Whither the transnational capitalist class?

Since the 1970s, the putative formation of a transnational capitalist class (TCC), typically viewed as part and parcel of capitalist globalization, has raised substantive and strategic questions for scholars and activists alike. To what extent has such a class actually formed and what is its transnational reach? What are its sources of cohesion and its capacity to act as a classfor- itself? How is the TCC articulated with other capitalist fractions and with state apparatuses that, in the same period, have developed increasingly international capacities and orientations? Most importantly, what strategic implications might be drawn from an analysis of transnational capitalist class formation in the current era? This essay takes up these questions and attempts to provide some answers grounded in scholarship from the past four decades. Although one can reasonably speak of a transnational capitalist class, its reach, cohesion and agentic capacity should not be overestimated. Moreover, the TCC is not a freestanding entity, but is linked to and indeed embedded in national capital circuits and state-capital nexuses. Given this, the task for movements opposing capitalist rule is to construct a historic bloc that is nationally rooted yet that also builds agentic capacity transnationally, while exploiting weaknesses in the bloc in which the TCC is a leading force. In engaging the challenges posed by the transnational capitalist class, the left should not trap itself within reified conceptions of a unified transnational capitalist bloc, nor should it withdraw into a self-defeating anarchism that minimizes the need for both cross-movement solidarity and state-centred politics