Political repression and capitalist globalization: A theory of a Transnational Repressive Apparatus

This dissertation argues that a central aspect of transnational capitalism in the late 1990s and early 2000s was the rise of a Transnational Repressive Apparatus (TRA) that limited the emergence of broad based and effective opposition movements in the global North. An application of Marxist state theory at the transnational level is made to theorize the TRA. The concept of the TRA builds upon the work of Robinson (2004) who argued that a Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) has benefited from the emergence of a Transnational State (TNS) apparatus since the 1970s. Specifically, the concept of the TRA builds upon the notions of State Repressive Apparatus and Ideological Repressive Apparatus described by Althusser (1971) as well as the concepts of consensus and coercion offered by Gramsci (1971), and applies them to the transnational level. The TRA theorized here is made up of ideological, economic, legal, and policing/security pillars. The ideological and economic pillars serve to limit peoples' conceptions about the global political economy so that they accept the social relations of capitalism as natural. The force of the legal and policing/security pillars of the TRA greet those who pass through the first two pillars of the TRA into open opposition to transnational capitalism. Cosmopolitan theory, it is argued, in embracing global social democracy, fails to account for the repressive nature of cosmopolitan institutions and practices as exemplified in this account of the TRA. A Marxist view on the global political economy, which stresses the centrality of imperialism and primitive accumulation as TCC policy imperatives, allows for insight into the nature of capitalism and the requirement that political repression is a necessary feature of transnational capitalism in the current era. The Marxist view allows for an account of the TRA.