Lecture
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hegemony of capital, precisely such corporate structures cannot but arise. The existence of such "firms" (as well as their struggles, mutual absorptions, and competition) is a law of the current stage of development of late capitalism. Returning to the analysis of the structure of corporate groups, let us note that not every one of them includes all of the blocks listed above. Some are confined to operations with fictitious financial capital, turning out to be only indirectly linked to the production of goods and services; others, conversely, are relatively independent of the control of individual financial institutions (though not of the life-activity of financial capital as a concrete-universal phenomenon); other modifications are also possible... Naturally, this multilevel international system is quite different from the private-capitalist or even joint-stock capitalist firm that was described in Marx's "Capital" and to whose characteristics (paradoxically enough!) right-liberal theorists still appeal when reflecting on the advantages of private property (a typical example being Jeffrey Sachs's work "The Market Economy and Russia").1
1 Sachs, J. The Market Economy and Russia. Moscow: Ekonomika, 1994. An uncompromising defender of private property is also the contemporary representative of the Austrian school, M. Rothbard (see: Rothbard, M. Power and Market: Government and the Economy. Chelyabinsk: Sotsium, 2010).
It is significant that, under these conditions, the corporate group turns into a mini-society, within which its own system of production (and other) relations takes shape. Within the corporate group (the "spider" and its "web"), a distinct social stratification even begins to emerge, along with a distinct system for distributing property rights, through which the most important relations of production, and of the distribution of labor and its products, are carried out under conditions of contemporary capitalism. As noted above, these relations include a complex set of mechanisms for the subordination of labor to capital (economic power). In concluding this subsection, let us underscore what is perhaps its most important conclusion: the principal power within such amorphous structures belongs (a fact that, in principle, has long been known to specialists but is almost never disclosed in textbooks or in popular and propaganda literature) not to shareholders, and not even to managers (as many proponents of the "managerial revolution" theory believe), but, as already noted above, to the corporate nomenklatura — a limited circle of private individuals who have "privatized," not the objects of property as such, but predominantly the fundamental rights of property, the channels of power. Let us note that, at the theoretical level, in characterizing the system of relations of the total hegemony of corporate capital, we have already demonstrated the fundamental existence of these "channels." Let us summarize the empirically observable manifestations of the most important channels of power within a corporation. These are:
• the power afforded by virtual fictitious capital (whoever controls transactions involving the fictitious capital of a given corporate structure gains control over its "circulatory system");
• control over, and the maintenance and development of, the firm's "traditions" and image (including that very "brand");
• control over information and a monopoly on key internal information (including information about the distribution of property rights, the movement of finances, and personnel);
• strategic management (the making of strategic decisions, control);
• the management of personnel and, more broadly, of the functioning of "human capital," and so on (including rigid administrative subordination of labor on the "periphery" of the corporation);
• control over the movement of shares (not necessarily ownership of a controlling stake);
• the maintenance of ties with state structures and other institutions of legal and illegal violence, as well as with the mass media... This is far from a complete list of even just the most important channels of power within TNCs. Let us stress once again that legally recorded ownership of shares is nothing more than one of these channels. Moreover, the system of property relations (including trust management, multilevel control over the firm through a system of cross-shareholding, control over debt obligations, subsidiary or parent companies, etc.) is, as a rule, fundamentally complex (if not to say tangled to the point of becoming what we have already referred to as a "black box"). Shares of specific firms are in most cases owned by other firms and by a multilevel system of holding companies (part of the information about this being a trade secret), as well as by minor shareholders, behind whom lies, once again, a circle of natural and legal persons known to very few, to whom the shares have been transferred under trust management (which is, incidentally, why the authors have singled out information about property rights as the most important channel of power).
