Contenu du sommaire : Une classe dominante mondiale ?

The World Ruling Class
Although widely present in the work of Marx and in Marxist writings, the concept of ruling class has never been fully clarified as to its meaning and implications. This essay thus seeks to point out some of the problems this concept entails, which have also emerged in the prolonged Marxist debate around it. After examining the way Marx and Engels depict the relation between the ruling class and the State, the main developments of the concept of ruling class in Marxist thought are analyzed. The article begins by a discussion of Ralph Miliband's perspective. It then examines the proposals for a transformation of the Marxist concept of ruling class advanced by Jacques Bidet, Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy. After a brief comparison between the Marxist theses and Michael Mann's theory of power, the article goes on to discuss the way in which the relation between ruling class and political institutions is transformed in the neo-liberalist era : the emergence of a global statuality, lacking in democratic legitimization, constitutes a fertile terrain for the coming to power of a transnational capitalist class, which controls political decisions in a much more direct way than in the traditional nation-state.

On the New Class: Capitalist, Transnational and Dominant?
To what extent have power relations changed in the age of globalization ? Contemporary Marxism offers various answers. One of the most innovative and persuasive perspectives is that suggested by Leslie Sklair, who recently theorized the dominance of a transnational capitalist class. After explaining Sklair's core theses, the article focuses on four questions raised by the English sociologist : (i) is there only one global class or are there multiple global classes ? ; (ii) can the current dominant class be considered to be really transnational, or is it merely “Atlantic” ? ; (iii) who are the members of the new capitalist class ? ; (iv) is the transnational capitalist class a ruling class or is it a dominant class ? Without examining the empirical research methods, the intention of the article is to outline the main available hermeneutical alternatives, while clarifying the strongest arguments in support of each of them and delineating their theoretical consequences. To this end, the various criticisms which neo- and post-Marxist interpreters have addressed to Sklair over the last fifteen years will be analyzed.

Time for a Paradigm Shift: The Rise of Transnational Capital and the Debate on the Global Ruling Class
It is time for a paradigm shift in our study of world capitalism and the global ruling class. The statecentrism informing much theorization and analysis of world politics, political economy, and class structure is less and less congruent with 21st century world developments. Global capitalism represents a new stage in the ongoing and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, characterized by the rise of transnational capital and a globally integrated production and financial system commanded by a transnational capitalist class, or TCC, that attempts to exercise its class power through transnational state apparatuses. The TCC, as the new global ruling class, has been attempting, albeit with limited success, to construct a global hegemonic bloc in which one group, the TCC, exercises leadership and imposes its project through the consent of those drawn into the bloc, while those from the majority who are not drawn into this hegemonic project, either through material rewards or ideological mechanisms, are contained or repressed. Global capitalism is in crisis. A popular revolt is spreading worldwide, thus posing many challenges. Transformative struggles must be informed by an accurate analysis of global capitalism and its ruling class.

States, Classes and Globalization: Beyond the Concept of a Global Ruling Class
This paper addresses the alleged contradiction between the international space of accumulation and the national space of states. In particular, it challenges the argument that the internationalization of production directly establishes a transnational capitalist class (TCC) as a coherent and self-conscious social force engaged in the formation of a putative transnational state (TNS). This contention rests on a set of mechanistic understandings of class formation and the role of the capitalist state. Against this, the emphasis here is on the ‘internationalization of the state' whereby nation states have, in an uneven and asymmetric way, come to take responsibility for promoting, underwriting and superintending a globalizing capitalism, both abroad and within their own domains. The political significance of this distinction is that the attempt to match the advanced internationalization of capital with a parallel internationalization of working class solidarity leads to a misguided internationalism. It mistakenly assumes that the weaknesses of working classes at a national level can be skipped over at an international level, and fails to properly grasp the continuing centrality, even under globalization, of the national-social formation.

The Transnational and the National in Capitalist Class Formation
Capital originated in between the political jurisdictions of the late Middle Ages and came of age in the English-speaking West. The British Isles and North America offered a liberal space which proved most congenial to the circulation of capital. By the late 17th century it occupied the high ground in the global political economy. Rival states, beginning with France, sought to match the advantage of the English-speaking West, by way of state-led development. Such contender states must confiscate and nationalize their societies, in order to mobilize resources for the contest with the Lockean heartland, thus exposing themselves to a passive revolution in which liberalism slowly undermines the power of the state class. A liberal state/society thus develops under the auspices of alternating fractions of capital, which must also build national compromises, as with labour in the post-war period, and with asset-owning middle classes in a conjuncture where a formerly globalizing production is replaced by money capital as the dominant force. Contemporary capitalist society is losing the ability to forge such compromises, as oligarchic capital resorts more and more to authoritarianism and war.

