by The Enduring Relevance of Kees Van Der Pijl
I met Kees Van Der Pijl this past summer in his home office in the suburbs of Amsterdam. Every wall was covered with shelves, every shelf was filled with books, and loose papers cluttered the couches, the desks, and the coffee table.
“Have you read all of these books?” I asked.
He seemed perplexed by the question. “Of course,” he answered. “That’s generally the idea.”
As we drank coffee and talked, I was left with the very strong feeling that such a lifestyle of cozy intellectual joy, whiling away hours reading in a sunlit study, was the peak of the human experience.
I had come to seek insight on the ideas of his 1987 work, published with a new introduction in 2012, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class. It was a major theoretical basis for a forthcoming book of my own research into the merging of the anti-Communist and Neoliberal movements, which was the subject of my Masters’ thesis.
Instead, Kees seemed interested in discussing his latest book, a sort of conspiracy-theory adjacent work on the pandemic. The work, which from our discussion seems based on reasonable ideas, nonetheless presented as vaccine-skepticism and has alienated Kees from many of his intellectual and academic peers. And this is not the first time Kees had gotten himself in hot water, having previously had to resign from a professorship for claiming that 9/11 was a Zionist plot.
But no amount of ostracization, self-inflicted or otherwise, over the last 40 years can steal the enduring relevance of Kees’ earliest and perhaps greatest work. In fact, 38 years after its publishing, and 13 years after its latest republishing, The Making of An Atlantic Ruling Class is more relevant than ever.
In the work, Kees explores the rise of Anglo-American hegemony over the rest of the capitalist world across the last century, from the massive European investments in the American railroad industry, through two world wars, the early Cold War, and the rise of Neoliberalism. In following this development, Kees traces the constant conflict between different wings of the capitalist class as they compete within and between nations for control over the international capitalist system. And his work not only shows how the protectionist and liberalist factions have clashed, synthesized, and clashed anew over several iterations: Kees also, theoretically roots this enduring conflict in the categories explored in Marx’s Das Kapital by drawing on the thinking of the ‘Amsterdam School’ of economic-informed international relations
Anyone who wants to understand the basis of Trump’s protectionist macro-pivot as more than the ravings of an idiotic buffoon, but rather as the latest, rational iteration of a longstanding tendency of one section of the capitalist class, must study Kees’ work.
The Theories of the Amsterdam School
The “Amsterdam School” is a little-known school of thought combining Marxist historical materialism with international relations to explore ‘transnational class formation.’ The school draws on earlier economic-historians, including American historian Gabriel Kolko, who was an pathfinding scholar of the impact of corporations on government policy and the rise of so-called “corporate liberalism” after the Second World War. Another influential thinker is the German Marxist Alfred Sohn-Rethel, who was involved simultaneously in the heart of the German business community and the resistance to the Third Reich; their work “Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism” further explored the rivalries among the financial/commercial and industrial wings of the German capitalist class to shed light on where fascism found its strongest support.
Class Fractions
In The Making An Atlantic Ruling Class Kees demonstrates how the Amsterdam School related international class formation to Marx’s economic theories by beginning with a consideration of the latter. Capitalists are situated differently within the national and global economy and each has different relationships to the extraction of surplus value from labor.This leads them to develop different and competing individual or inter-class preferences as against their capitalist peers and rivals.
At the most basic level of abstraction, this conflict within the capitalist class is rooted in the distinction between absolute and relative surplus value. Increasing absolute surplus value means maximizing the capitalist’s profit by lengthening the working day without pay, or reducing the wages without shortening the day, in other-words, paying workers less per hour. In contrast, relative surplus value means maximizing the capitalist’s profits by increasing the workers’ productivity.1 Generally, the former is sought by increasing oppression, while the later is pursued through capital investments. And while the pressure to increase absolute surplus value tends to intensify conflict between capital and labor, an increase in relative surplus value can allow for some flexibility and commonality between boss and worker by sharing gains from increased productivity.
