevelt offensive, in FDR's third
term; the Marshall offensive, coincidental with the initial four years of the
Marshall Plan; and the Kennedy offensive spanning the first half of the 1960s.
As far as the global structure of imperialism was concerned, the offensives
(alternating with periods of relative American defensiveness in international
affairs) represented concerted efforts of the United States to break into the
colonial empires or peripheral domains of the European powers while keeping the
Soviet Union at bay. Atlantic unity, the American nuclear posture, and its
militancy in the underdeveloped periphery itself, were all aimed to prevent
socialist forces from interfering with the delicate process of transition from
colonialism to neo-colonialism, and more particularly, to prevent the linkage of
Soviet power and local insurgency. Paradoxically, Atlantic integration therefore
represented a process of redistribution of spheres-of-influence at the expense
of Western Europe, facilitated by American control of the international monetary
system and its virtual monopoly, on the capitalist side, of the means of nuclear
destruction.
In this process of confrontation and
redistribution, Atlantic unity was cemented by the support the American
offensives could draw upon in Western Europe. As indicated above, the
traditional trans- Atlantic ties of capital were augmented after 1917 by the
attraction of European social democracy towards a Wilsonian universalism which
seemed to crystallize Kautsky's projections of a peaceful, ultimate stage of
capitalist development.
Along these two principal vectors - European liberalism and reformist socialism -
the process of
the transformation of Western European class relations into a corporate-liberal
mould was accelerated in the periods of an offensive US
foreign policy.
However in the intermediate periods associated with Republican presidencies, the
corporate-liberal synthesis, deprived of a dynamic American stimulus, tended to
disintegrate back into the polarized ideologies of laissez-faire liberalism and
state monopolism. Until the ultimate crisis of Atlantic integration in the
1970s, this alternation of offensive and defensive moments in the coherence of
the corporate-liberal unification of capitalist class interests testified to the
existence of an 'over-determining' Atlantic constraint, related in the last
instance to the balance of power within the American ruling class itself as well
as to the share of productive capital in the overall profit-distribution
process.
From this perspective, the history of
Atlanticism, as both ideology and an actual process of class formation, must be
related to the three successive strategies of Atlantic unity which corresponded
to the different offensive periods of American capitalism. The first was
Roosevelt's concept of Atlantic Universalism, which derived its specific
Atlantic dimension from the European focus of World War Two and the key position
of the British Empire in the world America wanted to expand into. The second
version of Atlantic unity was the Atlantic Union idea which surfaced at
the time of the Marshall Plan and combined a status-quo approach to control of
the periphery with a high-pitched Cold War unity against the Soviet Union. The
third Atlanticist strategy was the Atlantic Partnership scheme
promulgated by President Kennedy in an attempt to restore unity of purpose to an
Atlantic world in which the establishment of a restrictive EEC demonstrated the
degree to which Western European capital had emancipated itself from American
tutelage and was intent on carving out a sphere-of-interest of its own.
Liberalization and state intervention, the two
pillars of corporate liberalism, developed hand-in-hand in the period of
Atlantic integration, their relative emphasis deriving from the stubbornness of
either the original liberalism (as manifested, for instance, in the pre-Suez
political economy of Britain) or of state monopolism (as in the case of
Gaullism). The American offensives were instrumental in setting free the forces
for this transformation, and in activating the fractions of the bourgeoisie
involved in its evolution. The short-term cyclical developments, notably in the
profit-distribution process, which will allow US to explain the modalities of
actual class formation and politics in the central period under review, however,
should not obscure the fact that as a whole, the era of Atlantic integration was
characterized by a (Fordist) class compromise between capital and labour on the
basis of a 'Keynesian' sub-ordination of petty money interests to overall levels
of productive investment, and a profit-distribution structure skewed towards
productive capital. The New Deal in this respect, too, marked the beginning of
an era and set the standard for Europe.
In the course of the 1960s accumulation conditions in the
Atlantic area were more or less equalized, blocking the trans-Atlantic escape
routes for American productive capital by eliminating the gap between US and
European production conditions. As part of the same development, the profit
share of bank capital climbed drastically in all countries involved, and rentier incomes revived as
well. By the
time Richard Nixon cut the dollar from gold in August, 1971 and thus set free an
exponential growth of the mass of international liquidity, banks in practically
all countries in the area had already been liberated from the Keynesian shackles
imposed on them in the 1930s, or were soon to do so. The unimpeded international
circulation of capital which had been the aim of the architects
of Atlantic integration was finally realized - at the price of the system itself. Thrown into the rapidly widening
channels of international credit, the mass of savings centralized by Atlantic
bank capital served to facilitate the transfer of key segments of the productive
apparatus of the North Atlantic heartland to new zones of implantation in the
periphery.
This wave of internationalization, which widened
the scope of the present crisis, also destroyed the very structure of Atlantic
integration. By breaking the territorial coincidence of mass production and mass
consumption, it undermined the capital-labour compromise and the complementarity
of circulation relations; by allowing untrammeled competition in the search for
new outlets for capital, and in the mobilization of peripheral elites, it
destroyed the fundamental unity of purpose which had hitherto constituted the
cornerstone of the hegemonial strategy of the Atlantic bourgeoisie.