Alliances and accumulation: understanding the conflictuality between the United States of America, China and Russia through global capital flows

Abstract

This paper proposes to mobilize one of the major contributions of Nicos Poulantzas’ Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, namely the concept of the “internal bourgeoisie” in order to highlight the structural basis of the increasingly conflictual relations between the US, China and Russia. By applying the Poulantzasian political-economic reading of international capital flows to study a set of statistical data on foreign direct investment, this paper shows that globalization remains a fragmented and conflict-prone process. As long as the multiplication of commercial and financial links is not accompanied by the formation of a globally integrated bourgeoisie, the interdependence between different countries remains fragile. The core argument of this paper is that the absence of an internal bourgeoisie favorable to American capital in both Russia and China facilitates the tightening of world politics. Thus, Poulantzas’ international political economy provides a structural explanatory tool for understanding the extent to which the political tensions, which are currently shaking the world, are associated with the process of capital accumulation.