Upper Classes of all Countries unite under an Imperial Banner!
Class patterns (capitalists and managers) in contemporary managerial capitalism are analyzed in relation to financial globalization. At the center of the global network of ownership relationships (defined by the holding of corporate equity), one can locate a tightly intertwined set of financial institutions, overseen by the managers of these corporations and the managers sitting on the boards of transnational nonfinancial corporations. This network controls 40 percent of all transnational corporations worldwide and 94 percent of profits. It is still structured in geographical communities. This means that financial corporations still display national features : big capitalists still belong to their national communities and states are still strongly committed to the defense of the interest of their countries. While a globalization of class and states relationships is indeed underway, as it had been the case in the national unification processes in Europe (and elsewhere), it is being conducted under the leadership of hegemonic powers, such as the United States. However nothing implies that the current process will remain unipolar.

The Concept of Dominant Class, from the Nation-state to the World-State
As Gramsci put it, enforcing domination in capitalism requires not only means of coercion but also an ability to obtain social “consent”. Metastructural analysis pushes the idea even further. The object of social domination in capitalism is profit as abstract wealth, while the field on which “ruling” (vs. “dominating”) is exerted is the concrete space of use value. Thus the dominant class requires the articulation between, on the one hand, capital-power and, on the other, competency-power, whose relationship to the people as a whole is distinct. This pattern, formed within the context of the nationstate, is only very slowly emerging at the global scale. The key feature of the neoliberal moment, in which a world-state begins to penetrate the world-system, is domination without ruling.

About an unknown Tradition: Austro-marxism and Political economy
The Austro-Marxists, one of the most prolific and productive schools of Marxist thought in Europe between the 1890s and the 1940s, were not only pioneers in political theory, they also excelled in political economy. In this article, their major contributions to Marxist political economy – including Hilferding's famous Finance Capital – are presented in their historical intellectual context, that of prewar and postwar Austria and Europe. According to their credo, they made major advances in Marxist economic thought, in close contact with the major developments in philosophy and the social sciences of their time. Both in terms of the identification of some of the salient unresolved questions pertaining to Marx's critique of political economy and in tackling them, the Austromarxists, Otto Bauer, Karl Renner and others in particular, led and paved the way. Beyond that, the Austro-Marxists provided some of the most sophisticated examples of teaching Marx's critical political economy.

On Reactionary Neo-reformism
The age of reforms would appear to have taken over from the age of revolutions. However such a diagnosis of the present occludes the inversion of the progressive meaning of the term reform that has occurred. So-called “structural reforms” currently being imposed on societies are in fact reactionary counter-reforms, which go back on the revolutionary gains of two centuries of political and social reforms. After an examination of the current vein of reactionary neo-reformism, which draws on the Gramscian analysis of Italian fascism as a restoration-revolution, the article goes on to refute the claims of the neo-reformist project. It does so by way of a change in the paradigm at the heart of the project of revolutionary emancipation. The intention is to deconstruct the dichotomy between revolution and reform that was constructed by anti-revolutionary reformism in reaction to the French revolution, a dichotomy subsequently (and wrongly) taken up by a revolutionary anti-reformism. The intention is thus to defend the option of a revolutionary reformism which emerges from within the revolutionary movement.

Marx against Althusser in Misère de la philosophie

Challenging Louis Althusser's quest for scientificity in Marxism – focusing on Marx's epistemological break with Feuerbach's ‘humanistic' concept of alienation (1845) –, Fjled insists on the conceptual intertwining of Feuerbach's category of alienation with Adam Smith's notion of the division of labor in Marx's early thought. In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), Fjled pinpoints a rejection of this conceptual couple and, more generally, of any logic of historic movement as the pillar of the critique of capitalism, in order to explore democratic tendencies in Marx's œuvre. The aim is thus to highlight the conceptual and political consequences of this rejection, as opposed to the foundations of scientificity inherited from the discourse of political economy.

Marxism and Sociology: the Points of Encounter
In this interview Frédéric Lebaron reflects on his relation to Marx and to Marxist traditions, in particular regarding the governing orientation of his research project. The interview goes on to examine the relations and confrontations which exist between various Marxisms and sociological approaches, with specific reference to the question of the “Marxo-Weberian” paradigm. A number of recent works in the field of sociology are also discussed, notably those by Julian Mischi on French communism. More generally, F. Lebaron reappraises the question of the possible meeting-points between various readings of Marx and certain approaches drawing on the project of Pierre Bourdieu, despite the divergence that exists between them on certain essential points, in terms of their epistemological presuppositions. F. Lebaron therefore highlights the convergence between traditions which do indeed differ, but whose complementarity appears to him fruitful.