The Transnational Capitalist Class, the Trilateral Commission and the Case of Japan: Rhetorics and Realities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although the Japanese elite are now part of neoliberal globalization, this elite's rise within the transnational capitalist fraction has escaped the attention of social scientists outside Japan, with some exceptions including Stephen Gill’s (1990)’s work on the Trilateral Commission (TC) and Leslie Sklair’s (2001) book on multinational corporations and banks. The paper addresses this relatively underwritten case, by describing the transformations represented by transnationalisation of production and ownership and the historical and international context of Japanese capitalism. In addition, it examines the important role of the TC in supporting the creation of a transnational capitalist class. Throughout, I highlight the rhetorics used by the TC that emphasize the importance and benefits of neoliberal forms of economic transnationalization. In addition, I trace Japanese elite support for neoliberal forms of transnational integration in a series of Japanese economic Reports written in the 1990s. And, I examine quantitative evidence, as well as suggestive qualitative evidence around network ties of increasing transnationalization involving Japan. The article concludes that Japan’s elite is rhetorically and economically align with Western transnational capital fractions and increasingly acting as a transnational capitalist bloc, including through participation in the TC.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".