Globalization and the International Working Class is a polemic that stands the test of time. Mehring Books is pleased to now offer this out-of-print title, first published in 1998 as a reply to the Spartacist League’s attack against the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), in ePub and Kindle formats.

This work analyzes the transformation of multi-national corporations into massive transnational entities, facilitated by the development of computer technology and telecommunications. Assessing the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ICFI statement examines the role of the international labor movement, including the trade unions in the capitalist countries, under these changed conditions. The statement points out that the left petty-bourgeois tendencies (the “pseudo-left”) adopted a nationalist standpoint, adapting “to the Stalinist and social democratic bureaucracies in the advanced capitalist countries.”

“The advent of transnational corporations, which operate on a world scale and produce for the world market, is the central feature of a new and higher international division of labor, based on an unprecedented global integration of production,” the Introduction states. “Transnational corporations, either alone or in alliances, dominate production in every sphere, organizing the manufacture and distribution of commodities world-wide. But at every point, this socialization of production conflicts with the private profit system and the division of the globe into rival national states. … transnational production begins to lay the objective foundations for the development of the planned world socialist economy.”

Today, the global nature of capitalism is beyond dispute, and the reactionary nation-state system is driving the world’s major capitalist powers ever closer to global war and increasing social inequality at home, while preparing dictatorial forms of rule. A Marxist analysis of the objective basis of socialized production and the crisis of the nation state system is essential to the building of revolutionary leadership in the working class today.

Available as an ePub now for $9.99 from Mehring Books

Available for Kindle now for $9.99 from Mehring Books