Tag: economics

Transnational Capitalism and Global Crises

The race among dominant transnational corporations for ownership and control of AI technologies is a defining characteristic of the latest phase of the geoeconomics and geopolitics of global capitalism. This phase accelerated after the global capitalist crisis of 2008, which has resulted in several trends that have been driven by a systemic crisis of neoliberal capitalism. The first is the stagnation of global value chains reflected by global trade statistics, as the volume of global trade dramatically fell in the aftermath of the 2008 capitalist recession and has failed to rebound to pre-crisis levels if adjusted as percentage of GDP. The biggest factor behind the global trade slowdown has been the slower growth rates of trade within global value chains. In response, transnational corporations reduced the complexity of global value chains (incorporating fewer suppliers) in favor of greater capital-intensity and greater consolidation of those value chains around the most important global markets. As part of this process, transnational corporations have reorganized their global capitalist employees more rigidly around two categories: production supervisors and managers that oversee the logistical and supply operations of the global value chains and are relatively well-paid, and workers who produce within these chains at wages that continue to stagnate and decline relative to capitalist revenues.

Second, the gap between the profits of the dominant transnational corporations and the wages of the global capitalist workforce has grown wider, as more wealth is concentrated at the top. This has resulted in a further “hollowing out” of the industrial workforce in the core capitalist states, often expressed as a shrinking “middle class,” alongside the increased exploitation of the global working class. These class tensions have resulted in further deligitimacy of capitalist governments in the West, contributing to the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. and other neo-fascist political figures and parties in Western Europe, and also in several countries in the global South. The increased intra- and inter- class tension is a long-term byproduct of the contradictions of a capitalist political project that has steadily increased the power of transnational interest blocs while reducing the political influence of workers and ordinary citizens, whose political marginalization and alienation have steadily increased.

Third, the global value chains that were previously dominated by North-South linkages, with the dominant transnational corporations concentrated in the Northern states, have increasingly been challenged by the dramatic rise of China and the policies of the Chinese state, particularly in the area of high-technology, which has helped to shift global value chains in a South-South direction, with countries of the global South, led by China, reorienting global value chains toward production, marketing and consumption within the global South, driven by the global expansion of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. At the same time, the Chinese state has enacted policies that have contributed to a greater emphasis on domestic production and accumulation and to more stringent requirements for foreign transnationals investing in high-technology manufacturing in China in an attempt to assert greater control over some of the most lucrative global value chains.

The business and political coalitions in U.S. foreign policy that once advocated political and economic cooperation with China have been eclipsed from the mid-2010s to the present. Global capitalist crises, starting with the 2008 global recession, have sharpened the tensions between U.S. corporations which have long benefitted from locating their global value chains within the China market and those corporations who have long felt threatened by the competition posed by Chinese exports. Meanwhile the Chinese government has sought to extract more concessions from foreign investors and to increase the scope and scale of state intervention toward an upscaling of Chinese capacity in 5G technology and artificial intelligence.

An acceleration of Chinese nationalist political strategies in recent years, combined with the global political and economic crises of the covid pandemic, have increased the costs of foreign direct investments for Western corporations in China. Western corporations that have long been in competition with China, have been joined by a broader coalition of transnational investors that have aggressively led the campaign for heightened sanctions against China. This coalition has been bolstered by defections of some transnational firms in the information technology sector away from supporting cooperation with China and toward support for a more militarized competition with China. In fact, as I have documented elsewhere, there is a growing marriage between several powerful Silicon Valley firms and the military-industrial-surveillance complex reflected in the ascendancy of military contracts secured by the big tech sector, especially driven by the AI arms race.

Interest groups within the military-industrial-surveillance complex, which have long sought to identify China as a threat justification for higher military budgets, have identified an expansion of Chinese military capacity and utilization, especially in the South China Sea, as a threat to U.S. extra-regional hegemony in Asia. The rise of China’s economic and military capacity in Asia and its long-term claim to the island of Taiwan, with newly rising military maneuvers and tensions in recent years, has accelerated an increasing confrontational posture between the U.S. and China. The heightened competition between the U.S. and China, filtered through transnational capitalist competition for AI supremacy in global markets, is driving much of the geoeconomic maneuvering between transnational firms and the geostrategic competition between the U.S. and China.

My 2019 book, Corporate Power, Class Conflict and the Crisis of the New Globalization, is where I develop many of the these arguments (this blog includes material updated from that book). See also two excellent books that provide more recent analysis of how transnational capitalist competition is fueling geostrategic rivalry between the U.S. and China, including Clash of Empires by Ho-fung Hung, Cambridge Press, 2022, and Silicon Empires by Nick Srnicek, Polity Books, 2026. The key battles revolve around how surplus value will be extracted from global value chains, which transnational interest bloc coalitions will benefit the most from the political economy of value extraction and, most importantly, how will ownership and control over high-technology processes be determined in this phase of global capitalism? In my next two blogs, I will review the books referenced here and provide further reflections on how to understand our current configuration of global corporate and class power.

Trump the Grifter Idiot

Here are just a few thoughts about what it’s like for those of us in the U.S. to be in a country that is literally being led by the equivalent of a stupefying and mind-numbing infantile asshole. How can anyone doubt that Trump the Idiot’s rule is both an extension of a system that has long been plutocratic, corrupt, venal and self-destructive and one that has degenerated into an Onion-like parody of its historically most rapacious, uncaring and venomous tendencies. Even attempts at rational analysis, such as I have tried with my blog, fail to capture the full amount of the head-slapping, cringe inducing headlines that reflect the priorities of a deranged lunatic whose proclivities for self-enrichment are aided and abetted by Nazi symbols and music being deployed by a domestic occupying army whose activities of death and destruction are being celebrated by inside the beltway grifters and propagandists. Meanwhile, some Democrats look at this and only call for better training? 

Regarding the so-called “ruling class,” they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the tech billionaire sector whose wealth and power far exceeds any other coherent expression of unified interests. Therefore any analyst has to recognize that the marriage of Trump gangster capitalism and big tech gangsterism has taken ludicrous turns, illustrated by the economic and military threats to take Greenland. Reuters News reported during the 2024 Presidential campaign that Trump addressed his corporate donors about his Greenland plans, supported by members of the billionaire venture capitalist and big tech profiteers, as a way to expand their zones for super wealthy capitalist enrichment as a kind of plutocratic paradise free of any regulation or accountability. Grifters everywhere who want to shield their wealth from public scrutiny applaud this as a victory for global con men and mafioso elites who now have their closest friend in the White House.

The historian Quinn Slobodian has long chronicled the rise of the anarcho-capitalist big tech billionaires in the U.S. whose plans for tech monarchy freed from democratic accountability has a lengthy history. Trump’s alliance with these big tech billionaires has been starkly evident in his administration’s global threats to U.S. state governors and foreign leaders that there will be consequences if regulation blocks unbridled tech expansion of energy guzzling data centers. Rachel Adams in The New Empire of AI and Karen Hao in Empire of AI both detail the neo-colonial domination of the tech billionaire class, leveraging its wealth and resources to force concessions on taxation, regulation and subsidies on governments and localities around the world.

Meanwhile capitalist political parties in the U.S. and elsewhere, who have long lost much of their power of the purse to become heavily dependent on capitalist financiers to finance government debts and carry out government programs, channel public money through the big tech sector without asking much in return. Whether Democrat or Republican in the U.S., the answer is not accountability of big tech to the public, but instead how can the government lavish big tech with resources to be even more dominant, under the guise of global competition with China. This is competition that allows the already super rich to get richer still, and take down the globe with them, fueling climate degradation, increased militarism and resource grabbing imperialism.

The “left”, to the extent we exist, have to be as nimble as possible in maneuvering through a corporate-dominated system by broadening the tent to include all activities that have a chance to shine a spotlight on the costs and consequences of this corporate plutocracy: diminishing living and working conditions, environmental devastation, and even larger gaps between rich and poor. We need to work with everyone fighting back against this, but not with politicians aiding and abetting a neo-fascist party whose rhetoric of “populism” is merely a cover for their rapacious and authoritarian political project.

Favorite Books of 2023

This past year was rich in scholarship. A few of these books were published in 2022, but I read them this year and felt they had to be on this list since they were so compelling. That includes the first two, The Long Land War by Jo Guldi and Internet for the People by Ben Tarnoff. Guldi’s book is a magisterial account of the history of social, political and economic battles over ownership of land.

Guldi provides a sweeping overview of how colonial power structures, militaries, police forces and laws imposed from above, worked to expand control of land for the few, but in turn have been consistently challenged by social movements and revolutions from below, which have attempted, sometimes successfully, but often not, to redistribute landholding from the few to the many. Guldi is meticulous in identifying the historical patterns that have helped determine the winners and losers in the “Long Land War,” and as such, produces the first book of its kind to be written on such a large and inclusive historical and geographical canvas.

