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The Class Nature of Globalization in the Age of Imperialism

Berch Berberoglu Crit Sociol 2009 35: 785 DOI: 10.1177/0896920509343068 The online version of this article can be found at: http://crs.sagepub.com/content/35/6/785

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Critical Sociology 35(6) 785-800

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The Class Nature of Globalization in the Age of Imperialism

Berch Berberoglu
University of Nevada, Reno, USA

Abstract This article examines the relationship between globalization and imperialism, the dynamics, contradictions, and crisis of global capitalism, and its political-military arm the imperial state, the developing and maturing class struggle, and the prospects for social change and transformation of global capitalism. It examines these within the context of the globalization of capital in the 20th century and draws out the political implications of this process for the future course of capitalist development on a world scale. The article drives home the point that contemporary neoliberal globalization is in fact an advanced stage of capitalist imperialism, and that the contradictions of 21st century globalization are thus a projection of the contradictions of capitalism on a global scale, with all its inherent exploitative characteristics and conflicts that will lead to the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society. Keywords class struggle, crisis, globalization, imperialism, social transformation

Introduction
There has been a proliferation of literature on globalization and the political economy of global capitalism over the course of the past two decades. Few of these works, however, have attempted to link this process to imperialism or the expansive, predatory practices of advanced capitalism operating on a global scale. Fewer still have focused on the exploitative nature of this process and its destructive course of development that necessitates its transformation. And fewer yet have identified the working class as the leading agent of change and transformation of global capitalism as we move forward in the 21st century. My recent book, Globalization and Change: The Transformation of Global Capitalism, published in 2005, attempted to fill this gap in globalization studies by highlighting the nature, dynamics, and contradictions of neoliberal globalization as the highest stage
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of capitalist imperialism, and sought to convey the underlying fault lines of this process worldwide in order to assist those who are struggling to change it (Berberoglu, 2005). It thus attempted to provide an analysis and a road map to trace global capitalisms course of development and to understand the political work that is necessary to bring about its transformation. Acknowledging James Petrass immense influence on my thinking about neoliberal globalization, class struggle, and revolution in the age of capitalist imperialism, and dedicating this book to him, I wrote in its Preface:
I would especially like to thank James Petras for his inspiring work on imperialism, class struggle, and revolution, as well as his keen understanding of the class nature of the globalization process and its contradictions, which he has conveyed in many of his books over the years, especially in such pioneering work as his Critical Perspectives on Imperialism and Social Class in the Third World, as well as Class, State, and Power in the Third World, [1981] and his path-breaking recent work on globalization, with Henry Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the Twentieth Century, published in 2001. For his tireless lifelong dedication to the struggle against imperialism and global capitalism that has spanned a successful academic career for more than three decades, one that is being emulated by a new generation of revolutionary intellectuals who are carrying on the struggle for a just world, this book is dedicated to my mentor, teacher and friend James Petras. (Berberoglu, 2005: x)

As a revolutionary intellectual true to his principles, James Petras has succeeded in moving the discussion and debate over globalization along class lines, and doing so with a keen understanding of the dynamics and contradictions of capitalism on a world scale and its development into capitalist imperialism through the so-called neoliberal globalization process (Petras, 1998, 2007; Petras and Veltmeyer, 2003, 2007). Globalization and Change: The Transformation of Global Capitalism was the third in a series of a multi-year, multi-level project that I launched a few years ago with the publication in 2002 of a book that I edited titled Labor and Capital in the Age of Globalization, which presented a series of case studies on the labor process and labor-capital relations at the point of production under advanced, global capitalism (Berberoglu, 2002). Following this, I published in 2003 a second book that I wrote, titled Globalization of Capital and the Nation-State: Imperialism, Class Struggle, and the State in the Age of Global Capitalism, to expose the nature and contradictions of neoliberal globalization, tracing the evolution of capitalism and the capitalist state through its various stages leading to the globalization of capital and capitalist imperialism that the transnational corporations and the imperial state came to represent in this latest and highest stage of capitalist development at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries (Berberoglu, 2003). Culminating as the third book in the series, Globalization and Change complemented the previous two volumes by moving from an analysis of capitalism as a system of production to its class essence and political character in the form of the capitalist state, to its global manifestations through imperialist expansion and domination under the rule of

