Lecture
In everyday life, globalization is felt by most of the Earth's population across every sphere of social existence: from global problems that are practically relevant to everyone, to the worldwide market of goods (when we buy Chinese clothing, Dutch butter, Australian apples, and so on) and a unified "information field" (suffice it to mention the worldwide media and identical advertising found everywhere in the world — for everything from soft drinks to films).
As a starting point for our analysis, let us use a set of theses that are, in principle, generally accepted. As a first approximation, let us use the notion of globalization as a process that, first, characterizes a certain new quality of contemporary society as a unified, worldwide, global entity. We will try to work out below what exactly constitutes this new quality, but for now let us note that globalization, second, is precisely a process, and therefore has a definite measure of its own development. Moreover, this process (like any social process) is contradictory and nonlinear. Given this, the measure of globalization naturally can be, and is, different for different periods of social time and different "loci" of social space (put simply, the measure of globalization of social life differs for a village in the Russian hinterland and for Brussels, and it may rise or fall from year to year depending on a variety of circumstances). Accordingly, third, few would doubt that alongside globalization, the contemporary world also sees the development of opposing processes (localization, the renaissance of the social role of a number of national states, the "divergence" and clash of civilizations, differentiation in quality of life, and so on). Finally, it seems logical to assert that this is a process unfolding simultaneously at the level of technical-economic relations (productive forces), socio-economic relations (relations of production), socio-political relations, and cultural relations. If we agree with these notions, then the key question comes to the fore: what exactly is this new quality of the socio-spatial existence of the contemporary world, and does it even exist? The authors would answer this question as follows (for now this is no more than a hypothesis): globalization develops in the contemporary world to the extent that "global players" (the list is well known: TNCs, supranational institutions such as NATO, the IMF, the WTO, and the like, and the superpowers...) exert influence — up to and including decisive influence — on the economic, social, political, and spiritual processes taking place within national states and on the international stage. If we look at the process of globalization more rigorously, using a Marxist approach we can distinguish both the objective foundations and causes of this process (the progress of the worldwide socialization of production, in particular the deepening of the international division of labor to a level where it becomes no less significant than the division of labor within nations; the intensification of global problems to a level where solving them affects the vital interests of the majority of the Earth's citizens and requires the intervention of the world community; the development of global transport and telecommunications systems to a level where they become part of citizens' everyday lives, and so on) and their specific historical form. It is precisely the latter that is often designated by the term "globalization," and it constitutes the socio-spatial existence of the contradictions of the worldwide hegemony of corporate capital — or, in other words, the global hegemony of corporate capital as a particular historical social form of the processes of internationalization, "globalization the capitalist way." This is why we insist on distinguishing between (1) the objective and, on the whole, despite all their contradictions, progressive processes of internationalization, and (2) their particular late-capitalist form, which can and must be superseded, overcome. Internationalization can and must acquire new social forms.
Capitalist globalization is the socio-economic form of the objective process of the internationalization of production characteristic of late capitalism. It manifests itself in the establishment of the worldwide hegemony of large corporate capital and in the formation of a world capital market as an instrument of that hegemony
As the first "layer" of the globalization process, we can single out the globalization of the productive forces, and in particular international macro-technology, characterized by a number of specific features. First, the productive forces have attained a global condition. The problem of the use of natural resources has turned into its opposite: the preservation, restoration, and development of nature as a cultural value — that is, it has become a global problem uniting different states (in space) and different generations (in time). From now on, the use of any natural resource on any significant scale, in any country, becomes a global problem (in both time and space) — a problem whose existence must be taken into account when determining production technology, costs, and the useful effect of this activity by virtually all major economic, political, and other actors with the status of "global players." Moreover, not only weapons of mass destruction but also modern energy, transport, nuclear, chemical, microbiological, and similar technologies make the world unified and integral, both from a positive standpoint and from a negative one (the possibility of its destruction). Second, a system of extremely contradictory and far from always effective, yet rigid, dependencies is taking shape within global society — dependencies that, in the spirit of old Marxist traditions, should be called worldwide socialization. In essence, the international division of labor has itself become global; it is gradually coming to exert greater influence on production and economic life than the division of labor within national states. Even the production of perfectly ordinary industrial goods (automobiles, for instance) is carried out on the basis of international cooperation (including within a single — but transnational! — firm). Unified worldwide technological standards now extend to all the main products of industrial and post-industrial technology (from the dimensions of rolled steel and the quality of gasoline to software and even the sizes of vegetables and fruit). As early as the mid-twentieth century, the power grid of the CMEA member countries demonstrated the technological efficiency of unified international energy networks. In essence, requirements for the quality and safety of air transport, standards for container freight shipping, and much else have become worldwide. However, global socialization affects not only the international division of labor and the extremely intensive flows of raw materials, materials, finished products, and services, but also the development of international cooperation of labor, which links thousands of production facilities around the world through flexible cooperative ties. And while in the sphere of traditional industrial technologies these ties are stable and long-term, in high-technology and post-industrial sectors cooperation takes the form of network structures and even network enterprises, in which ideally calibrated and individualized (tailored to a specific consumer) products are created by hundreds and thousands of links with minute-level precision. This cooperation becomes flexible, yet at the same time even more intensive. Because of this, we can say that, third, the most important feature of the global character of the productive forces is the spread of new industrial and post-industrial technologies and telecommunications — above all information technologies — that are worldwide by their very nature (the simplest illustration being the well-known Internet, which has had a worldwide character from the moment of its birth). On the whole, the process of globalization (even when considered so far only at the technical-economic level — its social and political aspects are discussed below) turns out to be burdened with significant internal contradictions. These concern both the opposing tendencies in the development of the global macro-technology as such (above all the contradiction between the internationalization and localization of production processes, which finds one of its resolutions in the formation of open global technological systems), and the contradictions in the development of the global productive forces caused by the currently dominant social form of this process — global capital. The latter leads, in particular, to an international division of labor that is artificially overdeveloped (relative to technological, ecological, and humanitarian criteria) and to powerful geo-technological disproportions. These disproportions in turn give rise to yet another contradiction. The "North" (let us use this generally accepted term to denote the social space that is the "homeland" of the subjects of global hegemony, the global players), inheriting the achievements of centuries of bourgeois development, colonialism, and neocolonialism, and possessing a limited, steadily reproduced population with deep-rooted traditions of life under market conditions, creates (and monopolizes) high technologies, a skilled labor force, and opportunities for breakthroughs into post-industrial spheres, while absorbing the greater part (up to 80%) of the Earth's natural resources and exporting to the "Third" world dirty technologies that require the mass use of low-skilled labor and that deplete (pollute, destroy...) the natural environment. The "South" (let us use this term to denote the social space in which the objects of global hegemony live and act) correspondingly supplies natural resources to the developed economies, concentrates pre-industrial and dirty industrial technologies, and because of this (as well as the dominance of pre-bourgeois and early-bourgeois traditions in its way of life) turns out to be burdened with serious social, demographic, ecological, and other problems. Being a characteristic of the "twilight" of the "realm of necessity" (the world of social alienation) as a whole, this feature of globalization acquires a special aspect. Let us recall that the form taken by progress of the creatosphere in this world is the growth of the perverted (inverted) sector. Because of this, the possibilities for the progress of the creatosphere are absorbed by the perverted forms characteristic of this sector. The process of globalization begins to "feed" on resources released from material production and concentrates predominantly in such spheres as transactions (especially finance and trade), militarism, bureaucracy, mass culture, the media, and the like. Thus the process of globalization turns out to be directed (even at the level of the productive forces) toward consolidating the hegemony of transnational corporate capital, fused with the ruling elites of a number of states (above all the United States and the other countries of the "Group of Seven").
Turning to the second "layer" of the globalization process, the one situated at the level of socio-economic relations, let us first identify a number of widely known forms that ensure the worldwide hegemony of corporate capital and "consolidate" the preconditions for such hegemony identified at the preceding — technical-productive — level. For our investigation let us make use of the dialectic of the system of categories that reflects the internal structure of relations of production and allows us to distinguish such subsystems as the mode of coordination, relations of appropriation/alienation, reproduction, and others. Among the key contradictions of socio-economic globalization lying in the sphere of resource allocation (the mode of coordination), the one traditionally cited is the counterpoint between national — predominantly state — regulation and the world market, which is predominantly freely competitive. This contradiction does indeed "exist" and is one of the main challenges to the social-democratic trend in economic policy of recent decades. However, there are other, far less conspicuous but no less significant contradictions that characterize the specific nature of the mode of coordination of the global economy of late capitalism. Thus, the thesis of the formation of a total market of networks permeated by "fields of dependency" allows us to formulate a direct corollary: the existence of a system of relations of local regulation of the world market for goods, services, capital, and labor by TNCs and other global players. Let us deliberately repeat: the global market, contrary to the currently dominant mythology of market fundamentalism, is thoroughly regulated — only not by national states, but by global players. It is essential to note that the scale and intensity of regulation of the global market is arguably no less significant than the regulation of national economies. The reason for this lies, in particular, in the fact that TNCs and other global players subject to their regulatory influence predominantly counterparties that are qualitatively less developed. These counterparties, as a rule, are weaker than the TNCs in technological terms, in the level of capital concentration, in institutional development, in the strength of their political "cover" (it is one thing when your transactions are protected by the army and navy of the United States, quite another when you are country N, with an annual GDP smaller than the sales volume of a single subsidiary of an average TNC), and in other parameters that neoclassical economics assigns to the sphere of "market power." No less significant is the fact that the oldest and most universally recognized function of the state in economic theory — establishing the "rules of the game" in the market, and establishing and protecting property rights and contracts — is, as globalization develops, increasingly passing from national states to transnational institutions such as the WTO and others. Moreover, the seemingly neutral and unified "rules of the game" in global markets are in fact substantially different for actors belonging to national economies at different levels of development. As George Orwell once wrote, "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
Thus, it is well known that WTO rules are by no means uniform and differ substantially from country to country. In particular, the permitted amounts of state support for agriculture differ,1 as do the possibilities for using dumping prices, customs quotas, and the like, as well as the ability to compel violators to comply with these rules. Even more significant is the fact that the real possibilities for protecting property rights and contracts also differ substantially for different actors in the world economic system. If the most important of these actors decide that, in their view, some national state fails to comply with certain "universal human" norms and/or market rules, they can and do impose sanctions (up to and including economic blockade) that not merely undermine but simply destroy the foundations of free global competition for an entire range of economic players. Moreover, such sanctions, as a rule, are merely cloaked in rhetoric about "human rights" and "democracy," since they allow active economic cooperation with the fascist Pinochet while imposing a blockade on Cuba, where the real rights of ordinary citizens are protected far better than in many countries of the world with which the same United States is "friendly." Moreover, since, as we have already noted, some national states and their unions (the US, the EU...) are at the same time global players who set the rules of the game in world markets, we can speak of proto-imperial regulation of global markets by a limited circle of [super]national states. State regulation is indeed exercised in the world market, but for most of the world's national economies this regulation comes from a "foreign" state.
