The Transnational Capitalist Class

Synonyms

Capitalist class

The transnational capitalist class (TCC) is defined as the group of dominant capitalists comprising those who own and/or control major corporations and their allies in the political, technical, and culture-ideology spheres.

Introduction

The capitalist class has traditionally been defined as those who own the means of production and act directly or indirectly as a ruling class. While the original theory of the capitalist class as elaborated by Marx and Engels in the middle of the nineteenth century saw this as an international phenomenon, scholarly research has tended to concentrate at the level of the nation-state, particularly in large and economically powerful countries. With the rise of globalization and neoliberalism as new features of the economic, political, and cultural spheres in the second half of the twentieth century, attention started to focus more and more on what were then most commonly labeled multinational corporations, and a stream of studies...