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the transnationals and the imperial state, and to the class struggles that are the outcome of this process and are the basis of the struggle against capitalist globalization and transformation of the global capitalist system (Berberoglu, 2005). Neoliberal globalization, which some have argued represents a qualitative change in the development of capitalism, has been effectively shown by Petras and his colleagues, in particular Henry Veltmeyer, as a continuation of the process of transnational capitalist expansion and domination of rival and subordinate states for purposes of plunder based on the exploitation and oppression of the working class and other classes under the dictates of capital and the capitalist state on a global scale (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2001, 2003, 2007). It is within the framework of this understanding of class relations across the world that Petras has made a major and lasting contribution to the analysis of the global political economy, its contradictions and sources of its eventual transformation. In this essay, I examine the relationship between globalization and imperialism, the dynamics, contradictions, and crisis of global capitalism, and its political-military arm the imperial state, the developing and maturing class struggle, and the prospects for social change and transformation of global capitalism. I examine these within the context of the globalization of capital in the 20th century and map out the political implications of this process for the future course of capitalist development on a world scale.

Globalization and Imperialism

Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism operating on a world scale, and neoliberal globalization is the highest stage of imperialism that has penetrated every corner of the world. Both are an outgrowth of 20th-century monopoly capitalism an inevitable consequence, or manifestation, of monopoly capital that now dominates the world capitalist political economy. Thus, the current wave of globalization is an extension of this process that operates at a more advanced and accelerated level. A central feature of this current phase of transnational capitalism, besides its speed and intensity, is the increased privatization of various spheres of the economy and society. Under the current wave of globalization, this has especially been the case in areas such as communications, information technology, education, and the cultural sphere, where privatization is becoming increasingly prevalent. The rate at which these changes have been taking place, and the vigor with which transnational capital has been exercising more power vis--vis the state, has led some to declare globalization a qualitatively new stage in the development of world capitalism (Ross and Trachte, 1990). However, I would argue, as does Petras (2008), that these quantitative, surface manifestations of contemporary capitalism, no matter how pervasive they are, do not change the fundamental nature of capitalism and capitalist relations, nor the nature of the capitalist/imperialist state and the class contradictions generated by these relations, which are inherent characteristics of the system itself. They cannot change the nature of capitalism in any qualitative sense to warrant globalization a distinct status that these critics have come to assign as something fundamentally

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different than what Marxist political economists have always argued to be the normal operation and evolution of global capitalism in the age of imperialism (Beams, 1998; Foster, 2002; Harvey, 2003; Petras, 2008; Szymanski, 1981; Warren, 1980). Today, in the early 21st century, the dominant institution that has facilitated global capitalist expansion on behalf of the current center of world imperialism since the postWorld War II period the United States of America is the transnational corporation. As other capitalist rivals from Europe and the Pacific Basin have recently begun to emerge on the world scene as serious contenders for global economic power, they too have developed and unleashed their own transnational corporate and financial institutions to carve out greater profits, accumulate greater wealth, and thereby dominate the global economy. The transnational corporations and banks, based in the leading centers of world capitalism, have thus become the chief instruments of global capitalist expansion and capital accumulation (Mittelman and Othman, 2002; Petras and Veltmeyer, 2007; Waters, 1995; see also Barnet and Cavenagh, 1994). It is, therefore, in the export of capital and its expanded reproduction abroad to accumulate greater wealth for the capitalist classes of the advanced capitalist countries that one can find the motive force of imperialism and neoliberal globalization today. Neoliberal globalization, much as during earlier stages of capitalism, is driven by the logic of profit for the private accumulation of capital based on the exploitation of labor throughout the world. It is, in essence, the highest and most pervasive phase of transnational capitalism operating on a world scale. It is the most widespread and penetrating manifestation of modern capitalist imperialism in the age of the internet a development that signifies not only the most thorough economic domination of the world by the biggest capitalist monopolies, but also increasingly direct military intervention by the chief imperialist state to secure the global economic position of its own corporations. The relationship between the owners of the transnational corporations the monopoly capitalist class and the imperialist state and the role and functions of this state, including the use of military force to advance the interests of the monopoly capitalist class, thus reveals the class nature of the imperialist state and the class logic of imperialism and capitalist globalization (Berberoglu, 1987, 2003, 2005; Szymanski, 1981; Warren, 1980). But this logic is more pervasive and is based on a more fundamental class relation between labor and capital that now operates on a global level that is, a relation based on exploitation. Thus, in the age of neoliberal globalization (i.e. in the epoch of capitalist imperialism), social classes and class struggles are a product of the logic of the global capitalist system based on the exploitation of labor worldwide (Berberoglu, 1987, 1994, 2003, 2009; Gerstein, 1977; Petras, 1978). Capitalist expansion on a world scale at this stage of the globalization of capital and capitalist production has brought with it the globalization of the production process and the exploitation of wage-labor on a world scale. With the intensified exploitation of the working class at super-low wages in repressive neocolonial societies throughout the Third World, the transnational corporations of the leading capitalist states have come to amass great fortunes that they have used to build up a global empire through the powers of the imperial state, which has not hesitated to use its military power to protect and advance

