Critical scholars introduced the notion of the new international division of labour (NIDL) in the 1980s in order to stress that developing countries had become cheap sources of manufacturing labour and the rise of transnational corporations (TNCs) (Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye 1981). Foster and McChesney (2012) situate the rise TNCSs in capital’s attempt to overcome long-term economic stagnation. They see transnationalisation as an attempt of capital to attain global monopoly profits. TNCs aim to drive down the wage share globally in order to try to increase their profits by installing a system of global competition between workers. The consequence is a worldwide increase of the rate of exploitation (Foster and McChesney 2012, 114–115 and 119) that based on Stephen Hymer Foster and McChesney terms TNC’s “strategy of divide and rule” (pp. 119 and 126).
Table 11.2 shows comparative data for the world’s 2000 largest TNCs in the years 2004 and 2014. These companies’ revenues accounted for more than 50% of the worldwide gross domestic product, which shows that TNCs operate at the global level for trying to obtain monopoly status. In both years almost three quarters of the capital assets of these companies were located in the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, real estate), which confirms Foster and McChesney’s (2012) assumption that we can speak of global monopoly-finance capitalism. There are however also significant shares of the mobility industries (transportation, oil and gas, vehicles), the manufacturing industry, and the information industries (telecommunication, hardware, software, semiconductors, advertising, Internet, publishing, and broadcasting), which indicate that to specific degrees global capitalism is, besides finance capitalism, also a global monopoly mobility capitalism, a global monopoly hyperindustrial capitalism, and a global monopoly information capitalism (Fuchs 2014, chapter 5). Furthermore, these capitalisms in an interconnected manner form one overall global capitalist whole, a capitalist world system.
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1 Data source: Human Development Indicators, http://hdr.undp.org/, accessed on 26 October 2014.
2 Source: Human Rights Watch 2014 Report: Democratic Republic of Congo: http://www.hrw.org/world-report/2 014/country-chapters/democratic-republic-congo, accessed on 22 December 2014. 3 Ibid.