Transnational Capital and the Trend of Global Interactions

ABSTRACT

Economic globalization has been accompanied by the cross-border development of class relations. Resting on large-scale cross-border operations by transnational corporations, capital is accelerating the formation of a transnational capitalist class. The capitalist world has formed new, contradictory relations based on a multitude of existing inherent contradictions, rendering the world situation still more complex. In the late twentieth century, a number of scholars began to focus on this phenomenon, discussing various of its aspects such as the gap between rich and poor brought about by the formation of a transnational capitalist class on a global scale; the transnational capitalist class and the question of global hegemony; and the relation between the transnational capitalist class and the world system. Their discussions have since attracted the attention of Chinese scholars. This paper presents a basic theoretical analysis of the above phenomenon using the methodology of historical materialism, while also summarizing and commenting on the opinions of representative scholars.

KEYWORDS:

• Globalization
• transnational capital
• global system

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributor

Xiaoping Wei is professor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). She is also vice-director of the China Society of History of Marxist Philosophy, vice-director of the Society of Western Marxist Philosophy, and vice-director of the Society of Economic Philosophy. Her research area is Marxist political philosophy. She is the author of The Reflection on the Historical Subject and Historical Object (Beijing Publishing House, 1999), On the Tracks of Karl Marx (People’s Publishing House, 2005), German Ideology, Re-read and Analysis from MEGA (People’s Publishing House, 2010), Rethinking China’s Economic Transformation (Global Scholarly Publications, 2010), The Road towards “Capital”: On the Track of Marx’s Labor Theory of Value: Read MEGA2 (China Social Sciences Press, 2013). Her publications have been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Slovakian, Japanese, Vietnamese and Czech.

Notes

1 To describe it, Chinese scholars use a more accurate term, “transnational capitalist class” instead of “transnational bourgeoisie.”