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Book part
Publication date: 11 August 2017

Jeb Sprague-Silgado

As components of society, social classes contain individuals who are carriers of productive relationships. In the era of global capitalism, chains of accumulation are functionally…

Abstract

As components of society, social classes contain individuals who are carriers of productive relationships. In the era of global capitalism, chains of accumulation are functionally integrating across borders and regions – uniquely altering the formation of productive relationships. How can we understand class relations in the global era, and in the context of regions and countries in Oceania and Asia? How do transnational capitalist-class fractions, new middle strata, and labor undergird globalization? How have state apparatuses and other institutions in this part of the world become entwined with new transnational processes? To begin to consider these questions, this paper provides an overview and summary of studies on transnational class relations and the associated political economic changes occurring across areas of Asia and Oceania.

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Return of Marxian Macro-Dynamics in East Asia
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-477-4

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 13 April 2015

Jerry Harris

The purpose of this paper is to explore how capitalism has developed into a deeply integrative economic system of financial investments and manufacturing. This process of…

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore how capitalism has developed into a deeply integrative economic system of financial investments and manufacturing. This process of globalization has brought about the emergence of a transnational capitalist class that rules the world’s economy. Financialization, created by the speed and interconnectivity of information technologies, is a key element that has produced immense wealth for a few while reducing their dependence on the labor of workers. This system of global accumulation has lead to a crisis of democracy with several different possible outcomes.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper begins with an historical examination of capitalism and capitalist class formation by tracing developments from nation-centric capitalism to globalization. A conceptual explanation of the development of the transnational capitalist class (TCC) is offered. Research on current economic data to support the thesis on the emergence of the TCC in both its private and statist forms is included, as well as an examination of the latest technology developments that affect financialization and how this impacts class relations. The conclusion analyzes the development of democracy as a class dialectic, and the impact of globalization that is altering the historic relationships between capital and labor. The paper ends with a discussion of possible political/economic futures.

Findings

Globalization is a new era in which capitalism has deepened its inherent tendency toward creating world markets and production. This process has been greatly enhanced by the new technological tools of financial production. Organizing and overseeing this system of global accumulation is the transnational capitalist class. The emergence of this class has transformed class relations based within the historic perimeters of nation-states, and it threatens the content and character of democracy that arose out of the bourgeois democratic revolutions in America and France.

Originality/value

Transnational Capitalist Class Theory is a recently developed field of research. It is a new critic of mainstream international relations analysis which centers on nation to nation relationships. It also differs with world system theory which divides countries into a center/peripheral analysis. Within the field of TCC research, this paper offers an original historic perspective between global economics and the development of democracy. It also makes new theoretical connections between information technology, financialization and the destruction of the social contract.

Book part
Publication date: 17 June 2009

Simon Stander

There have been times in recent years when it has seemed that the US economy, in particular, has defied economic gravity. This was certainly the case in the late nineties of the…

Abstract

There have been times in recent years when it has seemed that the US economy, in particular, has defied economic gravity. This was certainly the case in the late nineties of the twentieth century. Many heaved a sigh of relief when the Nasdaq and the Dow responded to the pull of economic gravity and fell to earth in the early part of the twenty first century. The Earth at the time, in 2002, appeared to be indices of around 8,000 for the Dow and 1,250 for the Nasdaq. These measures still indicated huge wealth in terms of saleable bits of paper as well, indicating the underlying huge capacity of the real economy for creating surpluses. Both indices climbed back, though the Nasdaq was a long way from its astronomic former heights before the next (2007) crisis hit. True to the cyclical record of modern capitalism, however, by 2006 the US and the world stock markets were booming again. The nominal value of shares traded worldwide in 2006 by some estimates was nearly $70 trillion (Bogle, 2005). In 2007, another crisis appeared, ushered in supposedly by the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States; subsequent events took their toll in economic and financial terms not only in the United States but worldwide in most of the major economies. The terms “credit crunch” and “sub-prime” had become so pervasive within a few weeks of the onset of the latest economic crisis that by July 2008, the Concise Oxford Dictionary provided definitions for them. While these terms are now embedded in the language of economics and everyday speech, inevitably the affected economies will recover from the crises and continue to grow. While there is no shortage of reasons posited for the latest crisis and those preceding it, far fewer explanations have been forwarded to tell us why economies survive economic shocks and, despite dire predictions and expressions of gloom, recent crises have not been as disastrous as was once the case, notably as in the Depression years of the 1930s. During the Depression of the Thirties, production fell by a third between 1929 and 1933, unemployment reached 13 million and even by 1938 one person in five were unemployed. No economist has predicted these dire consequences even for the crisis of 2007–2009. In 1999, Paul Krugman published his short book: The Return of Depression Economics in which he not only reminded us of the 1930s Depression but suggested that the then economic crises bore an “eerie resemblance to the Great Depression.”1 He retreats within a few pages and describes the events as the Great Recession because the global damage has been “well short of Depression levels” (Krugman, 1999). A decade later, Krugman, by then a Nobel laureate for economics in 2008, began his 2009 revised edition of Return of Depression Economics thus: “The world economy is not in depression: it probably won't fall into depression (though I wish I could be completely sure about that)” (Krugman, 2009). By early January 2009, he surprised other economic commentators by using the term “depression” in his New York Times column.

