In this book, sociologist William I. Robinson offers a theory of
globalization that follows the rise of a new capitalist class and a
transnational state. Growing beyond national boundaries, this new
class comprises a global system in which Japanese capitalists are
just as comfortable investing in Latin America as North Americans
are in Southeast Asia. Their development of global, interconnected
industries and businesses make them drivers of world
capitalism.
Robinson explains how global capital mobility has allowed
capital to reorganize production worldwide in accordance with a
whole range of considerations that allow for maximizing profit
making opportunities. As a result, production systems that were
once located in a single country have been fragmented and
integrated externally into new globalized circuits of accumulation.
What this means, however, is not simply that factories are located
overseas where labor might be cheaper, but rather that the whole
production process is broken down into smaller parts and each of
those parts moved to a different country, depending on where
investment might be highest. Yet at the same time, this worldwide
decentralization and fragmentation of the production process has
taken place alongside the centralization of command and control of
the global economy in transnational capital.
In turn, this economic organization finds a political
counterpart in the rise of a transnational state. The leaders of
global businesses and industries think about themselves and how
they live in new ways. Hegemony in the twenty-first century,
Robinson argues, will be exercised not by a particular nation-state
but by this new global ruling class through the machinery of this
transnational state. Robinson observes, for example, that global
elites, regardless of their nationality, increasingly tend to share
similar lifestyles and interact through expanding networks of the
transnational state. Globalization is in this way unifying the
world into a single mode of production and a single global system
and bringing about the integration of different countries and
regions into a new global economy and society. But the new global
capitalism is rife with contradictions, such as the growing rift
between the global rich and the global poor, concludes Robinson.
The twenty-first century is likely to harbor ongoing conflicts and
disputes for control between the new transnational ruling group and
the expanding ranks of the poor and the marginalized. Sure to stir
controversy and debate, "A Theory of Global Capitalism" will be of
interest to sociologists and economists alike.
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