The internationalization of monopoly capital

Monthly Review

Volumn 63, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 1-23

  Mcchesney, Robert W ^a   Jonna, R Jamil ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

^b University of Orego   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79960495223     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/mr-063-02-2011-06_1     Document Type: Review

References (77)

1. Paul M. Sweezy, "More (Or Less) on Globalization," Monthly Review 49, no. 4 (September 1997): 3-4.
2. Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Müller, Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 213-14.
3. The notion of a dialectic of rivalry and collusion characterizing oligopolistic firms has been developed by Keith Cowling, based on the work of Baran and Sweezy in Monopoly Capital. See Keith Cowling, "Monopoly Capitalism and Stagnation," 155-66 in Tracy Mott and Nina Shapiro, eds., Rethinking Capitalist Development: Essays on the Economics of Josel Steindl (New York: Routledge, 2005).
4. UNCTAD, World Investment Report, 2010 (New York: United Nations, 2010), 17-18.
5. Mark Casson, "Multinational Monopolies and International Cartels," in Peter J. Buckley and Mark Casson, eds., The Economic Theory of the Multinational Enterprise (London: Macmillan, 1985), 65; V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1939).
6. Galambos quoted in G. Pascal Zachary, "Let's Play Oligopoly Why Giants Like Having Other Giants Around," Wall street Journal March 8, 1999.
7. "Let's Play Oligopoly!" Wall Street Journal.
8. For data and analysis of this see John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, "Monopoly and Competition in the Twenty-First Century," Monthly Review 62, no. 11 (April 2011): 10-11.
9. For UNCTAD the primary source for MNC data, "foreign control" is defined as ownership of least 10 percent of voting stock. This conforms also to the approach of the IMF. In the United States, however, the Bureau of Economic Analysis uses a threshold of 50 percent
10. In accord with UNCTAD data, U.S. totals are for nonbank US. parents and nonbank majority-owned Foreign Affiliates. See Chart 1 and Kevin B. Barefoot and Raymond J. Mataloni Jr., 'U.S. Multinational Companies: Operations in the United States and Abroad in 2008," Survey of Current Business 90, no. 8 (2010), Tables 16.2 and 18.2. The percentages for foreign affiliates are 12,24 6, and 22.8 percent of assets, sales and employment respectively.
11. Barefoot and Mataloni, "US. Multinational Companies,' 207.
12. Joseph P. Quinlan, Global Engagement (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2001), 37-41;
13. UNCTAD, The Universe of the Largest Transnational Corporations (New York: United Nations, 2007), 3.
14. Wladimir Andreff, "Outsourcing in the New Strategy of Multinational Companies: Foreign Investment, International Subcontracting and Production Relocation," Papeles de Europa 18 (2009), 19.
15. Keith Cowling and Roger Sugden, Beyond Capitalism (London: Pinter Publishers, 1994), 35.
16. Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 107, 126, 147-49;
17. Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 326-27;
18. Jeff Ballinger, "Nike Does It to Vietnam," Multinational Monitor 18 no. 3 (March 1997).
19. Anita Chan, "Nike and its Satanettes" (1999), http://business.nmsu.edu.
20. "Nike's New Game Plan for Sweatshops," Bloomberg Business Week, September 20, 2004, http:// businesweek.com. On the general issue of sweatshops in international textile and shoe production see Robert JS. Ross, Slaves to Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).
21. Mujeres Transformando and Institute for Global labour and Human Rights, "Ocean Sky Sweatshop in El Salvador: Women Paid Just 8 Cents for Each $25 NFL Shirt They Sew" (Pittsburgh, PA: The National labor Committee, January 24, 2011), http://www.globallabourrights. org. See also Bernard D'Mello, 'Reebok and the Global Sweatshop,' Monthly Review 54, no. 9 (February 2003): 26-40.
22. Beatrice Appay, "Economic Concentration and the Externalization of Labour," Economic and Industrial Democracy 19, no. 1 (1998), 161;
23. Yadong Luo, Multinational Enterprise in Emerging Markets (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business Press, 2002), 199-200.
24. See also Keith Cowling and Roger Sugden, Transnational Monopoly Capitalism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 3, 88-90.
25. Louis Galambos, The Triumph of Oligopoly,' in Thomas Weiss and Donald Schaefer, ed., American Economic Development in Historical Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 252.
26. World Motor Vehicle Production 2009, "OICA Correspondents Survey without double counts," http://oica.net.
27. See James K. Galbraith, The Predator State (New York: Free Press, 2008), 19-24.
28. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 119-20.
29. Foster, McChesney, and Jonna, "Monopoly and Competition in the Twenty-First Century," 13-19.
30. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 57-59.
31. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942), 90.
32. Edward M. Graham and Paul R. Krugman, Foreign Direct Investment in the United States (Washington, D C.: Institute for International Economics, 1995), 193.
33. John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, "The Internets Unholy Marriage to Capitalism," Monthly Review 62, no. 10 (March 2011): 1-30.
34. Competition in economics is largely about competition between firms over product markets/sales markets. Competition between workers within labor markets lies largely outside of this conception. On the importance of this distinction see Cowling and Sugden, Transnational Monopoly Capitalism, 4.
35. The role of "divide and rule" as a key strategy governing the actions of multinational corporations is discussed more fully under the section "The Law of Increasing Firm Size and the Rise of the Multinational Corporation" below.
36. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, (New York: The New Press, 1999), 98;
37. Insult quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 120.
38. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 739.
39. Stephen Herbert Hymer, The Multinational Corporation: A Radical Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 54.
40. Stephen A. Marglin, "What Do Bosses Do?: The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production," Review of Radical Political Economics 6, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 80-104; Cowling and Sugden, Transnational Monopoly Capitalism.