Details

Why Capitalism Survives Crises: The Shock Absorbers
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84855-587-7

Article
Publication date: 26 January 2012

Nathan Lillie and Miguel Martínez Lucio

Capital, through its practices and narratives of global competition, is able to play unions in different locations off against one another through the construction and…

Abstract

Purpose

Capital, through its practices and narratives of global competition, is able to play unions in different locations off against one another through the construction and exploitation of difference. Trade unions and their activists have responded through formal institutional responses and with new forms of network‐based cooperation which is, at best, limited to action supported by the interests of union actors involved at a given juncture. This article seeks to argue that these forms of organizational responses are in themselves insufficient to allow unions to overcome the prisoner's dilemma inherent in their operating at a lower geographic level than capital.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper brings together ideas and insights from various interventions made by the authors and is a based on a review of a large part of the literature.

Findings

To regain control over labour markets would require either more systematic and structured union organizations of a transnational scope or a more concerted attempt at new forms of networking and the construction of a convincing radical counter‐narrative to that of global capitalist competition. The paper also argues that on close inspection the internationalization of capital itself exhibits significant Achilles Heels and may actually facilitate these new labour developments.

Practical implications

The paper argues that trade unions need to build their international coordinating strategies through a range of democratic and participative approaches. It also claims that transnational corporations are much more exposed by globalization than many commentators admit, trade unions and worker activists can and do exploit these gaps.

Social implications

The power of transnational corporations fails to create consistent regimes of regulation and social progress. These in turn create a series of evasive strategies that do not contribute to consistent international dialogue.

Originality/value

The article asserts that the network structure of transnational labour unionism is in itself an ineffective response to capitalist globalization and the narrative of global competition.

Details

Critical perspectives on international business, vol. 8 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1742-2043

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Book part
Publication date: 5 July 2005

Eshrak Zaky

The unsettled opposing conclusions reached by a number of scholars about the remaining significance and/or weakness of the nation-state and its conflict and/or coalition with…

Abstract

The unsettled opposing conclusions reached by a number of scholars about the remaining significance and/or weakness of the nation-state and its conflict and/or coalition with global capital represent an analytical and theoretical impasse. These contradictory views have been contested in the literature leaving no clear methodological and analytical guidance on how to examine the state-capital relationship in any specific area in the era of globalization. This paper suggests that the contradiction and change in the relationship between the nation-state and capital is rooted in the contradictory needs of labor versus capital. However, the role of labor and its contradiction with capital has been absent from most state-capital analyses or is treated as a background variable. To help overcoming this analytical impasse, the paper calls for re-conceptualizing the role of labor on the global level and for incorporating this role within the state-capital relationship. The paper first provides a critical appraisal of the opposing views of the state-capital relationship and pinpoints problems in their analytical logics of contradictions and structural determination. The basic contradiction between labor and capital is restated and the ways in which different approaches had incorporated (or ignored) labor in relation to capital and the state are criticized. The critique covers mainstream and recent synthesized approaches but focuses more on post-Marxist political economy. The paper concludes with some suggested directions for research for addressing the capitalist state contradictions.

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The Capitalist State and Its Economy: Democracy in Socialism
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-176-7

Article
Publication date: 13 April 2015

Georgina Murray

– The purpose of this paper is to investigate who rules the world. The hypothesis is that it is the 0.1 per cent of owners and controllers of capital.

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate who rules the world. The hypothesis is that it is the 0.1 per cent of owners and controllers of capital.

Design/methodology/approach

This study used secondary sources including the Bureau Van Dyk and The World Top Incomes database to look at distributions of income and wealth (stock ownership). This is supplemented with a secondary source analysis and with some interviews.

Findings

The top point one per centers, the wealthy, those on the top incomes and transnational capitalist class are all distinct but overlapping categories that describe the (white) men and (few) women who hold power through their ownership and/or control of capital and who are thereby directly or indirectly able to act hegemonically on an emerging global basis.

Research limitations/implications

Theorists of the global school of capitalism Alveredo et al., 2013 argue that there has been a qualitatively new twenty-first century transnational capitalism in the process of emerging (see Robinson, 2012a). This paper tests this assumption and relates it to the work by Hamm 2010.

