If the typical capitalist firm of the 1940s, 1 950s or 1 960s was one which played a dominant role in one national economy, at the beginning of the 21st century it was one that operated in a score or more countries-not merely selling outside its home country but producing there as well. The biggest deployed far more economic resources than many states. "29 of the world's 100 largest economic entities are transnational corporations" ,8 reported UNCTAD. The process of national firms branching out into the rest of the world was not confined to the advanced industrial countries. It afected the Third World and Newly Industrialising Countries where the statification of industry had previously tended to go even further than in the West, as we saw in Chapter Seven. It intensified with the restructuring of industry that took place in each crisis of these years as firms rationalised production, shut plants and merged with others.
Myths and realities
This whole process was baptised "globalisation" by the 1990s. It was bracketed together with neoliberalism as representing a whole new phase of capitalism-for enthusiasts a phase very different to any previously. They held not only that the world should be organised according to the free flows of capital, without any intervention by governments, but that this had already come about.
We lived, it was said, in the age of multinational (or sometimes transnational) capital, of firms moving production at will to wherever it could be done most cheaply. It was, some influential voices insisted, a world of "weightless" production,9 where computer software and the internet were much more important than "old fashioned metal-bashing" industries, and where the absolute mobility of capital had completely detached it from any dependence on states. This was an integral part of the new economic paradigm supposedly unleashing a new dynamism in the aftermath of the failures of Keynesianism, state direction and Soviet style "socialism". "Nationalities of companies" were "becoming increasingly irrelevant', declared the British Tory minister Kenneth Clark.10 This was the age of "the stateless corporation", declared Business Week.11
Global Capital in the New Age
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