Kees relates these two basic modalities of profit-seeking to the two archetypes of bourgeois rule investigated by Lenin in his 1910 pamphlet, “Differences in the European Labour Movement.” In the work, Lenin discusses the section of the bourgeoisie reliant on force and the section reliant on concessions and liberalism.2
For Kees, the next level of investigation of the forces which determine differing interests within the capitalist is the division of labor among productive capital and circulating capital (including both money and commodity capital). These categories tie in to Marx’s exploration of the three stages of the circuit of capital discussed in Capital Volume II. The stages – money, production, and commodity – each give rise to such a circuit, with their relationship underpinning the famous formula (M — C … P … C’ — M’) and its sister formulas.
Kees explains the bifurcation of interests between productive and circulating capital in that
“whereas all forms of capital represent modes of appropriation of surplus-value, only the productive form is engaged in its creation through the subsumption of living labour-power.”
Therefore, industrialists involved in productive capital will generally tend to have a different set of interests than capitalists involved in money and commodity capital. This leads these sub-classes of capitalists to seek to organize to secure these interests through political action:
“Just as single capitals act out the logic of social capital through competition, groups of capitalists competitively seek to press their particular interests and have them recognised as the general interest. In the process they combine into ‘fractions’— abstractly speaking, capital fractions, defined by functions in the overall circuit of capital (bank, industrial, commercial capital).”3
And the divisions within the capitalist class can be developed even further. In the circulating-capital camp, there exists a contradiction between money and commodity capitalists; in the productivist camp, between productive capital which produces the means of production and that which produces consumer goods.
These different layers express different tendencies, but reality is of course far messier. They exist alongside all the world’s other complications, the relics and vestiges of older social relations, in a dynamic totality of production, distribution, and exchange, and also political mediation. Still, these main divisions of economics within the capitalist class form a reliable and ever-renewing division of material interests which, in general, tend to pit the capitalist class against itself on this basis.
In fact, this division between the financial and industrial bourgeoisie is perhaps first developed in the Marxist literature by Karl Marx in The Class Struggles In France 1848-1850, in which he analyses the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 as contests between these two camps.4
Concepts of Control
Consequently, there is a fight between and among the capitalists in order to define the rules of the entire system. For the Amsterdam School, this is the “Hegemonic Concept of Control”: one leading fraction tries to assert its preferred system as the capitalists’ general system, thereby articulating its “bid for hegemony.” These “concepts of control” include a full set of policies including labor relations, industrial policy, fiscal and monetary policy, foreign policy, and trade policy. All of these policies are expressed by more general economic and political-economic theories, which aim to establish a comprehensive political-legal framework for disciplining the entire capitalist class. This concept is similar to the Social Structures of Accumulation (SSA) framework which developed out of the UMass Amherst Department of Economics.
For Kees, the two main tendencies which have historically competed for dominance are the “money-capital concept” versus the “productive-capital concept.” The “money-capital” tendency is composed of the liberal-internationalists, those who prefer a system based on market mechanisms, primarily backed by bankers and merchants, and who prefer, among other thing, sound money. The state-monopolists, by contrast, are composed of those who prefer politically-determined arrangements and industrial cartels, and are primarily backed by industrialists.5
These two archetypes have a number of mutually-competing notions or priorities. For the debt-owning money-capitalist, sound money is paramount to receiving a return on investment. By contrast, the productive capitalist may benefit from government spending which boosts production, or from loose monetary policy which decreases the real cost of repaying debt. Moreover, free trade allows for the money-capitalist’s free-moving capital to seek the greatest outlets for profit seeking. Conversely, the productive capitalist, having made significant investments in fixed-location production cannot move their investments so easily, and may benefit from government-imposed production which distorts the market. And this division of interests and preferences extends to labor relations, healthcare policy, and virtually every other field.