Such regulation turns out to be all the more active and significant the more a given national economy is dependent on world technological and economic flows — especially on financial markets in general and on flows of freely convertible currency in particular. In this case (especially in the case of the US dollar) it becomes especially clear that in the modern economy, state regulation of the world market (and the regulation of monetary circulation is one of the key functions of the state) is carried out by one of the [super]national states. Finally, the "rules of the game" in global labor markets are absolutely unequal for different actors: they are practically free for citizens of the "First" world and rigidly restricted for citizens of the "Third." These are only some of the real contradictions of the total regulation of world markets by global players. Let us now rise to the level of the fundamental relation of production of global capitalism — the relation between global capital and labor. As a relation of production, capital acquires a number of qualitatively new features under conditions of globalization. First, the dominant form of capital becomes the transnational corporation (TNC). Let us begin our analysis with some definitions. The investigation carried out above allows us to show that a corporation is transnational to the extent that it (unlike an "ordinary" national monopoly corporation) constitutes a subject of hegemony (in particular, of monopolistic local regulation and market influence, and of the subordination of labor and of the human being) across a number of states. Moreover, a TNC constitutes an inter- and supra-state institutional form of international capital. If, in addition, it is based not in one country (as an "ordinary" TNC) but in several, then we can speak of a multinational corporation — but the point is not one of terminological nuance. What matters more is that, from a substantive standpoint, it can be defined as that form of corporate capital which generates the "field of dependency" described above and a system of relations of subordination of labor and of the human being on an international (in the limit, worldwide) scale — a "spider" that has created and continually reproduces one of the world's networks. As a result, the hegemony of corporate capital manifests itself as the power of a worldwide-unified (though internally competitive and antagonistic) global capital. Globalization changes not only capital but also labor. The globalization of labor relations is characterized by the formation of a world labor market permeated by the deepest contradictions generated by the world hegemony of capital. On the one hand, this market has already become unified and worldwide, since a single transnational global capital uses (exploits) hired workers in any country, in any region; labor is united by the capital that uses it (in particular, by TNCs) into a single worldwide process of reproduction.
On the other hand, capital does everything possible to ensure that the labor market (unlike, say, the market for goods) is:
• fundamentally fragmented, rigidly divided into qualitatively distinct, largely closed subsystems that are politically and economically localized;
• not even formally free, but controlled in each of its fragments by the subject of global hegemony;
• unequal in rights: in different "loci" of the world labor market, the content and structure of the aggregate worker, the dominant working conditions, the price of labor, the opportunities for developing human qualities and realizing "human capital," and the degree of social protection and organization of workers are all qualitatively different. As a result, global capital objectively and subjectively forms a system of economic and socio-political relations in which hired workers, as the socio-economic force opposing capital (in the labor market, and in socio-economic and political struggle), are reproduced under conditions in which deep disproportions persist in wages, social security, working conditions and the content of labor (and hence in the entire way of life of workers) between developed and developing countries.
These disproportions include:
• the stable reproduction of predominantly low-skilled pre-industrial and early-industrial labor in the "Third" world, and of skilled industrial and post-industrial labor in the "First" world, leading not only to a fundamental difference in the structure of the aggregate worker between the two groups of countries, but also to the entrenchment of this gap;1
• a gap of tens of times in the pay of workers of the same qualification;
• qualitative differences in the level and scope of social protection, working conditions, and social insurance and security between the named groups of countries, which entrenches qualitative differences in the content and character of the reproduction of labor and the labor force;
• persistent institutional barriers dividing the world labor market into rigidly fixed segments (the movement of labor is hedged about with far greater barriers than the movement of capital; emigration to developed countries from developing ones is extremely difficult).
