van der pijl-transnational classes and IR

TRANSNATIONAL CLASSES AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 25and in part are carried over from prior community bonds, traditional or‘imagined’. But increasingly, they assume a socialised form, that is,commodification and individualisation are made subject to collectivearrangements of a secular nature. Social cohesion becomes increasingly abstractfrom personal peculiarities and ever more dependent on largely invisible (at leastindirect) forms of mutual dependence and routinised organisation.Interchangeability of personnel, complementarity of tasks, regulation andplanning, are all aspects of this. Occasionally, there may be dramatic reversals onthis trajectory of increasing secularisation. Especially when certain particularlysensitive areas of community life are threatened (be it family, religion, ornation), a ‘tribal’ reaction may throw back the apparently rationalised social orderto the level of the primitive group, or worse, combine the capacity for planningengendered by a high degree of socialisation with certain features of a primitiveorder, as in Fascism, or Muslim fundamentalism.In all cases of Vergesellschaftung, division of labour and separation of tasks,driven by commodification directly or indirectly, are reintegrated into collectivearrangements under (different degrees of) capitalist control or normativelyconnected to it. The objective integration of a patchwork of overlapping units ofsocial cohesion structured around units of socialised labour exists in a tensionwith the commodity form of social relations, requiring constant mutualreadjustment through struggle. Therefore, the effects of commodification, asdiscussed on pages 11–14, are not only partly compensated for by persistingforms of (imagined) community; but also, if always incompletely so, bystructures of socialisation. The phenomena belonging to each set—commodification, (imagined) community, and socialisation—will all beobservable in a real situation, because none of them cancels out the otherscompletely, although their relative weight may vary considerably.The discipline of capitalAs we have seen, the contradictory processes of commodification andsocialisation, mediated by social struggles in which their mutual relation isarbitrated, can be understood as forces constantly restructuring a prior(imagined) community substratum without entirely obliterating its reproductive/affective core. Such transformed communities exist, as units of social cohesion,in a wider arena which is tendentially subject to the same, mutuallyconflicting pressures of commodification and socialisation. Let us now pose thequestion how social cohesion is maintained at all under the strain of thesecontradictory forces. This brings us to the role of the state as the source ofauthority and discipline, on which an actual discipline of capital is grafted at alater stage of development.In chapter 3 we will investigate the state in a more concrete, historical sense asa succession of specific state/society complexes and state forms. At the level ofabstraction we are dealing with here, however, a state can be said to emerge,