Presenter: Jim Glassman (University of British Columbia)

For many generations now, a significant number of Marxist theorists have been allergic to agency-centered analyses that emphasize the roles in historical events of what C. Wright Mills dubbed “the power elite.” Responding in kind, power elite analysts such as G. William Domhoff have dismissed much of Marxist analysis as mechanistic and unable to effectively account for many historical political events. The work of international relations scholars such as Kees van der Pijl, on the Atlantic Ruling Class, provides pathways around this unproductive stalemate, as does work by scholars such as the unorthodox leftist historian Gabriel Kolko. In this talk, I note how I have used the work of van der Pijl, Kolko, and others to construct a notion of the Pacific Ruling Class, and I argue that transnational ruling classes generally play central roles in the overall accumulation dynamics of capitalism, including in exploitation and imperial appropriation of surplus value, not to mention in generating global social conflict. Ignoring them in the name of focusing on “the class structure” or regarding them as secondary elements of the mode of production makes Marxist analysis unable to account for major events that are neither mere elite conspiracies nor simple expressions of capitalism’s accumulation dynamics.