Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.001 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".