Shortly after his first inauguration, in 2003, and then again in 2010 during his second presidential term, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva loaded up a government aircraft with Brazilian corporate executives and headed for Africa. As Thiago Aguiar discusses in the study before us, the presidential-corporate entourage opened up Mozambique and other African countries to investment in the continent’s abundant mineral resources by the Brazilian-based transnational mining corporation, Vale, under the rhetoric of “South-South solidarity.”
If we interpret the expansion in recent decades of South-South trade, investment and capital flows through the lens of twentieth-century theories of dependency, of the world-system, and of imperialism as core domination over an oppressed periphery, we may reasonably conclude that there is something progressive about the South-South integration agenda so epitomized by Lula’s African corporate safaris.
Yet such “solidarity” by transnational capitalists and the capitalist states that promote their interests is patently antagonistic to transnational proletarian solidarity. Social theories frame our understanding of the world in particular ways and are therefore never neutral but politically and ideologically charged. The sweeping transformation of the world capitalist system since the late twentieth century compels us to develop and apply new theoretical lenses in our interpretation of the world and in our political praxis. Left intellectuals and activists may cling on to outdated theories that see in the rise of transnational capitalist classes based in the historic periphery some progressive challenge to world capitalism. But in the end, such views can only end up cheering on the expansion of global circuits of capital accumulation that lead, in Africa and elsewhere, to the violent displacement of local communities, the plunder of resources, the exploitation of workers, and the degradation of the environment.
My colleagues and I have been advancing since the turn of the century a theory of global capitalism as a novel epoch in the ongoing and open-ended evolution of world capitalism characterized above all by the rise of truly transnational capital and the integration of every country into a new globalized system of production, finance, and services. In his 2018 study Giants: The Global Power Elite, sociologist Peter Phillips identifies an inner core of 389 individuals
In the brilliant study before us, Aguiar furthers our understanding of the tcc through a case study of Vale, one of four global mining conglomerates that dominate the industry worldwide. He traces the transformation of this corporate behemoth from a Brazilian state company established in the logic of an earlier era of national developmentalism and the subordination of Brazilian to core-based multinational capital. Much of the research on the tcc has focused on the cross-penetration of what were national capitals in the historic core of world capitalism. As Aguiar’s case study shows, Brazilian-based capital in the form of Vale has transnationalized not only by expanding throughout the “Global South” but also in the “Global North” through its purchase in 2006 of Inco, one of Canadian two largest mining companies, as well as in investments in mining and related industrial operations in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. tcc groups around the world are able to take advantage of differential rates and intensities of exploitation, as well as national borders and cultural sensibilities, to exploit workers and other subordinate classes throughout the global economy and to force competition on them in a global race to the bottom.
It is not therefore just that the leading capitalist strata from the historic periphery have transnationalized across the South and the North, but in doing so, they have integrated into a global ruling class that exercises its power over the laboring masses in both South and North. As Aguiar discusses, Canadian mine workers organized in the United Steelworkers union faced off against Brazilian corporate executives in a nearly year-long battle against attempts by Vale to roll back Canadian workers gains in the mining town of Sudbury.
Earlier this century I had the opportunity to give a talk in Manila to a group of Philippine revolutionary activists. One woman in attendance, originally from India, objected to my analysis of the tcc. Visibly disturbed, she told me that in India “we are fighting imperialism” just as Lenin had analyzed. I asked her what she meant by this. Core capitalists were exploiting Indian workers and transferring the surplus back to the core countries, she replied. It was by sheer coincidence that in the very week of my talk, the Indian-based global corporate conglomerate, the Tata Group, which operates in over 100 countries in six continents, had acquired a string of corporate icons of its former British colonial master, among them, Land Rover, Jaguar, Tetley Tea, British Steel, and Tesco supermarkets, making Tata the largest single employer inside the United Kingdom. So, India-based capitalists had become the largest single exploiter of British workers! The fundamental contradiction in global capitalism is not between core and periphery but between capital and labor on a world scale. The categories of “external” and “internal,” an unproblematized focus on nation-state boundaries and the nation-state/interstate framework of analysis they imply do more to confuse than to clarify the nature of the new global capitalism and its transnational class relations.
Many of us in the global justice movement have insisted for some time now that as capital has transnationalized so too must workers’ struggles. Aguiar discusses the Canadian strike, the attempt (ultimately unsuccessful) by Vale workers across borders to set up international worker associations, and Vale’s corporate labor relations strategy. As the discussion makes clear, workers around the world continue to face objective material constraints in the endeavor to transnationalize labor struggles, as well as subterfuge by trade union bureaucracies that are often tied informally to the capitalist state, and divisions between formal sector unionized workers and those that are precarious or not unionized.
It is true that labor relations in the historic periphery remain harsher than in the historic core. It is equally true that the historic imperial centers – often operating through transnational state apparatuses – continue to exert undue structural and often direct power over national states and social groups in the
William I. Robinson
Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara