The Transnational Capitalist Class, Social Movements, and Alternatives to Capitalist Globalization

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to rethink and globalize the concept of the capitalist class, to suggest ways in which this class uses social movements, and to explore what might come after capitalist globalization and the hegemony of the transnational capitalist class (TCC). The first section of the paper provides evidence that there is now a flourishing community of scholars largely but not exclusively connected with the Network for Critical Studies of Global Capitalism (NCSGC), who are building a substantial foundation for research on the transnational capitalist class all over the world. The next section poses questions around the hegemony of the TCC and highlights the importance of what is conceptualized as social movements for global capitalism. Relatively little attention is paid to this compared to the vast literature on social movements against global capitalism. The paper concludes with the question: Is there a non-capitalist alternative to globalization dominated by the TCC? The answer begins with the aphorism: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world, than to imagine the end of capitalism.” My view is that this expresses a profound truth, forcing us to begin again to think through what we once conceptualized as democratic socialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational capitalist class
• social movements
• socialism
• anarchism
• globalization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Leslie Sklair is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Associate Faculty in the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics, and President of the Global Studies Association (UK). Translations of three editions of his book Globalization: Capitalism and Its Alternatives (1991, 1995, 2002) have appeared in Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Persian, Spanish, Arabic, and Korean. The Transnational Capitalist Class was published in 2001 (Chinese edition, 2002; and selections in German, 2009). His new book (The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities, and Capitalist Globalization) will be published by Oxford University Press in 2016, the final chapter of which introduces his new research project on “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Notes

1 See, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SzooNM4_4pQUkPPK-vIwYSGE46ijFlTqRVGsMMgAAH0/edit.