Again, anyone who seeks in these tendencies a simple formula for understanding international class formation will find that reality is far more messy. In this messiness, two divisions of interests transcend national boundaries: they also also arise among and between nations, with some nations becoming so tied to one tendency that they become virtually a government avatar for it. And it is never the case that the ascendancy of the junior tendency over its rival leads to a one sided concept of control. Rather, every time the secondary tendency reassumes the leading role, it does so by synthesizing a concept of control which, while generally favoring its tendency, nonetheless integrates and appeases its rival tendency as a junior partner.
This “messiness” also includes the role of actors, organizations, and ideologies — the subjective factor — in building projects to pursue objective material interests.
“Of course individual or small group agency must resonate socially to make a difference; only the ‘fit’ with broader collective interests will lend a certain elite position its ‘systemic’ quality as a class perspective. ‘Agents’ in this sense embody a structure-inaction, and neither can be separated from the other.”6
Overall, this economic framework of the capitalist class’ internal contradictions is the specific abstraction of the inevitable “inner-penetration of opposites” which exists within any category. But Kees, relying on Marx, helps to give insight into what material reality this internal division is actually based upon.
The History of Atlantic Capitalism
Having laid out his theory of the formation, contestation, and reformation of concepts of control, Kees then applies this framework to the last century of capitalist development, focusing on relations between North American and Western-European capitalism. What follows is a brief summary
The pre-depression integration of American and European (largely British) capitalism was largely based on the British financial investment in American industry, especially the development of rail-roads. This initiated the relationship on the basis of the money-capital concept of control, with increases in free trade.
However, the Great Depression provided an impetus for the state-monopolist tendency. Free-trade broke down as tariffs were increasingly imposed, and Fordism, Keynesianism, and the New Deal all favored the industrialists at the expense of the financiers. There also developed a strong isolationist tendency among the American capitalists, backed especially by the Chicago industrialists around The Chicago Tribune, and also included domestic-focused manufacturers like International Harvester and Sears Roebuck. This tendency also took root within America’s heavy industries, which primarily produced inputs for the means of production, and which resisted the growing calls to intervene outside of the Western Hemisphere.7 Instead, these industries sought a sphere-of-influence agreement with German industrialists.
This isolationist force, including Robert E. Wood of Sears Roebuck, was a leading material backer of the America First Committee, which also included John Foster Dulles, as well as various progressives, farmers, and communists. The America First Committee was in sharp conflict with the Committee To Defend America, part of the revivalist money-capital tendency which, drawing support not only from bankers like JP Morgan, but also from some union leaders including David Dubinsky, sought to win public support for US intervention into the war. This shows how the workers and radical movements are often represented on either side of the finance-industrial divide, especially at pivot-points when the junior partner vies for hegemonic leadership.
Even as these two wings of American capitalism feuded, the growing inevitability of US intervention and the promise of war-time profit-making fed and forced the possibility of re-accommodation between the camps. But just as the capitalists were developing a new accord, their control over different wings of the workers movement slipped, as mass wildcat strikes developed in defiance of the Popular Fronts’ no-strike pledge.8 The possibility of the newly strengthened unions challenging the capitalist system directly forged a new bond among the ruling class based on rolling back the spirit of the New Deal.This was notably marked by the replacement of Henry Wallace with the more conservative Harry Truman. Even before Germany and Japan were defeated, anti-communism became the unifying banner of the ruling class, beginning first with the trial Socialist Workers Party under the Smith Act in 1941,9 and continued with the trials of the Communist Party in 1949 and McCarthyism and Taft-Hartley more generally.
Although the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor finally broke the back of the isolationist camp, this did not immediately weaken the industrial faction in favor of finance capital. Rather, the war super-charged Keynesian government spending on productive forces. Consequently, after victory productive capital remained in the saddle, as US manufacturers sold goods around the world. A new internationalist-minded industrial capitalism was made possible by the decimation by bombing of pre-war European and Asia industrial competitors. A new synthesis was achieved, corporate liberalism. As Kees holds,
“This consensus, which in the tradition of American New Left historiography of the 1960s I have typed ‘corporate-liberalism’, combined industrial Fordism and state intervention with a reaffirmation of the free international economy dear to the protagonists of the money-capital concept.”10
This model reigned for several decades, until the crisis of capitalist profitability challenged it in the late 1960s. As European and Japanese industrialists increasingly competed, as the US intervention in Vietnam drained the US treasury and failed to deliver favorable results in the Cold War, and as domestic unrest at home grew increasingly into a challenge to the system, corporate-liberalism fell into an acute crisis.11 A new pivot became possible and, for the capitalists, necessary.
