Kees van der Pijl
Routledge, 1998, £15.95
From the late 1970s a group of Dutch academic Marxists – including Henk Overbeek, Meindert Fennema, Frans Stokman, Robert J. Mokken and Kees van der Pijl – began studying networks of capitalist power, setting up their own international scholarly network in the process (involving, among others, Beth Mintz in the USA and John Scott in the UK). The focus was on the structure of interlocking corporate directorships in Europe and North America. Some of this work, unfortunately, is replete with impenetrable mathematical gobbledygook, making sense only to a handful of fellow academics. But some of the results of the research are really important and deserve a wider readership. Kees van der Pijl in particular seemed to have synthesised a lot of extremely interesting information about the history of the capitalist class. He, at least, hadn’t let the methodological tail wag the sociological dog. His jargon, however, is not so much mathematical as Marxist.
The book reviewed here is essentially a follow-up to the author’s strange and almost unreadable The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (Verso 1984) – a book which went down like a lead balloon in the UK for two reasons: first the sheer amount of fascinating empirical information about class fractions could not be assimilated by any known English-speaking reader (and derived from sources most of us would never have heard of); and second because it was all framed by an abstract Marxist theoretical superstructure that reads as if imposed on the facts from Mount Olympus. The book demanded not only familiarity with the deepest conspiracy analysis but also being up to speed on Marxist political economy (circuits of capital, regulation theory, etc.) – each of which is a very scarce accomplishment, but any brain that can do both together is almost unheard of.
This new book is slightly more readable and more sparing in the empirical detail, but every bit as theoretical. It poses the question: how can van der Pijl know so much? There is much of real interest here – chapter 4 is as good a summary of the history of global power elites as one is likely to find anywhere – but the real pity is that his writings will go over the heads of the very readers who could get the most out of what he writes.
The book defies easy summary. It deals with the struggles between the Anglo-American capitalist class and its European rivals through the twentieth century in the context of the need to forge a viable global hegemonic strategy – a political framework within which all capitalists everywhere can work. I would simply reproduce the following lengthy quotation, which illustrates, I think, not only the depth and breadth of his focus but also that van der Pijl (almost unique amongst academics today) takes parapolitics seriously:
‘……already in the second half of the 1970s, political violence must be considered to have been at least partly orchestrated from [Right wing] quarters (rather than discounted as a random phenomenon). In fact, one aspect of the Trilateral interregnum covering the period between the fall of Nixon and the Reagan-Bush era may have been that in the absence of a really effective hegemonic concept of control, violence was resorted to in order to enforce a consensus of fear. Although this must remain a hypothesis to be worked out later, the succession of high-level assassinations and engineered removals of top politicians (Willy Brandt in 1974, Gough Whitlam in 1975, Harold Wilson in 1976, Aldo Moro and Pope John Paul I in 1978, and Olof Palme in 1986, to name but the most spectacular cases) can probably only be understood if seen in the context of a single process.’ (p. 128)
Of the coincidence between right wing terrorism and the rise of free-market liberalism in this period, van der Pijl concludes that ‘the worlds of clandestine violence and economic rationality are entwined’ (p. 129). This book does try to see the wood for the trees, but the wood is still too abstract and there’s just not enough evidence for all the trees.