Social implications

The flip side of this progressively widening concentration of income and wealth into fewer (0.1 per cent) hands brings new lows to the polarisation of class, exploitation and domination. All of these have intensified since the 1980s with the end of the Keynesian Compromise. This north/south accentuated division has implications for social justice.

Originality/value

This seeks to identify empirical evidence to support the theory of an emerging transnational capitalist class.

Details

Foresight, vol. 17 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1463-6689

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 30 September 2020

Zophia Edwards

In recent decades, it has become clear that the major economic, political, and social problems in the world require contemporary development research to examine intersections of…

Abstract

In recent decades, it has become clear that the major economic, political, and social problems in the world require contemporary development research to examine intersections of race and class in the global economy. Theorists in the Black Radical Tradition (BRT) were the first to develop and advance a powerful research agenda that integrated race–class analyses of capitalist development. However, over time, progressive waves of research streams in development studies have successively stripped these concepts from their analyses. Post-1950s, class analyses of development overlapped with some important features of the BRT, but removed race. Post-1990s, ethnicity-based analyses of development excised both race and class. In this chapter, I discuss what we learn about capitalist development using the integrated race–class analyses of the BRT, and how jettisoning these concepts weakens our understanding of the political economy of development. To remedy our current knowledge gaps, I call for applying insights of the BRT to our analyses of the development trajectories of nations.

Details

Rethinking Class and Social Difference
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83982-020-5

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 12 October 2011

Jeb Sprague

It has been over a decade since the publication of Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri's widely read Empire, a book that claimed humanity had entered a qualitatively new era in the…

Abstract

It has been over a decade since the publication of Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri's widely read Empire, a book that claimed humanity had entered a qualitatively new era in the organization of power. How do critical sociological studies that also theorize global capitalism depart from or share affinities with Hardt and Negri's Foucauldian-inspired notion of empire? The two most important shared insights is the notion of a new epoch in the history of world capitalism and the conceptualization of a global system that moves beyond the idea of U.S. imperialism solely as behind its fundamental structure. However, overpowering Hardt and Negri's framework are some fundamental problems: the vague and nondialectical idea of multitude, the lack of the role of the state, their confusing and contradictory idea of constitutionalism, and a misapprehension of immaterial labor.

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The Diversity of Social Theories
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-821-3

Book part
Publication date: 10 February 2015

Antoine Vion, François-Xavier Dudouet and Eric Grémont

The paper examines the degree of interlocking directorships across the major Eurozone economies. It uses the major stock market indices in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands…

Abstract

The paper examines the degree of interlocking directorships across the major Eurozone economies. It uses the major stock market indices in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium to identify the top of the corporate elite in each country. For the period of 2005–2008, it studies transnational links between European companies. The paper draws attention to a number of features of these interlocks. Firstly transnational interlocks remain relatively low but secondly they do vary considerably. An important issue here is the degree of bilateral integration which is occurring between some countries within the Eurozone, for example France and Belgium, and the degree to which other countries, most notably, Italy are increasingly disconnected, whilst the two most powerful economies, France and Germany, are very weakly connected. This variability reflects a series of structural divides between big business in the Eurozone that makes it difficult for this corporate elites to be cohesive at the European level.

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Elites on Trial
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78441-680-5

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Article
Publication date: 13 April 2015

Dennis R. Morgan

The aim of this paper is to test and explore the hypothesis global ruling power, as well as review the six approaches featured in the special edition on global governance/ruling…

Abstract

Purpose

The aim of this paper is to test and explore the hypothesis global ruling power, as well as review the six approaches featured in the special edition on global governance/ruling power.

Design/methodology/approach

Anthropological and historical records are presented as support for the emergence of ruling power in society; moreover, evidence of global ruling governance/power is reviewed in the six papers featured in the special edition.

Findings

Alternatives for global governance are reviewed in two papers, while four papers present evidence in support of the thesis of the emergence of a transnational ruling power/class.

Research limitations/implications

Because global ruling power exists informally and surreptitiously, the exact mechanisms of control are difficult to delineate, especially due to the fact that the Powers that Be spend much effort to block research into this area; however, this special edition opens up a promising area for new research efforts into global ruling power and the potential for global democracy.

Practical implications

Practical implications, although minimal in the short-term, increase as awareness grows, and policy alternatives are considered for the transition to a long-term, democratic global future.

Social implications

Once social consciousness grows about the non-democratic, authoritarian nature of global ruling power/elite, the more the momentum will grow for reforms in the direction of global democracy – towards a more sustainable and equitable global system, politically, economically and ecologically.

Originality/value

This paper represents a relatively new area for interdisciplinary research into global futures. Futurists, political scientists and sociologists should find it valuable.

Details

Foresight, vol. 17 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1463-6689

Keywords

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