Will Brehm 2:09
William Robinson, welcome to FreshEd.

William Robinson 2:12
Hello to you and your listeners and thank you for having me on.

Will Brehm 2:15
So, you’ve written extensively about the transnational capitalist class. How would you define this class of people?

William Robinson 2:24
This is a class of capitalists that’s has lost his mooring to any one nation state. The 20th century, well actually going back to the late 19th century, there were mass struggles, trade union struggles, worker struggles, anti-colonial struggles worldwide from the late 19th century into the mid-20th century, which forced a redistribution of wealth downward and increased the power of the popular classes worldwide. Capitalists, an emerging group of capitalists, responded to that by going global from the 1970s and on, in order, at least in my analysis, to break free of the constraints that the nation state, and that working and popular classes inside the nation state were imposing on capital. And this group of capitalists became what I call the hegemonic fraction of capital worldwide, that is the emerging transnational capitalist class became hegemonic. There’s still local capitalists, there are national capitalists, there were regional capitalists, but the one that’s at the apex of the whole new global economy is this transnational capitalist class. And a little more technical terms, I defined the transnational capitalist class as that group of capitalists worldwide whose interests lie in the emerging globally integrated system of production and finance. So, in global markets and global circuits of accumulation. In distinction to national or regional or even local markets and local circuits of accumulation. One other thing I would add here is that what we’ve seen over the last 20, 30 years is an acceleration of neoliberalism worldwide, and free trade agreements worldwide, and that is the project of the transnational capitalist class: to break down national and regional barriers to the free movement of their capital around the world.

Will Brehm 4:16
Could you give me some examples of the institutions or the people who would be part of this transnational capitalist class?

William Robinson 4:23
Well just a couple of days ago, I finished reading the draft of a book by Peter Phillips – he’s a sociologist here in California – titled ‘The Global Power Elite,’ and he assembled some incredible data and alarming data and statistics. And he documents … he studied the apex, the top cream of the transnational capitalist class, and he identified and fully documents, and I’m going to quote from him now here “389 individual people who are the top ranks of the transnational capitalist class who, amongst themselves, control $40 trillion in wealth. This $40 trillion is concentrated in 17 global financial giants.” That’s what we see with the new global capitalist system, that these giant financial conglomerates at the very heart of the global economy, and they are incredibly invested amongst themselves; these seven global financial giants are cross invested. So, he describes that as a single vast network of global capital. But the $41 trillion dollars that those less than 400 individuals control isn’t the whole story, because in turn, these 17 global financial giants are invested in industry, in commerce, in the media, in the military industrial complex, and that involves tens of trillions of dollars more. So, what we’re seeing basically is the transnational capitalist class has an unbelievable concentration of the world’s resources and the world’s wealth.

Will Brehm 6:02
And so, this distribution of wealth downwards that was present before the 1970s when the emergence of the transnational capitalist class, as you said earlier, now are we seeing a redistribution of wealth upwards?

