the power in capitalist society?
Is Ellen Wood has put it, "Many tors have sought their principal targets in transnational organisations. Some of the most well-known critics of globalisation, at least in the dominant capitalist economies, characterise it mainly as a development driven and dominated by transnational corporations, whose infamous brand names - Nike, McDonalds, Microsoft, and so on - are the symbols of today's global capitalism.
At the same time, they seem to assume that the services traditionally performed by the nation state for national capital must now be performed for transnational corporations by some kind of global state. In the absence of such a state, the political Neoliberalism is not an automatic or inevitable process, but one organised and driven by governments, and in particular the government of the United States. .... ..... work of global capital is apparently being I globalisation as being fundamentally about done by transnational institutions such as the WTO, the IME, or G8 summits."
In a recent Guardian article (October 8) Philippe Legrain attacked the global justice movement for its 'false' view that the shakers and movers on this planet, the people who have the real power, are the multinational corporations. On the contrary, he insisted, the institutions with the real power are states.
After all, didn't the US government bring Microsoft to heel, threatening it with break-up unless it complied with antimonopoly court orders? And aren't the budgets of most states much bigger than the profits of multinational corporations? And therefore shouldn't we have confidence that states can control the corporations, and we can pick and choose which : ous to every reader of this paper: govemIn the late 1960s London Vietnam protestors regularly attacked the US embassy. In 2000, the May Day marchers trashed the Whitehall branch of McDonalds. Doubtless many of the May 2000 demonstrators would have just as happily smashed up the American embassy. But, argues Phil Hearse, the different targets do illustrate a change of focus for many in the global justice movement, posing the question: who has
bits of the globalisation process we want. Legrain's article plugged into a huge debate which has been raging for years. Among some currents combating global injustice, international state issues like the impending Iraq war are secondary things, sideshows, which divert attention from the real task of bringing the big monopolies and banks to heel. In addition, international organisations like the IME, World Bank and World Trade Organisation are often seen as more important to and more responsible for globalisation than states. One of the most extreme views from within the global justice movement is that put forward by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri in their book 'Empire', which sees creating a more-or-less unified capitalist world system, marginalising national states. Legrain's fundamental idea that states are more powerful than corporations is correct as far as it goes, but his conclusions are quite wrong. This is because he doesn't investigate an obvious question to his position: states could control multinational corporations, or rather the more powerful ones could, especially if they acted together: They could tum back the tide of globalised neoliberalism, but mostly of course they don't. Why not? To answer that you need to discuss a third concept, between multinational corporation and state, which must be obviment. As would be obvious to even a Martian on the first day of their visit to earth, 'states' don't act automatically, they are run not by robots, but by governments. Generally these are composed of people from political partie: which have a definite programme, a definite point of view and act accordingly.
In the present world the most important states - those of North America, Western Europe and Japan - are run by governments which accept the main tenets of free-market neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is not an automatic or inevitable process, but one organised and driven by goverments, and in particular the government of the United States. That government is the supreme representative worldwide of the interests of the big banks and the big corporations.
To see that you don't just have to investigate policies, but look at personnel. There is no government on earth which is so dosely linked to big business as that in the United States. Top people American government move in and out of bundle rival web browsers four power centres: law firms, universities, big corporations and finance houses.
Look at George Bush Inr and vicepresident Dick Cheney: both are former CEOs of big corporations. Defence and foreign affairs specialists tend to get top academic jobs (d Kissinger's Harvard professorship). Super-rich US law firms are dosely tied with corporate clients, and don't represent something apart from big business interests; US government is littered with lawyers.
In the 1970s and '80s there were a lot of debates about the 'relative autonomy' of the state, ie its partial independence from vested interests like big business. In the US the state has autonomy only in the classical sense implied by Marx; it is usually autonomous from particular capitalist interests, but absolutely integrated with overall capitalist interests.
The example of Microsoft rather tells against Legrain's position. The US Justice Department took action against Microsoft's semi-monopoly of internet browsers, not on behalf of America consumers but after bitter complaints from others corporations (especially Netscape HONDURAS: Global capital still relies on the state machinery of repression to maintain its exploitation goverment was faithfully carrying out its role of being the representative of the capitalist class as a whole, and not just of one corporation, no matter how powerful.
In fact, the resulting compromise in the Microsoft case, which forced Bill Gates' corporations to reveal some of the source code of Windows and other systems and
with Windows, stopped short of any action against Microsoft which would have seriously damaged that company. After all, Microsoft is one of the US's flagship multinationals. Globalisation in the South....
Legrain's view is a common one which sees globalisation as an 'automatic' process of the integration of the world's economies and cultures, driven by technological change like the internet and the irresistible power of world finance capital which can be switched from one country to another at the touch of a button. This is a very partial view which misses key elements. Globalisation is not neutral, it is neoliberal globalisation. It is not an absolute free market, but regulated markets, which act according to rules determined by states.
