Rooted Globalism: Arab-Latin American Business Elites and the Politics of Global Imaginaries
Kevin Funk, Indiana University Press, £27

WHY do we care so much about the poor? Why do we obsess about inequality from our privileged, superior positions of scholarship and journalism by wallowing in their misery? 

It is of course a form of absolution, penance if you will, from within a liberal caste that has clearly lost its grip on the bedrock of sociology, namely: an analysis based on class struggle. 

As author Kevin Funk notes, postmodern and postcolonial approaches with their focus on subaltern agency have largely displaced Marxist-inspired analysis as the standard-bearer for “radical” critique in the social sciences. 

This has meant that, while understandably seeking to highlight how the weak fight back against the powerful, we are seduced by the romantic lure of the former and devote far too little attention to the latter.

It is back to front. If we really want to explain why the slave is oppressed, we must understand what motivates the master, a sentiment at the heart of Funk’s brilliant argument for greater concentration on the sociology of elites.

He writes: “Simply put, we need more scholarship focusing on the world as seen from corporate boardrooms, executive offices, and centres of state power. Such studies are of tremendous normative appeal; namely, they hold the possibility of subjecting these actors and their activities to greater public scrutiny.”

This is critically important at this stage of capitalist development when the battle-front in the titanic struggle of humanity, where the war for justice will be won or lost, is between state sovereignty and global corporate capital that eschews borders and shares neoliberal ideology. 

In short, globalisation is the only arena that really counts, because increasingly the globalised nature of contemporary capitalist production and the ideas that underpin it make it impossible to ascribe a nationality to either goods, or the corporations that provide them. 

The dynamics of social class follow suit: the global super-rich 1 per cent now possess more wealth than the other 99 per cent of the world’s population combined. 

Yet while the expansion of capitalism on a global scale is undeniable, the territorial nation-state system persists, clinging to life. So which consciousness shapes the flow of “capital” and its endless eddy into every niche, the national, or the global, or a hybrid “rooted globalism”?   

Where do the loyalties of the magnates shifting capital around like chess pieces on a board truly lie: are they rootless multinational beings who see Earth’s orb as their plaything, or are they rooted in old loyalties affiliated with the nation-state system?

Funk’s ambition is to make empirical progress towards answering such questions, and his conclusion reasserts the importance of the state in global capitalism.

Through an examination of Arab-Latin American business elites, he explores capitalist class consciousness and determines that place-based “motivating imaginaries” continue to exert influence over this new multinational class.

Funk explores a boom in Arab–Latin American relations that is drawing both regions further into global capitalist flows yet simultaneously reinforcing a sense of belonging to a Middle Eastern imagined communities among Latin American economic elites of Arab descent. 

He observes how, as global capitalism and state policy drive these elites to search for profit-seeking opportunities abroad, the Arab–Latin American commercial class finds that its cultural capital — its “Arab-ness,” whether real or perceived — becomes a commodity.

Funk writes: “The argument for the existence of a fully formed imagined community of global capitalists retains analytical utility as an ideal type and as a representation of a class that has yet to coalesce but perhaps one day will. However, it is not a fully accurate description of living and breathing capitalist elites as they exist today.”

These findings challenge the conventional wisdom in many scholarly accounts of global elite formation, and also the assumption that the “national imaginary” is a dwindling, spent anchor of consciousness, just as the national state represents a threat to capitalist profits.

They go some way to answering a key question in structuralist accounts of capitalist globalisation: does a global capitalist class exist in objective terms?

As a result, Funk’s findings have real, political consequences. If “place-based imaginaries” are resilient and this cross-border class has a level of national attachment, it may be possible for nation-states to regulate them better, and hence for workers with a democratic stake in national policymaking to struggle against them, with clear implications for governance.

Second, and more importantly, this work exposes the “fragmentary and partial nature of capitalist hegemony,” thereby testing overly structural accounts of globalisation that nurture deterministic understandings of capitalism as immutable.

It is ironic, the author points out, that this immutability is the precisely the message pumped out by so much multinational corporate advertising based on neoliberal precepts.

As Marx and Engels observed, the bourgeoisie compels all nations “on pain of extinction” to adopt the bourgeois mode of production — thus creating “a world after its own image.”