In its first stage, capitalism emerged from its feudal cocoon in Europe during the so-called Age of Discovery, symbolized by the bloody conquest of the Americas starting in 1492. This widening and deepening enclosure has ushered in the new epoch of global capitalism. Waves of outward expansion through wars of conquest, colonialism, and imperialism have brought more of humanity and of nature into the orbit of capital.
Each successive epoch in its centuries-long existence has brought the reorganization of political and social institutions and the rise of new agents and technologies on the heels of major crises. But all systems exist in a perpetual state of development, transformation, and eventual demise, giving rise to new organizational forms, and capitalism is no exception. At first glance, the system may look familiar: capitalism continues to be driven by the endless accumulation of capital, with the attendant outward expansion, polarization, crises, and wars. A “brave new world” of globalized capitalism burst forth in the latter decades of the twentieth century. If we are to avoid a civilizational collapse and reach a Great Transition, we will need an accurate reading of the new global capitalism to guide our social practice.Įpochal Shift | Transnationalization | The Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) | Intimations of a Transnational State (TNS) | The Mean Streets of Global Capitalism | Transforming the Global System? | EndnotesĪ Great Transition to a just and sustainable world requires as its starting point an accurate understanding of how the system in which we live, capitalism, has evolved in recent decades.
In response, the more enlightened members of the transnational elite clamor for a powerful transnational state to resolve the ecological, social, economic, and political crises of global capitalism, but instead a global war economy and a global police state may be in the offing. The extreme global inequality that has resulted erodes social cohesion and fuels unrest. This corporate-driven globalization has brought a vast new round of global enclosures as hundreds of millions of people have been uprooted and converted into surplus humanity.
Its essence is the emergence of truly transnational capital, a transnational capitalist class (TCC) made up of the owners and managers of transnational corporations, and transnational state apparatuses through which the TCC attempts to exercise global political authority. We are in the throes of a transition to a qualitatively new stage of world capitalism.
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