International trade rules set by the WTO show this dearly. The WTO, along with the IMF and World Bank, wants to bust open third world and other national and Sun Microsystems). In this the US economies, and make them safe for dumping grounds-for cheap Western multinational corporations. But the WTO is not just an 'interational' organisation, it is a cartel of powerful states, led by the US. States which defy the WTO rules can be severely punished, not because the WTO bureaucracy has power in itself, but because it is backed by powerful states.
Equally, the advanced countries have the power to defy their own rules if they want; Bush's imposition of steep new import tariffs on steel entering the United States is a case in point.
But isn't it true that globalised neoliberalism has reduced the ability of states to make their own decisions, faced with the pressure from the US-led world system? Yes and no - it depends which states you are talking about. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a tremendous offensive against the South by the advanced nations. This has taken the form not only of the debt crisis - which existed well before the collapse of the USSR - but of the new trade rules of the WTO, and the attempts to deepen globalisation by expropriating the assets of states in the South.
IMF and World Bank 'conditionalities" make new loans depend on third world states privatising and de-regulating their economies, and swivelling their production towards cheap raw materials like cash crops, to be sold cheaply to the West. WTO rules make it much more difficult for the countries of the South to defy intellectual copyright by producing things like their own cheap, generic drugs - or to refuse to allow their countries to become
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goods.
Deepening globalisation in the South means debt for equity swaps (we give you more loans, you give us control of you industry, and using crises in places like Korea and Indonesia for US corporations to buy into failing local firms.
In this whole process we see international institutions acting on behalf of powerful states, which themselves are acting on behalf of the multinational corporations. Clearly it is difficult for third world states to defy this process. Doing so would mean making dear anti-imperialist political choices, mobilising the masses to defend these choices and seeking support on an international basis. That means choices of revolutionary proportions. Elites in the South are not in the least interested in this, but simply in making their pile as the local representatives ('compradors) of the world neoliberal system.
This situation shows how globalised neoliberalism has narrowed the gap for partial gains, such as were able to be made by third world nationalists in the 1950s and 1960s through nationalisations and high taxes on international companies. The stakes for opposing the world's powerful states and their corporations have been raised enormously; the choice of capitalism or anti-capitalism is much more stark. •..and in the North
The transition to the neoliberal automatically, governments forced it through. Nationalised industries didn't de-nationalise themselves, lower taxes for the rich didn't just appear one day and welfare systems weren't abolished because of the weather. These things happened because of an enormous political campaign to get bourgeois political parties to adopt neoliberalism, and this campaign was led by finance capital. Neoliberal globalisation is nothing other acquisitions, itself promoting an explosion of financial services companies.
Finance capital takes a cut of everything, seizing control of public utilities, transport systems, major companies and giant shopping malls and forcing individuals to stake their financial futures and pensions on stock market results - often, as we now know, with catastrophic results.
Finance capital in tum demands absolute freedom to move anywhere, the first and central form of globalisation. But to be safe to do that it demands a local regulatory framework which keeps its investments safe. And to do that it depends on states, and of course especialty the power of the states in which the multinationals are headquartered.
In fact there are very few corporations which are really 'multinational", ie where the nationality of the key shareholders is dispersed over more than two states. Most of these companies are headquartered in just one major imperialist country . • like the US, Britain or the Netherlands, although there are some significant AngloDutch companies.
This reality is often disguised by joint ventures, which involve subsidiaries jointly owned and controlled by multinationals from different countries. But joint ventunes can come and go; their basic building blocks are the major multinationals owned and controlled from one country. The country which has the largest num . •• ber of multinational corporations is of course the United States; and they expect what it is there for. Strategic implications
From all this we can see that in the rations and the state, and indeed the "international" organisations like the WTO and the IME, are interlocking structures in a single system. Top personnel move easily between them, and they complement one another in their funicagainst ecological degradation etc all con their state to defend their interests. That is tribute to highlighting different terrible
effects of globalised capitalism. Partial gains on all these fronts can be ! to attain at an international level. Long-term solutions however need recognition of two key factors. First, the neoliberal system which has deepened - achanced countries the big corpo- the scope for multinaionals to ramn the
advanced economies, within particular nation states. Upending the power of the BRADFORD: British cops mete out the global formula of repression against any who resist Upending the power of the multinationals means inflicting lasting defeats on capitalism in the belly of the beast. In the end only the power of the working class has the potential to do that.
beast. In the end only the power of the working dass has the potential to do that. achieved, although they are more difficult states, military power plays a key role.
Unbridled militarism from the United States is not something separate from neoliberalism in general, or from the power of the multinationals in particular. The planned allocation of oil concesround the world, has its key base in the sions in post war Iraq to the US oil majors
shows this vividly. The fight against imperialist war, the multinationals means inficting lasting i fight to stay the hand of American mili: the multinationals.
2002 13 defeats on capitalism in the belly of the tarism in Iraq, is not something separate
from global justice, but central to it. Indeed, for the moment, the question of Second, in the current hierarchy of war in Iraq is the central question of world
politics. Revolutionary socialists therefore champion all the struggles against privatisation and the destruction of welfare in the advanced countries, the fight for justice in the South and the fight against war. Another world is possible? Only if we fight against the power of imperialist states as well as the power of