The Dialectics of Globalization

Book excerpt: Combining bold theortical analysis and careful empirical investigation Harris provides a critical framework to understand the political and economic underpinnings of globalization. In an unique historical approach the book examines how the revolution in information technologies and the break-up of the Soviet Union intertwined to present new global opportunities to reorganize capitalism as a unified world system headed by an emerging transnational capitalist class. The book challenges the common view that nation states still define international relations, with the United States as hegemonic leader of the world system. Instead Harris offers a more complex analysis of world affairs that sees the current period as one of transition between nationally based industrial capitalism and a global system based on revolutionary methods of production and new class relationships. He argues this conflict appears in every country as national economies realigned to fit new patterns of world accumulation creating a host of political tensions within and between nations. This analysis is detailed in a distinctive interpretation of the US military/industrial complex, as well as the contemporary class struggles in Germany and the emerging powers of China, India and Brazil. The book concludes by investigating alternative trends which are currently challenging the inequalities of global capitalism, unfolding a fresh approach to the relationship between the state, market and civil society.