We rule the world: an emerging class fraction?
When I was young, I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old, I know it is”.
Introduction
The we in ‘we rule the world’ are the 0.1 per cent of the wealth holding ‘corporate bigwigs and wheeler dealers’ (Krugman 2011); they are the top 1%, income earners and they are the top transnational capitalist class [or TCC]. The TCC are the winners of the capitalist jackpot and maybe the only winners of the 2008-2013 global financial crisis (GFC) (see Chester 2014, Hamm 2010a, Hamm 2010b:1008, Leopold 2009a). They increased their market share (Murray and Peetz 2012) by an estimated $30 billion in 2009 ( Leopold 2009b) and now five years later they are worth collectively more (Kroll 2013, Lopez 2013) with the 400 wealthiest Americans are worth just over $2 trillion, roughly equivalent to the GDP of Russia (Kroll 2013) which is $300 billion more than the year before. These TCC are men (mostly) and women who as individuals have power through their ownership and/or control of capital which enables them to act as a hegemonic fraction of capital that is positioning itself to become a global ruling class (Robinson 2014:1).
The TCC are not an elite – they are a class – as defined by their relationship to the means of production. The enormous growth in wealth was unleashed, post 1980, by the neoliberal counter revolution (i.e. using the theories of Friedman and Freidman 1980, Von Hayek 1944:1008) enabling right and left right wing politicians to use the language of capital-liberating-policy and put it into everyday commonsensical meaning (Beder 2006, Cockett 1995, Murray and Pacheco 2000, Murray 2004). In this post Keynesian period we are experiencing financialization that is, it began in the 1980s with the deregulatory reforms (usually but not always enforced by neoliberal governments); when financial institutions and their transactions become more dominant and in size and influence (See Dicken 2003:201, Kus 2012); and whereby capital accumulation occurs mostly through 2 financial means rather than through trade or commodity production (see Connell and Dados 2014).
We are now in a period where a finance class fraction are poised to take an even greater role in the processes of capital accumulation.