If we now look at the process of interaction between labor and capital, we can easily note a number of important consequences of the analysis carried out above. A unified world capital (especially financial capital), which has roughly the same value at any point on the globe (in some cases, in the "Third" world, capital can yield even greater profit than in developed countries, given the greater riskiness of operations), interacts with a class of hired workers that is divided into segments and permeated by disproportions. Partial protection of the interests of labor, and at least a relative limitation of the exploitation of labor, are achieved only in certain national state formations. Under these conditions, capital — which is the subject of hegemony in the world economy and which makes use of the form of virtual (especially mobile) capital — gains the possibility of almost absolutely free maneuvering on a world scale, opposing hired labor and using it wherever and however this provides it the greatest benefit. The globalization of the hegemony of corporate capital thus means that unified world capital:
• is organized within highly effective transnational institutions (TNCs, the IMF, NATO, and the like) that control, within certain limits, markets and small business, hired workers, and "clients";
• possesses almost unlimited freedom in choosing the spheres of its application (this freedom implies the possibility of moving between fields of activity, regions of the world, and so on), which gives it undeniable advantages relative to hired labor (which in most cases is rigidly "attached" to national-state spaces, and in the case of low-skilled labor, to regional and occupational spaces);
• uses the advantages of its transnational cooperation and mobility to establish worldwide dominance and to reinforce disproportions and contradictions between regions and countries, and between social and national groups. Thus is formed the contradiction between labor and capital in the era of globalization. At one pole stands capital: global, integrated, organized, moving freely within an international economy, fused with national state and international institutions, and possessing not only economic but also political and spiritual power. At the other pole stands labor: differentiated, fragmented, localized within the scale of national states, regions, and industries (to this day the interests and rights of workers, insofar as they are defended at all, are defended predominantly on a national, or even local or sectoral, scale — this applies both to trade unions and to state systems of social protection), weakly organized, and not currently a force comparable in influence to capital. Moreover, the hegemony of capital, which in the conditions of the genesis of post-industrial technologies strives to subordinate the human personality, leads — under the internationalization of this process — to the comprehensive subordination of the human qualities of hired workers to transnational standards, turning them into global philistines and pushing alternatives to capitalist hegemony to the margins of nationalism. Thus, through a complex system of channels of its hegemony, global capital as a whole strives to subordinate humanity as a whole. Not only in the relations between an individual capitalist and a hired worker, but also (gradually) on the scale of the entire Earth, a transformation is taking place of the human being (the worker, the client, the consumer of mass-produced goods and mass media) into an impersonal function of global corporate capital, into a cog in the "global human-anthill." Thus we approach directly the phenomenon of the globalization of the reproduction process, characteristic of the relations of late capitalism. Let us begin with the fact that, as a result of the synthesis in the reproduction process of the properties described above, the functioning of the world economy turns out to be subordinated to the competitive-antagonistic interaction of TNCs to the extent that the process of globalization unfolds in the world (let us recall, it is uneven, nonlinear, contradictory!). This subordination manifests itself, in particular, in the fact that, first, the key global players (TNCs and others) turn out to be capable of exerting local regulatory influence (on an international scale!) on all the parameters discussed above:
• the world market for labor and "human capital," on which an international army of workers takes shape, living by the rules of the corporation and encompassing tens and hundreds of thousands of people — from the elite of managers and technology developers in developed countries to the impoverished computer assemblers and McDonald's waiters of the "Third" world;
• consumers, turning them into internationally standardized "clients" of Coca-Cola or representatives of the "Pepsi generation";
• small business (creating an international dependency of small entrepreneurs on a given TNC, one that runs through a number of states);
• a number of states, fusing with their ruling elites, maintaining lobbies in governments, parliaments, and municipal structures;
• international business structures (from the IMF and the WTO to the closed clubs of the TNC elite);
• information systems (including international ones), dominated by media holding companies that are themselves TNCs and are fused with other TNCs through cross-ownership of shares, personal union, and the like; • mass culture and show business, where the most dynamic subsystem of the contemporary global economy is taking shape, based on the genesis and unfolding of spheres lying "on the other side of material production";
• education, science, and genuine art (through "charitable" foundations and a number of other non-governmental organizations). The ultimate product of these fields of dependency is the "global human-anthill" (A. Zinoviev), with a standardized yet, at the same time, extremely contradictory way of life. The global standard for a Russian or Chinese seamstress sewing a Hugo Boss suit, and for the top manager of a global TNC who wears that suit, represents two ways of life that differ from one another in every respect — perhaps even more sharply than the lives of a serf and a landowner. Moreover, the processes described above of neo-marketization (the genesis of a total corporate-network market) and neo-privatization become worldwide, and can only be understood as worldwide, since, as a rule, the different poles, subjects and objects of hegemony belong not only to different levels of the social structure but are also separated from one another in space (for example, financial-information centers and the industrial periphery of corporations typically belong not merely to different countries, but to different worlds). The struggle between these TNCs, and within them, becomes a crucial factor determining the state of the contemporary world community. Second, global capital, based on the international socialization of production and the growth of the sphere of transactions, transforms the world financial market and the world markets for capital and goods into the dominant spheres of economic life on a world scale. Those who rule these markets (especially the world financial market) become the masters of the world community. Thus arises the crucial (and very widely discussed) problem of financial globalization. It is precisely in this sphere, key to contemporary capital, that the processes unfold which determine the economy of late capitalism and turn it into the functioning of global virtual fictitious financial capital par excellence (the world crisis that began in 2008 only temporarily slowed the unfolding of these processes):
• the scale of transactions on currency and other world financial markets significantly exceeds — to the point of a qualitative difference — the volumes of production of material goods and trade in them;
• the dominance of world financial corporations (banks with capital volumes in the hundreds of billions of dollars, nearly an order of magnitude greater than the budgets of most countries in the world), operating as monopolistic "spiders" in international markets;
• the nearly determining influence on geo-economics of international institutions of financial regulation (it is no secret that not only private firms but also many dozens of national states depend on the IMF and the private-state capitals standing behind it);
• international flows of capital (including public and private debt) that largely determine the fate of national economies, and so on.