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the interests of capital in every corner of the globe. It is in this context that we see the coalescence of the interests of the global economy and empire as manifested in control of cheap labor, new markets, and vital sources of raw materials, such as oil, and the intervention of the imperial state to protect these when their continued supply to the imperial center are threatened (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2001). Imperialism has been an enormous source of profit and wealth for the capitalist class of the advanced capitalist countries, who, through the mechanisms of the transnational monopolies and the imperial state, have accumulated great fortunes from the exploitation of labor on a world scale. Given the uneven development of capitalism, however, some countries have grown more rapidly than others, while some previously less developed countries have emerged as new contenders in the global economy. The rivalry between the capitalist classes of the old and newly emergent capitalist states has turned into rivalry among the leading countries within the world capitalist system. This has led to intense competition and conflict between the rising capitalist powers and the declining imperial centers on a world scale, hence leading to shifts in centers of global economic and political power. Focusing on the US experience, it is clear that in the post-World War II period the United States of America emerged as the dominant power in the capitalist world. In subsequent decades, US-controlled transnational production reached a decisive stage, necessitating the restructuring of the international division of labor, as the export of productive capital brought about a shift in the nature and location of production: the expansion of manufacturing industry on an unprecedented scale into previously precapitalist, peripheral areas of the global capitalist economy. This marked a turning point in the rise of the US economy and the emergence of the United States of America as the leading capitalist/imperialist power in the world (Berberoglu, 2003). Although the large-scale US postwar global expansion ushered in a period of unquestioned US supremacy over the world economy and polity during the 1950s and 1960s, the economic strength of US capital over foreign markets through investment, production, and trade during the 1970s took on a new significance one resulting from the restructuring of the international division of labor. US transnational capital, in line with its transfer of large segments of the production process to the periphery, poured massive amounts of capital into select areas of the Third World, as well as into its traditional bases of foreign investment Canada and Western Europe and became the leading center of world capitalism in a new way (that is, by becoming the dominant force in the worldwide production process). Thus, not only did overall US direct investment expand immensely during this period, but also a shift in the form of investment in favor of manufacturing came to constitute the new basis of changes in the international division of labor with great impact on the national economies of both the periphery and the center states, including the United States of America. This process further fueled the contradictions and conflicts inherent in capitalist production and class relations on a global scale, including inter-imperialist rivalry between the chief capitalist states on the one hand and the exploitation of labor on a global scale on the other, with all the consequences associated with this process a process that has led to the crisis of global capitalism.

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Figure 1 The origins and development of global capitalism and the capitalist state through its various stages

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Imperialism, the State, and the Crisis of Global Capitalism

The global expansion of capital over the past 100 years has had varied effects on the economy, state, and class relations on a world scale. Figure 1 outlines the origins and development of capitalism and the capitalist state through its various stages from its early beginnings to the modern global age. It shows that, as capitalism developed from its competitive to monopoly stage, it underwent a major transformation that elevated it from the national to the global level. This was accompanied by a worldwide process of economic expansion as the export of capital replaced the export of goods that was characteristic of the earlier stage of capitalist development. Monopoly rule over the global economy, facilitated by the advanced capitalist state, set the stage for imperialism through the internationalization of capital and capitalist relations across the world, and led to the consolidation of capitals grip over the world economy. This provided the political framework for the direct role of the advanced capitalist state in safeguarding the interests of capital and the capitalist class around the world a role facilitated by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization global institutions designed to advance the worldwide operations of the transnational corporations as the instruments of global capitalism (Kloby, 2003; Payer, 1974, 1982). The capitalist state, now controlled by the monopoly fraction of the capitalist class, thus came to serve the long-term interests of global capital and the global capitalist system through its political and military apparatus in service of the transnationals and the transnational capitalist class (Sklair, 2001). Looking at neoliberal globalization in class terms, we see that a complex web of class relations has developed at the global level that is both complementary and contradictory. Thus while the capitalist classes of the dominant imperialist states cooperate in their collective exploitation of labor and plunder of resources at the global level, the underlying contradictions of global competition and conflict among these classes lead at the same time to inter-imperialist rivalries and confrontation around the world (Hart, 1992). Just as each imperialist power exploits its own as well as its rivals working classes for global supremacy, so too one observes the potential unity of the working classes of these rival imperialist states as workers come together in forging a protracted struggle against the entire global capitalist system. It is here that the capitalist/imperialist state comes to play a critical role in facilitating the exploitation of global labor by transnational capital, but in doing so also risks its demise through the unfolding contradictions of this very same process that it is increasingly unable to control and regulate (Berberoglu, 2003, 2005). The problems that the imperial state has come to tackle, at both the global and national levels, are such that it is no longer able to manage its affairs with any degree of certainty. At the global level, the imperial state has been unable to deal with the consequences of ever-growing superexploitation of labor in Third World sweatshops that has led to immense poverty and inequality worldwide; nor has it been able to take measures to reverse the depletion of resources, environmental pollution and other health hazards, a growing national debt tying many countries to the World Bank, the International

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Monetary Fund, and other global financial institutions, and a growing militarization of society through the institution of brutal military and civilian dictatorships that violate basic human rights. The domination and control of Third World countries for transnational profits through the instrumentality of the imperial state has at the same time created various forms of dependence on the center that has become a defining characteristic of neoliberal globalization and imperialism today (Amaladoss, 1999; Sklair, 2002). Domestically, the globalization of capital and imperialist expansion has caused immense dislocations in the national economies of imperialist states. Expansion of manufacturing industry abroad has meant a decline in local industry, as plant closings in the United States of America and other advanced capitalist countries have worsened the unemployment situation. The massive expansion of capital abroad has resulted in hundreds of factory shutdowns with millions of workers losing their jobs, hence the surge in unemployment in the USA and other imperialist states (Phillips, 1998; Wagner, 2000). This has led to a decline in wages of workers in the advanced capitalist centers, as low wages abroad have played a competitive role in keeping wages down in the imperialist heartlands. The drop in incomes among a growing section of the working class has thus lowered the standard of living in general and led to a further polarization between labor and capital (Berberoglu, 1992, 2002). The dialectics of global capitalist expansion, which has caused so much exploitation, oppression, and misery for the peoples of the world, both in the Third World and in the imperialist countries themselves, has in turn created the conditions for its own destruction. Economically, it has afflicted the system with recessions, depressions, and an associated realization crisis; politically, it has set into motion an imperial interventionist state that through its presence in every corner of the world has incurred an enormous military expenditure to maintain an empire, while gaining the resentment of millions of people across the globe who are engaged in active struggle against it.1 The imperial state, acting as the repressive arm of global capital and extending its rule across vast territories, has dwarfed the militaristic adventures of past empires many times over. Moreover, through its political and military supremacy, it has come to exert its control over many countries and facilitate the exploitation of labor on a world scale. As a result, it has reinforced the domination of capital over labor and its rule on behalf of capital. This, in turn, has greatly politicized the struggle between labor and capital and called for the recognition of the importance of political organization that many find necessary to effect change in order to transform the capitalist-imperialist system. The global domination of capital and the advanced capitalist/imperial state during the 20th century did not proceed without a fight, as a protracted struggle of the working class against capital and the capitalist state unfolded throughout this period of capitalist globalization. The labor movement, the anti-imperialist national liberation movements, and the civil rights, womens, student, environmental, anti-war, and peace movements all contributed to the development of the emerging anti-globalization movement in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These and related contradictions of late-20th-century capitalist globalization led to the crisis of the imperial state and the entire globalization

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project which increasingly came under attack by the mass movements of the global era that came to challenge the rule of capital and the capitalist state throughout the world (Brecher et al., 2000).

