Towards A Global Ruling Class? Globalization and the Transnational Capitalist Class
By William I. Robinson, Jerry Harris. Science & Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis, 2000
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A transnational capitalist class (TCC) has emerged as that segment of the world bourgeoisie that represents transnational capital, the owners of the leading worldwide means of production as embodied in the transnational corporations and private financial institutions. The spread of TNCs, the sharp increase in foreign direct investment, the proliferation of mergers and acquisitions across national borders, the rise of a global financial system, and the increased interlocking of positions within the global corporate structure, are some empirical indicators of the transnational integration of capitalists. The TCC manages global rather than national circuits of accumulation. This gives it an objective class existence and identity spatially and politically in the global system above any local territories and polities. The TCC became politicized from the 1970s into the 1990s and has pursued a class project of capitalist globalization institutionalized in an emergent transnational state apparatus and in a “Third Way” political program. The emergent global capitalist historic bloc is divided over strategic issues of class rule and how to achieve regulatory order in the global economy. Contradictions within the ruling bloc open up new opportunities for emancipatory projects from global labor.
Subfields: Public Administration, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/00e25c1879bd6dd87158708d50174df359a65e85
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Citations in the corpus
- Rising powers, global capitalism and liberal global governance: A historical materialist account of the BRICs challenge (2014, background): “Beginning in the early 1990s, this provocative literature has argued for the emergence of a world-spanning fraction of capitalists dislodged from national moorings and constituting a new class-for-itself at the global level (Robinson, 2004, 2005; Robinson and Harris, 2000: 22; Sklair, 1997, 2001).”