In our view, behind these phenomena lies an essential shift that is noted today, in one form or another, by many researchers. Financial globalization (the global hegemony of virtual fictitious capital) unfolds in the world to the extent that the micro- and macroeconomic parameters of national economic systems (the volume and direction of investment, marketing strategy, directions of growth, structural shifts in national economic systems and in the world division of labor, the level and dynamics of inflation, and much else) take shape under the determining influence of the conjuncture of financial markets, which are dominated by a limited circle of mutually competing financial TNCs ("spiders") forming interlocking virtual fictitious networks ("webs"). Ultimately, it is precisely the global struggle among these corporation-networks that becomes (though has not yet become) the decisive factor in the socio-economic life not only of individual capitals but of countries and peoples. At the same time, on the whole the global financial system remains predominantly spontaneous and weakly regulated — a "black box." However, in individual cases the largest financial corporation-networks ("spiders") are capable of pursuing a coordinated strategy of subordinating (or destroying) potential competitors, of seizing spaces not yet under their control (the "paving over" of economies), and of other coordinated actions, up to and including wars (when consolidated with the institutions of political globalization). Third, TNCs that dominate on a world scale fuse not only with national states but also with the international bodies of interstate regulation of the world economy. The creation of the latter is an expression, on the one hand, of the international socialization of the economy and of socio-political processes, and, on the other, of a new (compared to the first half of the twentieth century) mechanism of the dominance of capital and its institutions at the macro level. These supranational interstate institutions turn out to be an important component of the international hegemony of capital. Moreover, what is at issue here is not only economic but also geopolitical, ideological, and similar formations: from the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO to NATO. As a result, the world's socio-economic space is quite rigidly divided between the subjects of hegemony (TNCs and the states that are their "homeland," above all the United States, then the European Union and the countries leading it — Germany and so on — Japan, China, and, on a much smaller scale, South Korea and the other "tigers") and its objects (predominantly the "Third" world). That said, the real balance of hegemonic forces is more complex, since there also exist powerful tendencies toward resistance to the power of the superpowers and the international structures they control; however, the subjects of this resistance may often be reactionary alliances acting with pre-bourgeois intentions of anti-hegemonism (fundamentalism and the like). Given this configuration of forces, quite peculiar relations arise between TNCs and certain national states: the former can manipulate their capital, as it were choosing for themselves a "suitable" state, while the latter turn out to be hostages of international capital flows. Well known is the flow of capital, especially financial capital (though not only), into offshore zones, "under the wing" of states with preferential taxation, into zones protected from international socio-political upheavals (Switzerland), and so on. Even more conspicuous is the migration of capital into countries with cheap labor, low levels of social protection, weak state regulation, and negligible democratic restrictions on the activity of capital by trade unions, local self-government, environmental, and similar associations. All this creates serious threats to the development of the social and other regulatory functions of the state carried out at the national level.
In a number of cases (for example, for countries of the "Third" world, for Russia), this freedom of capital movement leads to its periodic mass flight, which intensifies internal socio-economic problems. It is more interesting to focus on the opposite phenomenon: a kind of "assistance" to TNCs from their "home" states, whose foreign-policy activity helps the unfolding of their hegemony. A wide range of methods can be used for this: from pushing the principles of free trade for some while imposing blockades on others; from the mass use of "humanitarian" channels and "aid," which create a kind of beachhead for the unfolding activity of TNCs (the Westernization of ways of life is a crucial condition for the penetration of Western TNCs, especially in such spheres as the production of consumer goods and mass culture), to direct aggression. Equally important is the fact that states that are "home" to TNCs create preconditions for the hegemony of corporate capital over hired labor (from "feeding" their own to banning immigration and preserving the poverty of "others," barbarically exploited by the same TNCs). In this context, the groundlessness becomes especially glaring of the position according to which contemporary capitalist globalization is an exclusively beneficial phenomenon, while responsibility for its negative consequences lies with national states that incorrectly determine the conditions for the activity of transnational capital.1 Of course, the statesmen of particular countries must bear responsibility for the economic policy they pursue.
1 This position is defended by the Nobel laureate Jagdish Bhagwati (see: Bhagwati, J., In Defense of Globalization, Moscow: Ladomir, 2005). Below we summarize arguments already encountered earlier in the book that show the groundlessness of the optimism of the adherents of neoliberal globalization in general, and of J. Bhagwati in particular.
