A retrospective view of the development of my research program

Much of social inquiry has demarcated and compartmentalized its field according to divisions between state/society, politics/economy, domestic/international, global/local, and so on. While the conceptual frameworks generated by these separations have illuminated important aspects of social life, they have also tended to obscure larger webs of social relations and processes in which each of these particular aspects might be understood to be dynamically embedded. Insofar as envisioning and producing future possible worlds involves these relations and processes, this limitation has both analytical and political implications. In my work I have consistently sought to draw connections between these apparently discrete aspects of social life and fields of inquiry.

From the beginning of my career I have focused upon the intersection of International Political Economy (IPE) and International Relations (IR), seeking to show that states and systems of interstate power relations are embedded in and (to a significant degree) produced through systems of relations which encompass (among other things) the social organization of production. I have argued that this latter is itself structured according to relations of class (and, in my later work, by race and gender as well), and is an object of contestation among social classes, state managers, and other historically situated political agents. Thus politics is not confined to the formally public sphere of the state, but permeates the economic sphere as well: just as the state and interstate politics can profoundly shape economic and social life, so the politics of the economy can have enormous -- if not conventionally recognized -- implications for the historical form taken by the state and world orders constructed among states. My point here is not to reconstruct IR/IPE on the basis of an economistic reductionism in which all causality is seen as emanating from an already constituted, foundational economic sphere (a sort of universal independent variable); but rather to argue that politics and political struggle are essential aspects of the processes by which all social structures are (re)produced, and hence that the analytical separation of political from economic life (as well as domestic and international aspects of these) may represent a false dichotomy which obscures much of potential political importance.

In pursuing this agenda, I have drawn on the intellectual resources of a particular strand of historical materialism associated with the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci and his contemporary interpreters (especially Robert Cox, Craig Murphy and the neo-Gramscian school of international relations, and subsequently also Stuart Hall and the British school of critical cultural studies). I have found Gramsci to be invaluable because of his groundbreaking emphasis on the directly political character of ideological struggles in terms of which concretely situated social agents come to recognize themselves and understand their relations to the larger social world as well as alternative possible futures. 1

I have read Gramsci through the lenses of a "critical realist" philosophy which posits the internal relation of structure and agency within the process of (re)producing social reality – an open-ended materialist dialectic of real, effective social structures and active, interpretive social agents. On this view, structures (such as class) may create the conditions of possibility for particular forms of social identity and agency, but they are not self-actualizing. Structures cannot (re)produce themselves in abstraction from agency, nor is agency reducible to structural determination. Even though agents may be assigned particular powers to act in certain ways by virtue of their structural position, the actualization of these powers is contingent upon the complex interactions and interpretations of concretely situated historical agents. The reproduction of social powers, dominance relations, and the practices that sustain them is therefore always problematic, contestable. How, indeed whether, structures are (re)produced is determined by routine interactions and (more-or-less explicitly political) struggles among historically situated social agents.²  It is in the context of this view of structure and agency that Gramsci’s understanding of ideological struggle takes on such significance for my work. Accepting in broad outline Marx's analysis of the structure of capitalism, Gramsci was unwilling to embrace the more mechanical and economistic interpretations of Marx circulating in the international socialist movement. Progressive social change would not automatically follow in train behind economic developments, but must instead be produced by historically situated social agents whose actions are enabled and constrained by their social self-understandings. How, indeed whether, such change occurs depends upon struggles to delimit or expand the horizons of these social self-understandings.

My first major project, Producing Hegemony, dealt with the importance of Fordist modes of industrial organization for US global power in the 20^th century.³  I demonstrated the ways in which Fordism was itself the product of political struggles, central to which were alternative ideological constructions of "Americanism" and "industrial democracy". These latter, in turn, were crucially affected not only by industrial struggles within Fordist workplaces, but also by world order struggles in which particular visions of "Americanism" were counter-posed to fascism and communism. I thus wove an historical interpretation of processes – crucially mediated by ideology -- by which class struggles in the sphere of production conditioned, and were themselves profoundly affected by, world order struggles. In the conclusion to that work, I suggested that the historical structures it described were in the process of decomposition and reconstruction, including the tendential globalization of economic relations, and that these processes implied heightened levels of political contestation and new political possibilities.

