"id","author_first1","author_last1","title","year","publication","volume","issue","pages","summary","keyword0","keyword1","keyword2","keyword3","keyword4","keyword5","keyword6","keyword7","type" "211","Leslie","Sklair","The Transnational Capitalist Class and Global Politics: Deconstructing the Corporate-State Connection","2002","International Political Science Review","23-2","Apr.","159-174","

Question(s) addressed by the author and working arguments

Transnational corporations engage in a variety of political activities that take place at all levels of the political sphere, from community and urban through national and global politics, and involve many different groups of actors. This article addresses two sets of questions: (1) What forms do these activities take? (2) Do they enhance or undermine democracy?

Transnational Corporations (TNCs) clearly engage in political activities of various types, but the exact forms of these engagements and the roles of the various actors in them have not been subject to a great deal of a systematic research. While TNCs have always been political actors, the demands of economic globalization require them to be political at the global level in a more systematic sense than previously.

The Transnational Capitalist Class is composed of four main, interlocking groups:

Corporate executives and their local affiliates (the corporate fraction);

globalizing bureaucrats and politicians (the state fraction);

globalizing professionals (the technical fraction);

merchants and media (the consumerist fraction).

The global system and its central concept of the transnational capitalist class suggests how we might fruitfully analyze the promotional culture of cigarettes and the social forces that support it. TNC executives, globalizing bureaucrats, politicians and professionals, and consumerist elites all play their parts individually and in concert to bring this promotional culture of cigarettes and smoking into as many institutional sectors of all societies as they can and to create a dependency on both the drug (nicotine) and the money (financial dependency of many types) that the tobacco industry brings with it.

TNCs and their allies are political actors and that they do achieve significant success in getting across their message that there is no alternative to global capitalism. TNCs are legal bodies to every right to act legally to further their interest.

Conceptual references to transnational – transnationalism

Transnational Corporation and transnational capitalist class.

Conclusions or Final Remarks

The political activities of the TNCs and their allies, therefore, raise serious doubts hoe well our democrats are working with respect to everyday economic issues, global trade and investment, health and safety of workers and safety of workers in health. This is all in the name of globalization, free trade and international competitiveness and the hope, that, somehow, it will make poor people better off.

","Class","Global Capitalism","International Politics","NGOs","Political parties","Politics","Transnational Capitalist Class","Transnational Corporations","journal"