Ben Tarnoff also examines structures of power and domination within the history of the Internet, focusing on how public funding was used in the U.S. to develop the architecture of the Internet, only to transfer that architecture to private sector corporations for profit. Tarnoff offers compelling examples of efforts to fight back and create public alternatives to private sector domination of the Internet.

Michael Zweig, an economist and long-time organizer and activist, has written a gem of a book: one of the best introductions on how to think about the relationship between theory, practice, and building successful social movements. Instead of getting caught up in the counterproductive exercise of separating class from race and gender, Zweig articulates what should be a common sense notion for people on the left: advancements toward greater equality in each and all of these areas: class, race and gender, should be applauded. Zweig provides a useful roadmap of how to conceptualize the fight for social justice in a way that should be of use for a wide range of social justice movements.

Quinn Slobodian, whose previous book The Globalists tracked the origins of neoliberal ideology from the 1920s and 1930s to the present, examines how libertarians, especially anarcho-capitalists, have championed special economic zones as areas of uber-privilege for capitalist owners—free of any public accountability or democratic control. Within these zones, which have proliferated under neoliberal global capitalism, capitalist ownership enclaves determine winners and losers through monetary exchange, which then sorts out the successful from the unsuccessful based on private capitalist accumulation, absent intermediaries, other than—and this is an important caveat: a militarized and authoritarian state structure that serves to protect wealth from democratic politics. It’s an eye-opening account of the marriage between libertarian ideology and authoritarianism.

The other books on my list cover a wide range of provocative topics in a thoughtful and informed way. Christina Gerhardt offers a compelling account of the impact of climate change from the bottom up, profiling the islands that are slowly and steadily disappearing through the eyes and minds of islanders themselves. Malcom Harris examines the historical evolution of Silicon Valley, especially its connections to systemic racism and eugenics, the military-industrial complex, corporate welfare and corporate power blocs that have used their privilege to monopolize their positions in contemporary capitalism. Antony Loewenstein traces the history of the Israeli state from a militarized domestic apartheid to a global seller of weapons to dictatorships around the world. Gary Anderson has edited an important collection of articles showing how the creation and expansion of NATO has always been firmly grounded in the interests of dominant corporations and states, not so much in the interests of the public.

Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire have written a must-read account of the corporate forces that have engaged in a decades long push to privatize public schools in the U.S. and the consequences of these policies, as well as the efforts to fight back. Will Bunch identifies the corporatization of universities, with less public funding, rising tuition and dependence on large-scale student debt, as systemic drivers of inequality in the U.S.

Kerry Howley in Bottoms Up examines the growing infrastructure of the U.S. surveillance state, especially its lack of accountability and its treatment of whistleblowers. Joe Posnanski is a beautiful writer of baseball history and his new book captures many of the joys of fandom.

Victor Lavalle’s Lone Women is a wonderful narrative that combines science fiction with social history in its story of an African-American woman homesteading from California to Montana in the early 20th century in search of a new beginning, but also in possession of both a curse and a revenge for wrongs committed in the past. Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi wrote a science fiction novel about The Centre, a language institute that is capable of training individuals to speak any foreign language fluently within just a couple of weeks, but at a significant price.

Steven Conn’s Lies of the Land is a much-needed corrective to simplistic tropes about rural America. Conn argues that the same corporations that have dominated urban areas also prevail in rural America, from military-industrial corporations, retail chains, extractive industries, and manufacturing plants. There is a class structure here from which the politics follow, rather than just a disgruntled angry base that votes for Donald Trump. Naomi Klein has written one of her best books that captures the larger socioeconomic and political implications of identity creation, re-creation and marketing through social media, led by Klein’s own experience of being confused for Naomi Wolf, a deep state conspiracist of the far right. Gilbert Achcar has published a collection of his excellent and perceptive essays on the ways that the U.S. has used the post-Cold War period to entrench a set of expansive, militaristic policies in search of new enemies. Costas Lapavitsas has edited a book, The State of Capitalism, that has several worthwhile contributions useful for understanding trends in global corporate power. Evan Drellich examines the ethical bankruptcy of major league baseball’s Houston Astros by locating their cheating scandal within a larger use of baseball analytics in which winning becomes the justification for scrapping morality, not that this is terribly new or novel, but a compelling read.