Transnational Capital and the Politics of Global Supply Chains

Abstract

In the latest phase of globalization, transnational corporations based in the U.S. have worked closely with U.S. foreign policymakers to secure favorable foreign direct investment provisions within U.S. domestic legislation and within U.S. trade agreements. These interactions between transnational firms and the U.S. state have provided many of the preconditions for an expansion of foreign direct investment connected to capital liberalization and the growth of global supply chains from the 1980s to the present. This relationship is best conceptualized as representing a "transnational interest bloc," whose policy objectives are incorporated within investment provisions in US-backed trade and investment agreements.

The New Finance Capital: Corporate Governance, Financial Power, and the State

“…With the elimination of barriers to the free movement of capital from the 1990s onward, these firms set up globally integrated production processes and value chains by outsourcing stages of production to subcontractors located in relatively low-cost peripheral zones. The MNCs sitting atop the new global economy came to perform a "system-integrator" function, organizing a secondary layer of subcontractors that carried out actual production (Cox, 2013). The market power of these MNCs remained grounded not in their control over specific industrial processes, but rather in their possession of two unique kinds of financial assets: branding and intellectual property.…”

Cut from the Same Cloth: The US Textile and Apparel Industry and Post-Disaster Designs for Haiti.

“…Scholars of the business conflict school determined that varying business interests compete in a pluralist fashion (based on organizational structure, capital endowments, and political coalitions) to affect policy outcomes. In terms of foreign economic policies, these varying interests are often moderated by the exigencies of US national interests, the structure of global capitalism, and changing conditions in affected developing countries (Gibbs 1991;Cox 1994;Nowell 1994).…”

Globalization and Capitalist Geopolitics

“…For critics like Boggs (2011a), Wolin (2010) and Cox (2012Cox ( , 2013, the subordination of US foreign policy to the interests of capital indicates the increasing control of the US and global economy by a system-integrating transnational bloc. The largest corporations, argues Cox, have increased global market share across a range of industries from the 1980s to the present, a trend which is closely linked to the growing importance of global value chains.…”

“…Corporate globalization implies not simply a flight of finance capital to low-wage economies or the dependence of Western non-financial corporations on financial assets (Cox 2013), but the declining coherence of advanced nations as capital degrades the infrastructural basis of industrial society in a 'race to the bottom' to coerce American and European workers to compete with low-wage earners in Asia and Latin America. For critics like Boggs (2011a), Wolin (2010) and Cox (2012Cox ( , 2013, the subordination of US foreign policy to the interests of capital indicates the increasing control of the US and global economy by a system-integrating transnational bloc.…”