But it is no great secret that it is precisely the concessions made by the leaders of various states (Russia during the period of "radical market reforms" being a particularly notable example, though by no means the only one) to the "wishes" (or even the undisguised pressure) of transnational companies and their patrons at the IMF, the WTO, and the US Treasury Department that lead to decisions which aggravate the negative aspects of neoliberal globalization. However, even the most productive use of the opportunities offered by capitalist globalization, carried out within the neoliberal model and a policy that observes the rules of the "Washington Consensus," entails a significant increase in the risks inevitably associated with it. The strengthening of the position of transnational companies within the economies of nation-states leads to a growing dependence on decisions made at these corporations' headquarters — decisions shaped by the conditions of the world market and which are in no way subject to the control of sovereign governments, and which in many cases run counter to the national interests of these states and their peoples. National states are even more defenseless in the face of the actions of global players on the world financial market: a shift in the direction of "hot money" flows can create a financial crisis literally overnight in almost any country of the "Third" World. And this is not merely a possibility: this threat has become a hyper-realized reality in many countries of the world, including our own homeland. Finally, the thesis that transnational companies bring with them more advanced technologies and relatively higher standards of pay and environmental protection is a half-truth. Indeed, in a number of cases (though far from always) transnational capital is more "advanced" technologically, socially, and environmentally than local capital. But this is only one side of the coin. The other side is that global corporate capital exerts a substantial regressive effect on the "periphery." As a rule, it (1) does not transfer modern technologies to national systems, instead exporting the most primitive forms of production to third countries. Moreover, it (2) initiates and supports precisely the kind of (neoliberal) economic policy on the part of national governments that preserves the technological backwardness of national economies, while the TNCs themselves ruthlessly suppress the emergence of national high-tech production as a potential competitor. The degree of "social responsibility" shown by TNCs in "peripheral" countries (3) is strictly limited, falls far short of the level found in their "home" countries, and in no way negates these corporations' consistent struggle to restrict the social and labor rights of hired workers and their efforts to prevent wage levels on the periphery of the world economy from converging with those in the "core" countries. The same holds for (4) environmental problems: most of the production facilities that TNCs operate in "peripheral" countries are enterprises that it would be inefficient to locate in "core" countries, including for environmental reasons, and which it is therefore profitable to relocate away from the metropoles in order to export environmental "dirt." And most importantly: the proponents (if not to say apologists) of globalization constantly compare neoliberal globalization exclusively with the conservative, backward, often semi-feudal tendencies of one national government or another, trying to convince us that globalization is the lesser of two evils. But that is precisely the point — this is a comparison between two evils. Meanwhile, both theory and practice suggest that in the modern world one can and must choose not between conservative semi-feudal national isolationism and neoliberal "shackling," but rather between these two negative tendencies, on the one hand, and, on the other, an alternative model of socially, humanistically, and environmentally oriented economic development of national systems within a new form of integration, built on new rules for newly open economies and communities. As a result of the processes described above, the global hegemony of capital, so to speak, "breaks open" national economic complexes. The former patterns of reproduction, development, and functioning of the economy at the macro level, which took shape (and were described) as national, are, under conditions of globalization, formed — and must not only be described but, crucially, regulated (it is well known that no economy can survive today without macro-regulation) — at the international level. Yet such regulation as currently exists is aimed almost exclusively at maintaining the rules and norms of the "free" market. Meanwhile, conscious global regulation is needed, at a minimum, in all those spheres that are currently subject to the influence of the nation-state. In Western European countries, these include, for example, social and environmental standards and programs, systems for partial redistribution of income in favor of the poorest and most socially vulnerable strata of the population, structural adjustment programs (and the financial and credit regulators designed to support them), and many others. Such regulation is also needed on a global scale, and this would be merely one element of a "minimum program" to soften the contradictions of the global hegemony of capital. However, these international mechanisms for global programming and regulation of the world economy are only now emerging, and mainly as an alternative to [neoliberal] globalization, chiefly in the form of initiatives by various non-governmental organizations, movements, and the like. What actually happens in practice is a fundamental contradiction in the mechanism by which the global macroeconomy functions: the increasingly interconnected and unified processes of functioning and development of the international economy, which require more intensive and comprehensive regulation (not least because of the profound contrasts in levels of development), are being squeezed by the agents of globalization into the old framework of a liberal market combined with national state regulation. As a result, the contradiction we have already noted arises between the liberal model of globalization, on the one hand, and national state systems of regulation and social protection, on the other. Thus national state regulation appears, on the surface, to be a brake on globalization. This in turn creates the appearance of an objective alternative: either strong regulation and a social national state, but with capital flight and a loss in the global economy, or a reduction in state regulation and social constraints (which, let us add, gives greater freedom to the hegemony of the agents of globalization) and success in global markets (but, let us add, a loss in social protection, and so on). Examining the social parameters of how the global economic system functions, we can note that the reproduction of the contradictions described above, and in particular the contradiction between labor and capital in the global economy of the twenty-first century — an economy that has passed through a stage of socially regulated system (and has not entirely lost its achievements) — cannot but sharpen the antagonism between the principles of the social state and the laws of life of global capital, which is characterized by free movement in search of the fewest social constraints (from the state, trade unions, local self-government, and the like). As with state regulation, the existence of this contradiction and its acuteness today is disputed by no one. But here too, most seek a way out of the conflict either through reducing social protection or through limiting internationalization. Meanwhile, a fundamentally different way out exists. Even setting aside, for now, the path of transition to a post-capitalist society as the most general alternative, a struggle is possible for the reform of the world-economic relations of late capitalism — a struggle that could become a kind of "negation of the negation" of the relations of partial social regulation of the capitalist system, in which renewed principles of the social state and civil society would be developed on an international scale. Let us emphasize that global capital not only stands opposed to hired labor and other anti-hegemonic forces but is also internally contradictory. Its life-activity consists of economic, coercive, ideological, and other forms of struggle (and not merely competition) among various groupings (corporate alliances), in which the whole host of methods we identified in our analysis of the hegemony of capital is deployed, along with others not examined in this (predominantly politico-economic) work. The arenas of struggle among these groupings are extremely diverse — ranging from world markets and geopolitical clashes between powers to intra-state structures (clashes in the struggle for influence over governments, parliaments, and presidents among forces lobbying for the interests of different corporate groupings), or even human souls. In concluding this section, the authors would like to draw attention to the fact that the starting point, the "cell," so to speak, of the global hegemony of capital is, in our view, the new social relation of corporate dominance and manipulation that we analyzed above, in the section devoted to the new — totally networked — nature of the contemporary global market. It is precisely this new relation, which gives rise to the power of corporate networks over the market and, even more broadly, over the economy, society, and the individual, that becomes the systemic quality of globalization. And it is this that we will discuss below, with an emphasis on empirical data rather than purely abstract-essential aspects.