Through this opening marched the bank-sponsored Neoliberal movement, which had been waiting in the wings since at least the Mont Pelerin Society conference immediately after the war.. The neoliberal theories of Hayek and his co-thinkers were originally ridiculed by the leading forces of US capitalism, but by 1970 found embrace as a savior from the current crisis. With neoliberalism came not only new fiscal and monetary policy and changes to government budget priorities, but also the breakdown of the corporate-liberal labor accord. It also predicated Nixon’s pivot to China in order to isolate the USSR and find new outlets for Western capitalist investment, favoring bankers and merchants at the cost of domestic manufacturers. And with neoliberalism, finance capital took the leading role. American industry took a back-seat.
The supremacy of finance capital via the rise of Neoliberalism never meant total adherence to a purely free trade doctrine. Moreover, Clinton’s 100 percent tariffs on Japanese cars imposed in 199512 and the geographic production quotas imposed on vehicles in the original NAFTA framework, serve to further drive home the argument that the transitions between industrial and finance capital’s dominant role never lead to the pure adoption of either form instead, they simply rebalance in one direction or another. Trump’s USMCA replacement for NAFTA increased geographic production quotas which were already in place.
The leading role of Neoliberalism continued as the collapse of the USSR opened new avenues for international financial investments.13 This continued into the 2000s with the mop-up campaign of enforcing “structural adjustment” privatization and liberalization programs on the remaining minor powers which still had strong state intervention in their economies.
Needless to say, a century of events cannot be summarized sufficiently in a few paragraphs, but the main point is to highlight how these macro-events relate to the feud between industrial and finance capital. Those curious will find a far more comprehensive analysis by reading Kees’ book in full.
Understanding Our Current Conjecture
“History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Mark Twain
The framework developed in The Making of An Atlantic Ruling Class is crucial for understanding our current conjecture.
Armed with Kees’ framework, we can understand this Trumpian pivot as the latest expression of a long-unfolding rivalry between two factions of the bourgeoisie, rather than a totally irrational expression of one egomaniac’s mad ravings. In this way, we can explore how Trump’s model replicates past practices, and also how it carves its own concept of control which is similar – but not identical to – past hegemonic projects.
Neoliberalism’s declining dominance is tied to the breaking-down of its ineffective “concept of control” because it is no longer delivering for the US capitalist class. While the opening of China was a key strategic pivot for Neoliberalism, 40 years of trade has created a near-peer economic superpower. And it is one which can outcompete US capitalism at its own game. Simultaneously, in the US and elsewhere, domestic unrest sparked by Neoliberal austerity has only grown and increasingly threatens the stability of the system.
Pressed on the one side by the threat of China, and on the other side by domestic opposition which has grown continuously since 2011, the Neoliberal project has failed to meet the needs of the capitalists. The finale opened with the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, and peaked with the defeat of the Trans Pacific Partnership.
A new pivot is necessary as the finance-capital concept of control fails to deliver stability for US capitalism. Within this window, the industrial capitalist wing which has long played second fiddle now seeks to assert itself as the leading wing of US capitalism.
On this basis, Trump is forwarding a replacement concept of control which bases itself more on the “state-monopoly tendency” and industrial capitalists.This implies prioritizing a sphere of influence approach over one unified global free-trade system. In some sense, this mode is a retreat for the US capitalist class, as capitalists retreat from attempts to dominate the globe in order to protect their domestic economy from Chinese competition. But this is a retreat necessarily imposed by the real threat to US domestic-focused capitalists: Chinese imports.