First remark. The analysis carried out above of the content of the hegemony of corporate capital at its present stage of development suggests that the interaction of corporate groups with one another and with third parties is a single mechanism that preserves the appearance of market competition while integrating all the channels of hegemony available to these groups. As a result, each of these "spider" groups strives to weave as extensive and powerful a web as possible (developing the channels of hegemony both extensively and intensively), striving (toward a limit it can never actually reach) to turn all counterparties — legal and natural persons: subcontractors, consumers, workers, government officials, journalists — into its own clients, dependent (often unconsciously) on the "spider" — the corporation generating the field of its power. The channels of a corporation's power with respect to "external" agents include:
• the monopolization of the achievements of international socialization (for example, the technological dependency of partners in the third world and of small business) and of new technologies (above all, high technologies, accessible in most cases only to large groupings); the subordination of clients to the corporation's technological standards;
• monopolistic local regulation of market parameters, reproduced at a new level through the creation of "webs" (at present this involves not so much an effect on price levels as the "enclosure" of a certain socio-economic space, the monopolization of the "image" of a product, its market standards, quality parameters, and so on), including through an active marketing policy and the other methods named above;
• the monopolization of certain segments of the financial market and financial control (control over the movement of fictitious capital), carried out both openly (for example, the "servicing" of financial flows by banks, which in practice is often supplemented by regulation and control on the part of these institutions) and covertly (for example, the buying up of shares through holding companies that do not disclose information about the structure of their shareholdings); • influence, based on the fusion with the state institutions of a number of countries and on the corporation's own institutional power, over the frameworks and rules of market interaction established by regional, national, and international institutions, over standards, long-term social and structural programs, and even over the general model of the evolution of capital (support for social-democratic or liberal parties in elections being the simplest and least significant example);
• the implementation of their own strategic long-term programs by non-market (bureaucratic-planned, if one likes, "command-administrative") methods within their own "empires" and on the economic territory under their control (for example, in small developing countries, or in particular regions, or in certain sectors of individual economic systems);
• the monopolization of information and information channels (including through fusion with the state and the mass media) by both legal (patents, and so on) and illegal methods, and information pressure on clients through these channels, through advertising, and so on;
• the use of all the methods described above for subordinating individual clients, above all the final consumers of goods and services (ranging from the general strategy of imposing a consumerist way of life and the aforementioned aggressive advertising, to direct coercion in "Third World" countries);
• the deployment of the full range of non-economic methods (from direct and indirect violence to the subordination of the mass media and, through them, influence on competitors, state institutions, workers, and clients). A list of these channels, along with their concrete elaboration, could be given simply on the basis of the analysis of the essential features of the hegemony of capital presented above, to say nothing of the thousands of foreign and hundreds of domestic works on these questions. Second remark. The channels of hegemony described above, and all the others, are in practice indeed fused into a single system, in which each specific action (for example, the introduction of a new product onto the market, or the struggle to create more favorable institutional conditions for a firm's operations by securing the election of a suitable president in one of the countries where a TNC's subsidiaries operate) integrates practically all of them. At the same time, one can, somewhat conditionally, distinguish two types of interaction. The first is interaction between subjects of comparable strength — a struggle for hegemony (relations between corporate groups, in particular TNCs, between them and states, or supranational institutions regulating socio-economic and geopolitical processes — ranging from the World Bank and the IMF to NATO). Here, relatively equally "armed" armies collide (each of the "spider" subjects can use practically the entire arsenal of methods described above, as well as some others unknown to the authors or altogether secret types of "weaponry"). Here the struggle only outwardly preserves the trappings and appearance of market competition and is carried out as a relatively "equal-power" clash of agents employing all the mechanisms of hegemony named above. In doing so, these clashes often (though not always!) occur only at the "pre-competitive" stage (in the process of working out the parameters of future contracts, in developing investment programs, and so on), subsequently shifting, at the production stage, into a system of relations sometimes called "cooperative" or "contractual" ("partnership") capitalism. This is no accident: contemporary highly socialized (in the industrial sector) or altogether universal (in the information sector) production requires a constantly maintained, flexible proportionality, rather than periodic crises and collapses of the largest production-information complexes. The second type of interaction is the subordination by the subjects of hegemony of their objects (workers, clients, small business, and even, in part, the governments of small "Second" and "Third" World countries). In this case, the use of the channels of the unified mechanism of hegemony named above is almost exclusively one-sided in character. As a rule, neither workers, nor clients, nor other objects of hegemony can employ any of the mechanisms of suppression named above in response to the actions of corporate capital. All that is left to them are various means of resisting subordination. Among these are attempts to "restore" pre-imperialist "classical" capitalism, in particular by cultivating a general atmosphere of the "free" market, in which the hired worker, the consumer, the small entrepreneur, and so on, as relatively independent counterparties, retain a certain freedom of choice (let us repeat once more, to avoid misunderstanding: the hegemony of corporate capital is nowhere absolute; it is merely the dominant aspect of capitalist socio-economic and political life). This group of methods also includes attempts to use the mechanisms of representative political democracy and other means of pressuring the state with a view to "shifting" its activity toward a search for compromise between corporations and the population. More important, however, is the activity of uniting citizens into voluntary associations (trade unions, environmental and other unions, and so on, up to and including left-wing parties) in order to counterpose the strength of free association to the power of corporate capital. Conservative methods of "fencing off" from global capital, which some countries of the "Third" and "Second" Worlds attempt to use, are also possible.
Q.11.1. What are the prerequisites for capitalist globalization on the side of the productive forces?
Q.11.2. Why does global socialization occur unevenly?
Q.11.3. How do differences between the core and the periphery of the world economy in the level of development of the productive forces entrench the global hegemony of transnational capital?
Q.11.4. How does globalization change the relations between labor and capital?
Q.11.5. What is the role of financial globalization?
Q.11.6. How does the relationship between nation-states and transnational capital take shape?
Q.11.7. How does the network of global dominance of transnational capital take shape?
Q.11.8. What are the channels of power of transnational corporations?
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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