Let us begin our study of the structure and mechanisms of the life-activity of modern corporate capital with the anatomy of the corporate network. The categories of transnational capital and corporate capital are widely used in the contemporary literature, and we have already examined the concept of the corporate network above, so we will continue to use them as working terms. More precise definitions of them should emerge as a result of our study of the anatomy of what constitutes the "unit" of late capitalism — the relatively distinct capital of the neoliberal period of capitalism. The analysis carried out above of the relations of hegemony of capital allows us to refine this immediately: a "typical" transnational corporate network (group) is, in our view (and there is nothing especially original here), a system of corporate capitals joined into a single but amorphous entity with blurred boundaries and poorly specified property rights, characterized by a complex set of internal social ties. Its systemic quality (which distinguishes the network from the mere sum of the capitals and other groups that make it up) is the capacity of this network as a whole (1) to exert a local regulatory influence on the market, to be a subject of hegemony (a "spider"), generating a "field of dependency," and (2) to carry out relations of hegemony of this capital with respect to the workers included within it. Let us note at once: this definition is political-economic in character and cannot serve as a working definition for economic practice. But it is grounded in the conclusions of our preceding study and can serve as a starting point for what follows. This group represents the center (the heart and brain) of a gigantic, extremely fine, barely visible but powerful web, formed by its actual and potential clients in all their diversity (the spider and its web). A typical empirical phenomenon to which we can relate the category named above is the transnational corporation together with the counterparties drawn into its "field of dependency": subcontractors, outsourcers, and so on, and, to the extent that they too fall within its "field of dependency," all of its suppliers, distributors, and consumers of its products. Such a corporation-network is interwoven with the corporation-networks of other TNCs, overlapping with organizations that are drawn not only into its own "field of dependency." As such, the corporation-network is a system of specific relations of production. This view is not something fundamentally new. It goes back to Marx's treatment of individual (singular) capital as a relation between two poles — hired labor and capital in the narrow sense of the word. However, for us this political-economic emphasis is of crucial importance, since it points to the key for investigating the nature of this phenomenon: an analysis of the parameters of the interactions among various actors, their forms and content.
Let us begin this analysis by fixing certain semi-empirical, semi-theoretical, but relatively easily identifiable parameters, moving gradually from the financial "summit" down to ever deeper and lower-lying strata. "At the top," our object appears as a network which (1) is united by virtual financial capital (in the form of a set of formally and informally merged financial institutions, including banks, holding companies, pension funds, and other funds). This virtual and blurred financial network (2) is fused with a somewhat more clearly defined set of relatively independent firm-corporations possessing empirically fixable attributes, including a name-brand and legally recorded characteristics. Examples of these are familiar: Wal-Mart, Exxon, Apple, General Motors, Ford, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America, IBM, Procter&Gamble, and other members of the top ranks of the Fortune 500 list. It is precisely these "subsystems" of the network we are studying that are usually associated with the concept of a "transnational corporation," and this is correct, but only in part, since the actual network — one of the few centers of internal and external power in the modern market/capital — is a much larger, amorphous, and legally unfixed association with fundamentally blurred boundaries. The "named" corporations that belong to this network in turn (and this is already a truism, but we will note it nonetheless) have (3) their own "headquarters," "centers," where thousands of "elite" professional employees work. Often, when speaking of the internal relations within TNCs and characterizing them as "creative" firms, it is precisely this part of the corporation that is meant. In reality, however, the corporation is (4) a more or less integrated, unified system of relations comprising a set of relatively independent subsidiaries — the "periphery" of the corporation. Each such subsidiary may include dozens of [production, transport, etc.] enterprises and [marketing, supply, etc.] services, as well as its own management centers. As a whole, this is a system consisting of many hundreds of structures located, not so much in "First World" countries, as in those of the "Second" and "Third" Worlds, where a wide range of goods and services are produced (a diversified system of interdependent firms and/or their subsidiaries). The degree of integration/independence of these subsidiaries depends on many parameters (ranging from technological specifics to the quality of "local" management), which we will not examine here. From a political-economic standpoint, what matters here is simply that this is a system of transitional production relations, combining, not without contradiction, a certain degree of market competition with planned regulation. The foundation of this network is (5) hundreds and thousands of enterprises (predominantly on the periphery of the capitalist world), where not only highly educated professionals are employed but, above all, hundreds of thousands of hired workers of middling and low qualification, earning at best a few dollars an hour assembling machines and mobile phones, bottling Coca-Cola, and making hamburgers... These are the working class of the corporation. These workers are engaged predominantly in industrial labor (and in some cases, especially in the service sector, manual labor) and are in a state of rigid dependency on the corporation — not only economic but also social — which is especially characteristic of small towns in "Second" and "Third" World countries, where there are often simply no other decent jobs available. Within each of these corporations, a complex system of channels of power operates, ensuring (6) the dominance of the corporate nomenklatura. It is important to emphasize that this is not simply the boards of directors of individual firms, but rather the largely hidden "brain" — not so much of individual