The Crisis of the Imperial State on a Global Scale

The crisis of the imperial state at the global level is a manifestation of the contradictions of the global economy, which in the early 21st century has reached a critical stage in its development. The massive flow of US transnational investment throughout the world, especially in Western Europe, Japan, and other advanced capitalist regions, has led to the post-World War II re-emergence of inter-imperialist rivalry among the major capitalist powers, while fostering alternate cycles of cooperation and conflict in the scramble for the peripheral regions of the global capitalist system Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (Falk, 1999; Halliday, 2001; Hart, 1992). With the integration of the economies of Western Europe into the European Union (EU), the postwar emergence of Japan as a powerful economic force, and the more recent rise of China to global prominence, the position of the United States of America has declined relative to both its own postwar supremacy in the 1940s and 1950s and to other advanced capitalist economies since that time. Despite the fact that US capital continues to control the biggest share of overseas markets and accounts for the largest volume of international investments, its hold on the global economy has recently begun to slip in a manner similar to Britains in the early 20th century. This has, in turn, led the US state to take a more aggressive role in foreign policy to protect US transnational interests abroad. Its massive deployment in the Middle East in the early 1990s, which led to the Persian Gulf War of 1991, and most recently its intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 and invasion of Iraq in 2003, have resulted in great military expenditures and translated into an enormous burden on the working people of the United States of America, who have come to shoulder the colossal cost of maintaining a global empire whose vast military machine encompasses the world (Beams, 1998). In the current phase of the crisis of the US imperial state, the problems it faces are of such magnitude that they threaten the very existence of the global capitalist system. Internal economic and budgetary problems have been compounded by ever-growing military spending propped up by armed intervention in the Third World, while a declining economic base at home manifested in the housing and banking crisis, and a recessionary economy is further complicated by the global rivalry between the major capitalist powers that is not always restricted to the economic field, but has political (and even military) implications that are global in magnitude (Beams, 1998; Panitch and Leys, 2003). The growing prospects of inter-imperialist rivalry between the major capitalist powers, backed up by their states, are effecting changes in their relations that render the global political economy an increasingly unstable character. Competition between the United States of America, Japan, and European imperial states representing the interests of their own respective capitalist classes are leading them on a collision course for world

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supremacy, manifested in struggles for markets, raw materials, and spheres of influence in geopolitical as well as economic terms, which may in fact lead to a new balance of forces, and consequently alliances that will have serious political implications in global power politics. As the continuing economic ascendance of the major capitalist rivals of the United States of America take their prominent position in the global economy, pressures will build toward the politicization and militarization of these states from within, where the leading class forces bent on dominating the world economy will press forward with the necessary political and military corollary of their growing economic power in the global capitalist system (Falk, 1999; Hart, 1992). These developments in global economic and geopolitical shifts in the balance of forces among the major capitalist powers will bring to the fore new and yet untested international alliances for world supremacy and domination in the post-Cold War era. Such alliances will bring key powers like Russia and China into play in a new and complicated relationship that holds the key for the success or failure of the new rising imperial centers that will emerge as the decisive forces in the global economic, political, and military equation in the early 21st century (Halliday, 2001). The contradictions and conflicts embedded in relations between the rival states of the major capitalist powers will again surface as an important component of international relations in the years ahead. And these are part and parcel of the restructuring of the international division of labor and the transfer of production to overseas territories in line with the globalization of capital on a worldwide basis a process that has serious consequences for the economies of both the advanced capitalist and less developed capitalist countries. Economic decline in the imperial centers (manifested in plant closings, unemployment, and recession) and superexploitation of workers in the Third World (maintained by repressive regimes) yield the same combined result that has a singular global logic: the accumulation of transnational profits for the capitalist class of the advanced capitalist states above all, that of the United States of America, the current center of global capitalism. It is in this context of the changes that are taking place on a world scale that the imperial state is beginning to confront the current crisis of global capitalism.

