Rethinking the Transnational Capitalist Class

It has been more than four decades since Stephen Hymer (1974) first mooted that globalizing capital was begetting, in its pathways, an international bourgeoisie, and nearly two decades since Leslie Sklair's (2001) pathbreaking The Transnational Capitalist Class. 2 The basic thesis that with capitalist globalization comes a tendency toward formation of a transnational capitalist class (TCC) is well established, but a tendency is not a fait accompli, and as social scientists and activists we need to be attentive to the complexities in class formation and global political economy.That means clarifying some continuing ambiguities.In this article, I attempt to clarify: 1) how key terms like global, transnational, regional and national apply within transnational capitalist class formation; 2) how the distinction between a capitalist class in-itself and for-itself applies to the TCC; and 3) how insights from the Amsterdam School, which embarked upon the first sustained research program on the TCC in the 1980s, can add nuance to our analysis of TCC formation.From the start, there have been different conceptions of the TCC in play.In his foundational statement Hymer noted the basic process that underlies TCC formation: the internationalization of capital which leads an internationalizing segment of the capitalist class to "detach their interests from the home market" and to support an international regime that "allows free movement of capital between countries" (Hymer, 1974).In a related paper, Hymer (1972, 100-1) drew a direct link between internationalization of capital and "international class consciousness on the part of capital".Kees Van der Pijl (1984), a decade later, focused on the region within the world-system in which capitalist internationalization was most intense, what he called the Lockean heartland, and the Atlantic ruling class that, over the course of three centuries, had come to form a hegemonic fraction.Van der Pijl's densely historical treatment was complemented by Meindert Fennema's (1982) network analysis, 1

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