corporations as of the entire network as a whole. The chief distinguishing feature of this summit is that it effectively "privatizes" the fundamental rights of property (power, control) and information (which is especially important for contemporary virtual capital in the era of the information society) within this system. This is a specific kind of "privatization," for it applies not to social resources but to private ones (the resources of the corporation) and is only partially fixed legally. Again, in part, this "corporate nomenklatura" (the real owners and top managers) of the network can be related to the concept widely used in Western literature of "insiders."1 The latter term, as a rule, carries a negative connotation and is associated with the criminally prosecutable use by managers of a firm's internal information for personal gain. What we are speaking of, however, is something different — real intra-corporate power, a phenomenon that only partly overlaps with the phenomenon of insider trading. This upper stratum of the network is fused with (7) a range of national and international state institutions, not so much through illegal relations of corruption as through legal relations of diverse cooperation — from hundreds of channels of economic interaction to mutual legal "consultation" on strategic issues, whether in the form of open "summits" of the Davos type or closed, secret "no-tie" negotiations, from the influence of capital on elections to personal union... All these channels have been described repeatedly in the most varied forms: from journalistic "exposés" to the personal memoirs of former heads of state and/or corporations, from textbooks on public administration by Harvard "Kennedy School" professors2 to monographs on the problems of state-monopoly capitalism by Soviet academicians from the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (some of whom later turned — in the manner of Academician Primakov — into heads of foreign intelligence services and even prime ministers). No less important is the coordination of the corporate nomenklatura with (8) a system of institutions of violence — both legal (its own systems of security, intelligence, and so forth) and illegal, extending as far as organized crime (predominantly in countries of the "Second" and "Third" Worlds, where the firms' subsidiaries operate) and the subordination of corrupt puppet governments in certain small countries or individual regions. These structures also subordinate to themselves (9) a number of mass media outlets. Finally, (10) they control the system for reproducing "human capital" (colleges, universities, charitable foundations, and so on). We have identified all these "levels" and components of the corporate network by synthesizing what has been said above about the nature of the total market and the hegemony of capital and by relating this theory to the generally known features of contemporary capital. It is essential that each of these "levels" of the corporate group is relatively autonomous, and the ties between them (both horizontal and vertical) are riddled with numerous contradictions; nevertheless, they are all bound together by the systemic quality noted above — the capacity of this network as a whole to exert an external, local regulatory influence on the market, to be a subject of hegemony (a "spider") generating a "field of dependency," and a subject of internal corporate-capitalist hegemony. It is curious that this systemic quality (like other concrete-universal categories, for example, value) cannot be "touched" or seen with the naked [dialectical-method] eye. However, there are some important "nuances" here as well. While the network as such cannot be seen, the power of its individual "visible" components can be related to certain empirical phenomena. These include, in particular, phenomena that express a kind of "spirit" of the firm, such as its name and brand. It is precisely a firm's brand that is now valued more highly than ever and constitutes one of the most important components of a corporation's virtual value. This is no accident — this "brand" is precisely a certain external fixation of a given firm's (corporate capital as a link in the network) capacity to generate a "field of dependency." A brand is, to a certain degree, a simulative symbol of the existence of a stable clientele (a "web" — for example, of people accustomed to drinking specifically Pepsi-Cola in any city or country of the world they may visit), a sign of the dependency of a given socio-economic space on this corporation (the "Pepsi generation"), and so on.1
1 We may mention the highly illustrative work in this respect by Naomi Klein, "No Logo: People Against Brands," which shows the mechanisms by which people are subjected to corporate control through the system of "branding."
Thus, we can offer a fairly rigorous theoretical explanation of what seems to theorists the mysterious value of a "brand" — it is an indirect symbol of the systemic quality of the corporation, without which it might cease to exist as a subject of hegemony: not simply as capital (of greater or lesser size), but as a special kind of capital — capital capable of exerting a local regulatory influence, possessing a "clientele," and partly subjecting that clientele to its influence. We may therefore suppose that the high economic valuation of a brand is not so much the "price" of guaranteedly high quality (Hugo Boss suits are now made predominantly in China, and BMWs are assembled even in Russia from parts made in the most varied corners of the globe) and/or of a firm's "intellectual capital," as it is the monetary equivalent of its capacity to locally regulate the market by imposing (within certain limits, of course) its goods on consumers and other counterparties — an equivalent of its "market power." In characterizing the corporation-network as a generator of a "field of dependency," one should not forget that these networks enter into a system of diverse relations of struggle and partnership with one another, continually redistributing the highly amorphous boundaries of their influence. Accordingly, the circle of clients of each corporation is always blurred, mobile, undefined, and subjection to it is not only local but also partial and incomplete. On the surface, it may appear that this "brand" is created by a team of managers (or, in rare cases, by its founder-owner, such as the mythologized Ford or Bill Gates), but in essence the matter lies elsewhere — in the fact that, under conditions of the global
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Часть 1 Chapter 11. Capital as a Global Phenomenon, or the Political Economy of Globalization
Часть 2 11.5. Channels of Corporations' External Power: Some Additional Remarks -
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