The framework of the Amsterdam School suggests that we would find Trump replicating many of the policies of past state-monopolist tendencies, and we do see this in practice. We see him courting labor, raising tariffs, pushing for a weaker currency, and using leverage to pressure allies to bolster their fealty to the US-led camp.
For the most part, protectionists and free-traders express their views not out of some fanatical devotion, but because their ideologies forward their material interests (or those of their benefactors). These seemingly-contradictory forces actually have the same ultimate purpose: to forward the interests of US capitalism. This is most clearly exemplified by the fact that the leading forces of the Neoliberal Reagan Revolution are the same forces helping organize the pivot to Trumpism. The Heritage Foundation, which drafted the Trumpian Project 2025: Mandate For Leadership, drafted its first Mandate for Leadership for Reagan in 1981 on the basis of Neoliberal economic policies.
An Opening For Socialists, Too
The failure of the finance capitalists and their neoliberal model is an opening for the industrialists who have waited offstage for the better part of four decades. But this opening has only emerged because of the profound crisis which US capitalism finds itself in. So it is an opening too for socialists. In the reorganization of hegemony, the great reshuffling of the American order which is now underway, all the cards are mixed on the table.
For Lenin, the first symptom of a revolutionary situation is
“when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the “upper classes”, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth.”14
This opening will not last forever. But while it is open, socialists can seize it, too.
- Marx, Capital Chapter 12: “The surplus-value produced by prolongation of the working day, I call absolute surplus-value. On the other hand, the surplus-value arising from the curtailment of the necessary labour-time, and from the corresponding alteration in the respective lengths of the two components of the working day, I call relative surplus-value.” ↩︎
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1910/dec/16.htm ↩︎
- Pijl, K. van der. (2012). The making of an Atlantic ruling class. Verso. XV ↩︎
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/class-struggles-france/ch01.htm
↩︎ - Kees credits the “state-monopolist” concept to Lenin’s “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/index.htm ↩︎
- Pijl, K. van der. (2012). The making of an Atlantic ruling class. Verso. XVI ↩︎
- Pijl, K. van der. (2012). The making of an Atlantic ruling class. Verso. 109 ↩︎
- Pijl, K. van der. (2012). The making of an Atlantic ruling class. Verso. 133 ↩︎
- The SWP were advocating their pro-strike Proletarian Military Policy. See: Canon, Military Policy of the Proletariat” Socialist Appeal, October 12, 1940. Interestingly, Cannon writes of the “isoloationists,”
“That wing of the American bourgeoisie going by the name of isolationist are no less aggressive, no less military minded, than the wing which wants intervention right now in the present war.
The Chicago Tribune strongly criticizes the Roosevelt policy only because they have a different approach to the war. They think we should begin the struggle, the struggle of American imperialism for world dominion, by conquering first the Western Hemisphere and proceeding next to the East by way of a war against Japan, postponing the clash with Hitler till a later time. The more farsighted, the more conscious and, I am sure, the strongest section of the American bourgeoisie, who are called interventionists, believe that we must begin the struggle for world dominion by intervention in the European war. What divides the two camps at this time is only a matter of strategy. Now that they are confronted by an open military alliance of Germany and Japan their differences can easily be reconciled.” ↩︎ - Pijl, K. van der. (2012). The making of an Atlantic ruling class. Verso. 107 ↩︎
- As explicated by the elite in the infamous Powell Memo, “Attack On The Free Enterprise System.” ↩︎
- https://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/17/business/sanctions-japan-overview-100-tariffs-set-13-top-models-japanese-cars.html ↩︎
- As the great state owned enterprises were looted with the help of the Clinton administration. ↩︎
- Lenin, The Collapse of the Second International, Section II. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/csi/ii.htm ↩︎
Henry De Groot
Henry De Groot, he/him, is involved with the Boston DSA Labor Working Group, an editor of Working Mass, and author of the book Student Radicals and the Rise of Russian Marxism.