41. As John Dunning has argued, Marx, and after him Rudolf Hilferding, were the first to develop the notion of internalization in explaining the growth of the firm; however, in their theories such internalization was not of transaction costs-as in the neoclassical Coasian theory of the firm-but of labor within a context of control and exploitation. See John H. Dunning, Explaining International Production (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 130-32.
42. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, part 4.
43. Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 44, 226-27.
44. Illustrations of the role of the state in the growth of large capitals can be found in Kevin Phillips, Wealth and DemocracyA Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002).
45. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1961), 317-18.
46. See Edwards, Contested Terrain, 3-71.
47. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1019-38. The role of scientific management and its relation to monopoly capitalism is examined in great detail in Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998).
48. Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Stage to the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 166-67.
49. The best mainstream approach to the rise of the multinationals, accordingly, is the "eclectic paradigm" developed by John Dunning, which emphasizes a large number of factors, including both monopolistic advantages (in line with Hymer) and the internalization of market costs. It, however, has the disadvantage of not putting accumulation at the center of the analysis. For a concise summary of the eclectic paradigm see Geoffrey Jones, Multinationals and Global Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 12.
50. Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, The Dynamics of U.S. Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 99.
51. For a classic expression of this see Robert Gilpin, US. Power and the Multinational Corporation: The Political Economy of Foreign Direct Investment (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
52. The emphasis on strategic control as the defining trait of the modern giant corporation or multinational-a form of control that evolves out of capital's domination of the labor process from the very beginning of the workshop/factory system-is in many ways the centerpiece of the work of Cowling and Sugden in their Transnational Monopoly Capitalism, 8-27. See also Graham and Krugman, Foreign Direct Investment in the United States, 36.
53. Graham and Krugman, Foreign Direct Investment in the United States, 193.
54. Hymer, The Multinational Corporation, 86-88;
55. James Peoples and Roger Sugden, 'Divide and Rule by Transnational Corporations,' in Christos N. Pitelis and Roger Sugden, eds., The Nature of the Transnational Firm (London: Routledge, 2000), 174-92.
56. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, 137-82;
57. Richard B. Freeman, "The New Global labor Market," Focus (University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Research on Poverty) 26, no. 1 (Summer-Fall 2008): 1-6;
58. Joseph P. Quinlan, The Last Economic Superpower (New York: McGraw Hill, 2011), 176.
59. "Inside Foxconn's Factory," The Telegraph (UK), May 27, 2010, http:// telegraph.co.uk.;
60. "Foconn Cuts Off Suicide Compensation," The Australian, June 12, 2010, http://theaustralian. com.au.
61. Peoples and Sugden, "Divide and Rule," 182-89.
62. On the unequal exchange process that this process relies on and reinforces, wherein wage differences are greater than the difference in productivity, see Gemot Köhler, "A Critique of the Global Wage System" (2006), http://caei.com.ar.
63. Keith Cowling, Monopoly Capitalism (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1982), 145.
64. KeithCowling,"MonopolyCapitalism and Stagnation," 150.
65. Graham and Krugman, Foreign Direct Investment in the United States, 193. As Sam Gibara, CEO of Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co, declared in 1999, "What you have is a chain reaction. We're going global because our customers are going global. Then, to the extent that we go global, our suppliers are going global." What Gibara refrained from mentioning was that Goodyear's rivals were going global too-a development that Goodyear sought to address by creating strategic alliances, a form of collusion, with other firms (in 1999 it established a strategic alliance with Sumitomo Rubber Industries Ltd. of Japan).
66. In "Lets Play Oligopoly!" Wall Street Journal.
67. John H. Dunning and Sarianna M. Lundan, Multinational Enterprises and the Global Economy (Northampton, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar, 2008), 487.
68. See Cowling and Sugden, Beyond Capitalism, 67-69.
69. Cowling, "Monopoly Capitalism and Stagnation," 150.
70. On the relation of international oligopoly to stagnation see Cowling and Sugden, Beyond Capitalism, 91-113. On monopoly capital and global financialization
71. see John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009).
72. James B. Davies, Susanna Sandström, Anthony Shorroks, and Edward N. Wolff, The World Distribution of Household Wealth," in James B. Davies, ed, Personal Wealth from a Global Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 402.
73. Angus Maddison, The World Economy A Millennial Perspective (Paris: Development Centre, OECD, 2001), 125-26.
74. UNCTADStat, "Nominal and real GDP, total and per capita, annual, 1970-2009: US Dollars at constant prices (2000) and constant exchange rates (2000) per capita," (New York: UNCTAD), http:// unctadstat.unctad.org. Today the Least Developed Countries, as designated by the UN, include thirty-three in Africa, fourteen in Asia and one in Latin America and the Caribbean.
75. See Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar, eds, Agriculture and Food in Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).
76. In Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw's neoliberal triumphalist tract (about how Hayek won over Keynes) the great enemy is the state while corporations are downplayed and "corporation" doesn't even deserve an entry in the index. This is all the more startling since Yergin has spent most of his career in support of the giant oil corporations. See Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002).
77. Bernard E. Harcourt, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).