After completion of the Producing Hegemony project, I began to investigate the ideological politics surrounding the decomposition of Fordist production systems in the US and the concomitant globalization of production during the last decades of the 20^th century. While engaged in political activism with a local group organizing against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, I had witnessed first-hand the seemingly bizarre and initially puzzling juxtaposition of diverse political tendencies within the anti-liberalization movement: progressives emphasizing a project of democratizing economic relations on a transnational scale; economic nationalists interested in protecting American jobs and our position of global privilege; and neo-nazi groups inciting xenophobia through racialized representations of a conspiratorial politics of global liberalization. I set out to try to understand better the political visions which animated these various currents of resistance and to what degree they might find common ground.

The first product of this effort was an analysis of the NAFTA debates which set the stage for the remainder of the project.⁴ I interpreted NAFTA as an historically significant instance of ideological struggle over the meanings associated with transnational liberalization. As the growth-oriented historical structures of Fordism-Keynesianism and the kinder, gentler liberalism of the postwar world order were increasingly displaced by a more hard-edged and austere neoliberalism, and as the Cold War ceased to provide an organizing narrative for Americans’ self-understanding in the world, the ideological hegemony of postwar liberalism – which promised to citizens of the "free world" the liberty and prosperity denied to people under communist domination -- increasingly lost its ability to shape popular imagination. And it was in this historical-structural context that the debates over NAFTA took on their larger significance. For what was at stake in these discussions was much more than trade policy; the debate brought to the level of explicit public discourse questions about alternative possible worlds which would have been almost unthinkable under the hegemony of Cold War liberalism. I argued that it was not possible to understand North American movements opposing transnational liberalization and NAFTA in terms of the old liberal narrative of "free traders" versus "protectionists". I documented that those who opposed NAFTA were not univocally doing so from the perspective of economic nationalism, as was generally claimed. While there were certainly nationalistic currents in the opposition to neoliberal globalization (especially among those groups associated with Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan), many of the arguments against NAFTA sprang from a vision of economic life as entailing intrinsically political relations, relations generating social powers which might conceivably be subjected to norms of popular consent and democratic accountability, and that actualizing these latter possibilities in a globalizing world would require forging relations of transnational solidarity. In other words, a major part of the opposition to NAFTA was formulating an explicitly democratizing project which they counterposed to neoliberalism’s vision of a depoliticized and privatized economy. Although I could not at that time have foreseen the emergence of a transnational movement for global justice in the wake of the 1999 Seattle protests, I interpreted the NAFTA struggle as a significant political development insofar as it represented a break with the formerly hegemonic ideology of postwar liberalism and a major expansion of the horizons of political imagination and action.

After sketching the outlines of a progressive opposition to NAFTA, I became interested in the ideological roots of economic, cultural and racial nationalisms animating the right wing of opposition to transnational liberalization. These nationalist populisms were being taken increasingly seriously by proponents of liberalization such as the World Economic Forum and others. This led me to undertake a study of the American far-right, and their nativist and conspiracist understandings of globalization as part of a tyrannical New World Order engulfing America. I traveled to Cambridge, MA and worked in the archives of Political Research Associates, perusing back issues of the John Birch Society’s (JBS) New American and the Liberty Lobby’s conspiracist tabloid The Spotlight. I read numerous conspiracist texts produced by the Birch society and various independent right-wing publishers, and I had several discussions with middle-level officials of JBS. And, for the first time, I did extensive internet-based research, taking advantage of the strong internet presence of far-right groups. The result was a series of publications in which I sketched the main elements common to a family of conspiracist New World Order narratives, and demonstrated that these narratives were at work in the political analyses of NAFTA, GATT and globalization put forth by a spectrum of right-wing political forces including Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, the John Birch Society, the Liberty Lobby, and various white supremacist and neo-nazi sects.⁵  I also examined the more ambiguous ideological representations of influential populist radio talk show host Chuck Harder, who appeared equally at home with progressives like Ralph Nader and members of armed militia groups.⁶  My primary purpose in these analyses was to demonstrate that conspiracist narratives imply a politics of scapegoating which, even in forms which may not be explicitly racist and/or anti-Semitic, lend themselves readily to a politics of hate, exclusion and violence. On those grounds, I argued that the economic, cultural and racial nationalisms of far-right anti-globalists were fundamentally different from, and indeed ultimately incompatible with, the projects of cosmopolitan solidarity and transnational democratization advanced by progressive critics of neoliberal globalization.

