by
Jacobin
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The big question is whether this nationalist political right represents a turn away from transnational capital accumulation. These forces sometimes express themselves as protectors of domestic manufacturing jobs. But I don’t think that’s their main thrust. Their main thrust is to define the nation again in xenophobic terms, which also combines with protection of old cultural values that would restore hierarchies of race, gender, and sexual orientation.
in response to the interviewer's comment that Trump's economic agenda is just "neoliberalism with a white nationalist face"
[...] it’s worth remembering that fascist regimes were capitalist. There is a tendency among analysts to think of capitalist regimes as tending to be free-market, but the type of state-led capitalism that Hitler introduced was very much capitalist. [...] we might see authoritarian state-led, but blatantly capitalist, infrastructure programs and policies.
Yet both of them played the nationalist card, and it shows the extent to which the nation-state has remained integral to the global accumulation projects of so many capitalists. These guys understand that for accumulation to continue on a global scale, you need to legitimate it by attaching it to a xenophobic nationalism of some kind. They’re trying to ride this tiger of nationalistic ideology that allows global accumulation to continue. That may be at the expense of the Ukrainian or the
Estonian nationalists, and for sure at the expense of Mexican immigrants, let alone refugees of every sort.
on the similarities between Trump and Nigel Farage
You simply couldn't have global production with out the role that finance plays just in this respect, and I'm not even getting into the role that finance plays in terms of venture capital, which was very important in terms of the development of information and technology revolution we just lived through; or the role it plays in terms of facilitating investment. You could do the same for the kind of role that finance plays in terms of making indebted consumers into viable consumers. [....] you can go even further to look at the role that finance plays via channeling workers' savings into pension funds and the role those pension funds play in investing in stock markets, investing in derivatives, and so on, which has to be traced through how that links to production.
[...] Has globalization become a euphemism for imperialism or are these distinct phenomena?
LP: I think one should try to retain these terms in somewhat of a separate way. I don’t think that we should transfer all the meaning that the word capitalism or global capitalism or even globalization has to the term imperialism. I think imperialism is very much a state thing. It is associated with the stage of capitalism we’re in, and its global nature, but it’s not quite the same thing.
I think globalization or global capitalism is about some of the things that Doug referred to at the beginning, this massive increase in the proportion of world gross national product that is traded internationally—the enormous flow of capital, including foreign direct investment, both of which entailed therefore the need for the flow of money for financial capital to grease the wheels of trade and foreign direct investments and of course on the basis of that, one gets a whole lot of financial capital feeding on itself. Not all of which is speculation. Some of it is risk management and so on. So you get this enormous body of financial capital at a global level, always centered primarily on Wall Street, to some extent, and the City of London. And a lot of the surplus of what is produced in the world ends up back in those places where it’s reallocated, even if it’s produced in China or wherever.
So I think globalization is a real thing and I think it’s also associated to some extent with this fourth industrial or technological revolution we’re living through—the digital revolution or the computer revolution. I don’t think it’s caused by it but it’s an element in it that is part of this process of globalization. And a lot of people point to that calling it things, like Manuel Castells does, the “network society” and so on, which may be going too far, but it’s an important element in it.