Globalization, Class Struggle, and Social Transformation

With the spread of capitalism and capitalist class relations around the world, capital has effected transformations in the class structure of societies with which it has come into contact. As a result, the class contradictions of global capitalism have become the primary source of class conflict and class struggle throughout the world (Berberoglu, 2009). The development of capitalism over the past 100 years formed and transformed capitalist society on a global scale. This transformation came about through the restructuring of the international division of labor prompted by the export of capital and transfer of production to cheap labor areas abroad. This, in turn, led to the intensification of the exploitation of labor through expanded production and reproduction of surplus

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value and profits by further accumulation of capital and the reproduction of capitalist relations of production on a world scale. A major consequence of this process is the increased polarization of wealth and income between labor and capital at the national and global levels, and growth in numbers of the poor and marginalized segments of the population throughout the world. These and other related contradictions of global capitalism define the parameters of neoliberal capitalist globalization and provide us the framework of discussion and debate on the nature and dynamics of globalization in the world today (Veltmeyer, 2008). The widening gap between the accumulated wealth of the capitalist class and the declining incomes of workers has sharpened the class struggle in a new political direction, which has brought the advanced capitalist state to the center stage of the conflict between labor and capital and revealed its ties to the monopolies. This has undermined the legitimacy of the capitalist state, such that the struggles of the working class and the masses in general are becoming directed not merely against capital, but against the state itself (Beams, 1998). This transformation of the workers struggle from the economic to the political sphere is bound to set the stage for protracted struggles in the period ahead struggles that would facilitate the development of a much more politicized international labor movement. The globalization of capital is thus bound to accelerate the politicization of the working class and lead to the building of a solid foundation for international solidarity of workers on a world scale that is directed against global capitalism and the advanced capitalist state on a world scale (Bina and Davis, 2002; Howard, 2005; Stevis and Boswell, 2008). The relationship between the owners of the transnational corporations the global capitalist class and the imperial state, and the role and functions of this state, including the use of military force to advance the interests of the capitalist class, thus reveals the class nature of the imperial state and the class logic of neoliberal globalization today (Berberoglu, 1987, 2001, 2009; Szymanski, 1981; Warren, 1980). But this logic is more pervasive and is based on a more fundamental class relation between labor and capital that now operates on a global level (that is, a relation based on exploitation). Thus, in the age of capitalist globalization, social classes and class struggles are a product of the logic of the global capitalist system based on the exploitation of labor worldwide (Berberoglu, 1994; Petras, 1978). Capitalist expansion on a world scale at this stage of the globalization of capital and capitalist production has brought with it the globalization of the production process and the exploitation of wage-labor on a world scale. With the intensified exploitation of the working class at super-low wages in repressive neocolonial societies throughout the world, the transnational corporations of the leading capitalist countries have come to amass great fortunes that they have used to build up a global empire through the powers of the imperial state, which has not hesitated to use its military force to protect and advance the interests of capital in every corner of the globe. It is in this context that we see the coalescence of the interests of the global economy and empire as manifested in control of cheap labor, new markets, and vital sources of raw materials, such as oil, and

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the intervention of the capitalist state to protect these when their continued supply to the imperial center are threatened. Lenin, in his book Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, pointed out that capitalism in its highest and most mature monopoly stage has spread to every corner of the world and thus has planted the seeds of its own contradictions everywhere (Lenin, 1975 [1917]). It is in this context of the developing worldwide contradictions of advanced, monopoly capitalism that Lenin pointed out, [I]mperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat ... on a worldwide scale (Lenin, 1975 [1917]: 640). In considering the emerging class struggles throughout the globe, the question that one now confronts is thus a political one. Given what we know of neoliberal globalization and its class contradictions on a world scale, how will the peoples movements respond to it politically worldwide? What strategy and tactics will be adopted to confront this colossal force? It is important to think about these questions concretely, in a practical way one that involves careful analysis and organized political action. Understanding the necessity of mobilizing labor and the importance of political leadership in this struggle, radical labor organizations have in fact taken steps emphasizing the importance for the working class to mobilize its ranks and take united action to wage battle against capitalist globalization (Munck, 2002; Stevis and Boswell, 2008; Waterman, 1998). Strikes, demonstrations, and mass protests initiated by workers and other popular forces have become frequent in a growing number of countries controlled by the transnationals in recent years. Working people are rising up against the local ruling classes, the state, and the transnational monopolies that have together effected the super-exploitation of labor for decades. Various forms of struggle are now under way in many countries under the grip of transnational capital (Berberoglu, 2009; Houtart and Polet, 2001; Polet, 2007; Stevis and Boswell, 2008). The logic of transnational capitalist expansion on a global scale is such that it leads to the emergence and development of forces that are in conflict with this expansion. The working class has been in the forefront of these forces. Armed insurrection, civil war, and revolutionary upheavals are all a response to the repression imposed on working people by global capitalism and its client states throughout the world. Together, these struggles have been effective in frustrating the efforts of global capital to expand and dominate the world, while at the same time building the basis of an international working class movement that finally overcomes national, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries that artificially separate the workers in their fight against global capitalism. In this sense, labor internationalism (or the political alliance of workers across national boundaries in their struggle against global capitalism) is increasingly being seen as a political weapon that would serve as a unifying force in labors frontal attack on capital in the early 21st century (Beams, 1998; Fishman, et al. 2005).2 The solidarity achieved through this process has helped expand the strength of the international working class and increased its determination to defeat all vestiges of global capitalism throughout the world, and build a new egalitarian social order that advances the interests of working people and ultimately of all humanity.