Then I brought these strands together into an analysis of the ideological politics of globalization as these have played themselves out in the US during the 1990s. Here I would not want to be understood as claiming that the politics of globalization are reducible to their US manifestations, but rather that the US remains a disproportionately powerful global actor and, to that extent, understanding the politics of globalization in the nexus of relations between the US and the global economy is necessary, if not sufficient, for understanding the politics of globalization more broadly. I attempted to integrate into these analyses a heightened sensitivity to relations of race and gender, and the ways in which their cultural construction was intertwined with the (re)production of class.⁷ The result was my second book, Ideologies of Globalization.⁸

The events in Seattle occurred shortly before the book went to press, enabling me to include some discussion of the emergence of these struggles out of the processes I had been studying. Once again, I stressed the potentially transformative significance of the politicization of economic life, enabling those who might formerly have understood themselves as private economic actors – employees and consumers – to begin to see themselves as engaged in more-or-less explicitly political processes of reshaping the world economy in order to make it more responsive to social values broader than private profit, to make economic actors socially accountable and the economy itself more broadly democratic. Not only would the structures of the world economy be reshaped by such movements, but perhaps most importantly, so would the social identities, interests and capabilities of the persons whose ideological constructions and material activity produce our world.

Notes

1. My evolving interpretations of Gramsci are to be found in the following sources: M. Rupert (1995) Producing Hegemony: The Politics of Mass Production and American Global Power, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, chapter two; and (Re)Engaging Gramsci: A Reply to Germain and Kenny. Review of International Studies, 24 (1998), pp. 427-34. Back to Text

2.  For an explicit discussion of social power as emerging from a dialectic of structure/agency, see M. Rupert (2002) "Class Powers and the Politics of Global Governance," paper prepared for the MacArthur Consortium conference on Power and Global Governance, University of Wisconsin, Madison, April 19-21.  Back to Text

3. M. Rupert (1995) Producing Hegemony: The Politics of Mass Production and American Global Power, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.  Back to Text

4. M. Rupert, "(Re)Politicizing the Global Economy: Liberal Common Sense and Ideological Struggle in the US NAFTA debate" Review of International Political Economy 2, 4 (1995): 658-92.  Back to Text

5. M. Rupert, "Globalization and the Reconstruction of Popular Common Sense in the US." In S. Gill and J. Mittelman, eds., Innovation and Transformation in International Studies. Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp.138-52; and "Contesting Hegemony: Americanism and Far-Right Ideologies of Globalization." In K. Burch and R. Denemark eds., Constituting International Political Economy, International Political Economy Yearbook, Volume 10. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1997, pp. 113-38.  Back to Text

6. M. Rupert, "Globalization and American Common Sense: Struggling to Make Sense of a Post-Hegemonic World." New Political Economy 2, 1 (1997), pp. 105-116. Reprinted in Barry Gills, ed., Globalization and the Politics of Resistance, Macmillan / St. Martin’s, 1999, pp. 171-188.    Back to Text

7. M. Rupert (2002) "Class, Gender and the Politics of Neoliberal Globalization in the US" in Craig Murphy, editor, Egalitarian Politics in an Age of Globalization, New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, pp. 7-35.  Back to Text

8. M. Rupert (2000) Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World Order. London: Routledge.  Back to Text