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Global capitalism today represents a dual, contradictory development whose dialectical resolution will be an outcome of its very nature a product of its growth and expansion across time and space within the confines of a structure that promotes its own destruction and demise. However, while the process itself is a self-destructing one, it is important to understand that the nature of the class struggle that these contradictions generate is such that the critical factor that tips the balance of class forces in favor of the working class to win state power is political organization, the building of class alliances among the oppressed and exploited classes, the development of strong and theoretically well-informed revolutionary leadership that is organically linked to the working class, and a clear understanding of the forces at work in the class struggle, including especially the role of the state and its military and police apparatus the focal point of the struggle for state power (Berberoglu, 2001, 2007; Knapp and Spector, 1991; Stevis and Boswell, 2008; Szymanski, 1978). The success of the working class and its revolutionary leadership in confronting the power of the capitalist state thus becomes the critical element ensuring that, once captured, the state can become an instrument that the workers can use to establish their rule and in the process transform society and the state itself to promote labors interests in line with its vision for a new society free of exploitation and oppression, one based on the rule of the working class and the laboring masses in general.

Conclusion
In this article, I have outlined the class contradictions of neoliberal globalization/ imperialism, the crisis of the global economy and the imperial state, the emergent forms of class struggle, and the prospects for the transformation of global capitalism in the 21st century. I have discussed these within the context of the globalization of capital in the 20th century and have mapped out the political implications of this process for the future course of development and transformation of capitalism on a global scale. Our understanding of the necessity for the transformation of global capitalism, which is political in nature, demands a clear and concise analysis of its contradictions in late 20th- and early 21st-century form, so that this knowledge can be put to use to facilitate the class struggle in a revolutionary direction. In this context, one will want to know not only the extent and depth of global capitalist expansion, but also its base of support, its linkage to the major institutions of capitalist society (above all the state, but also other religious, cultural, and social institutions), the extent of its ideological hegemony and control over mass consciousness, and other aspects of social, economic, political, and ideological domination. Moreover and this is the most important point one must study its weaknesses, its problem areas, its vulnerabilities, its weak links, and the various dimensions of its crisis especially those that affect its continued reproduction and survival. Armed with this knowledge, one would be better equipped to confront capital and the capitalist state in the struggle for the transformation of global capitalism in this century.

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Notes
1 While one consequence of imperialism and neoliberal globalization has been economic contraction and an associated class polarization, a more costly and dangerous outcome of this process has been increased militarization and intervention abroad, such that the defense of an expanding capitalist empire worldwide has come to require an increasing military presence and a permanent interventionist foreign policy to keep the world economy clear of obstructions that go against the interests of the transnational monopolies. However, such aggressive military posture has created (and continues to create) major problems for the imperialist state and is increasingly threatening its effectiveness and, in the long run, its very existence. 2 The necessity of the struggle against global capital in an organized political fashion has been emphasized by working class organizations, and this has led to several successful revolutions during the 20th century. Throughout this period, working class organizations have emphasized the centrality of international working class solidarity (or proletarian internationalism) for any worldwide effort to wage a successful battle against global capitalism.

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For correspondence: Department of Sociology (300), University of Nevada-Reno, Reno, NV89557, USA. Email: [email protected]

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