William Robinson 6:18
That’s what we’ve seen every single year, every single day since the 1970s. Let me go into some data but let me expand the analysis a bit here. Global capitalism is in deep crisis. And I described that crisis as an over accumulation crisis. And that for me is capitalism’s Achilles’ heel, and we’re seeing that at this point. The natural tendency for the capitalist system is to concentrate wealth in one pole and to polarize that wealth and throw the vast majority of people into impoverishment and immiseration. Now that natural tendency for capitalism to accumulate wealth has been offset historically by a number of other counter tendencies, such as trade unions and working classes and popular classes struggling for a redistribution of wealth downward, such as states, governments, intervening in the capitalist markets to set up programs that would redistribute wealth downward, and that was the social welfare policies of the 20th century: Offset that inherent tendency of capitalism to concentrate wealth. And when capital goes global in the 1970s, those counter tendencies which broke down and redistributed wealth downward were reversed. So, everyone’s familiar with this data that 1% of humanity at this time in 2017 controls more than 50% of the world’s wealth, then the top 20% of humanity has 95% of the world’s wealth. That means that 80% of humanity has only 5% of the world’s wealth. We’ve never seen such incredible levels of inequality worldwide, and that is generating – even though it’s a bonanza for the transnational capitalist class, the transnational elite, and for privileged trader among the rest of the population – that is generating a deep crisis for the system. It’s leading to a breakdown of the system, and as leading to social conflict and political crises as well, those levels of inequality. But let me get back to that structural level that I mentioned earlier, this, what I call “over accumulation crisis”. What that means is that if I’m a capitalist, and let’s say I’m producing computers, iPads, or iPhones, whatever it is, for the global market. If 80% of humanity has less and less purchasing power, and that the purchasing power is concentrated among 20 – and by the way, increasingly, among 15, 12% of the world’s population, because that polarization is still deepening, and continuing – that means that at some point, I can’t sell those computers. In other words, I can’t unload all of this wealth; it pours out of the global economy. And so that’s what’s meant by an over accumulation crisis. That wealth is so concentrated at the top, and all of this wealth being produced cannot be “unloaded”. That’s the term we use in political economy, it cannot be unloaded, and that leads to crisis. That is the crisis, in my analysis in 2008, was the explosion of a new global crisis of over accumulation. And that’s still continuing. And I’d like to point out how the transnational capitalist class has responded to this crisis of over accumulation. How have they been able to continue making profits to accumulate their capital in the face of worldwide demand that is just not there, in the face of over accumulation? Well, I’ve identified three different key mechanisms, and many listeners will be familiar with this. One is debt driven demand. So, we have a situation where, to give you an example of the United States, and this is very important, because the United States is historically what we call “the market of last resort,” meaning that all the countries in the world can eventually unload their goods and find markets in the United States. So, in the United States, consumer debt in 2017 surpassed $13 trillion. That’s the highest level in recorded history of consumer debt in the United States. And just yesterday, I discovered a new statistic, and that is that one trillion of that is credit card debt which is now in default. So that shows you the crisis tendency, and that debt driven consumer consumption cannot be continued. And it’s not just in the United States. Last year, a report came out that for the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development countries, that’s the 22 most developed countries in the world, the ratio of household income to debt continues to deteriorate and it’s at an historic high, meaning that debt in those 22 richest countries, debt driven consumption is also reaching a ceiling, maxing out. And I will add another piece of data, that the global bond market is 100 trillion dollars. The bonds market, that’s government bonds market, meaning that governments can’t pay their bills, so they issue bonds. And that’s already 100 trillion dollars; there’s now the risk of global default in the bonds market, the government debt. So basically, this debt driven consumption, which has pushed forward the global economy in the 21st century, is bottoming out. It cannot continue. And the transnational capitalist class that continues to face the crisis of where to unload the surplus, how to continue accumulating. And its second mechanism has been financial speculation. And again, I’m sure that your listeners have heard about this, but these figures are absolutely shocking. And so gross world product in 2016 was $75 trillion. That means all of the goods and services produced in the world amounted to the equivalent of $75 trillion. Yet, in that same year, just in currency speculation, the figure was $5.3 trillion every day. And listen to this, the global derivatives market – and derivatives are, by definition, financial speculation. It’s not producing any new wealth; it’s simply speculating on existing wealth. The global derivatives market reached 1.2 quadrillion dollars. So, listen to that again: 75 trillion is the global production of goods and services. 1.2 quadrillion is just speculation, just in derivatives. That’s what we call this the gap between the real-world economy and fictitious capital, speculative capital is reaching such mind-boggling levels that it cannot continue to fuel the growth of the world’s economy and to stave off this accumulation crisis or another major economic crisis worldwide. The final mechanism that the transnational capitalist class has used to push forward its accumulation, its profit making in the face of stagnation and overaccumulation, is what I call “militarized accumulation” and “accumulation by repression”. And what I mean by this is that you now have the transnational capitalist class seeking wars and seeking conflicts and seeking to escalate systems of social control and repression, such as building a wall between the US and Mexico, and the war on immigrants, the so-called and farcical war on terror, the farcical war on drugs, all of this now becomes opportunities to make profit in the face of the lack of other ways to make profit in the civilian economy. And so, it should be no wonder that, to give you an example, the Pentagon budget increased 91%. That’s almost a duplication from 1998 to 2011. And once again … I mean, it has continued to increase since then and under Trump, it’s sharply escalating right now. The United States just announced it is going to spend $1 trillion to modernize and expand its nuclear arsenal. And this is all over the world. All over the world it is escalating military spending, which is a reflection of what I’m referring to as what I call militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression. So, these are the ways in which the global crisis is unfolding, and which the transnational capitalist class has managed to somehow keep moving forward in the face of this crisis.

Will Brehm 14:31
Do you think it will actually, like this crisis, and these three different elements of this crisis, will ever impact the transnational capitalist class to such an extent that there would be a redistribution of wealth downwards in the other direction? Could it ever actually impact them to a point where we’ll see some structural changes going on in the global economy?

William Robinson 14:56
Yes, really good question and two things going on. One is that these levels of unbelievable inequality is of course generating mass resistance struggles all over the world. Some of those resist responses are not necessarily progressive, such as Christian fundamentalism, or Islamic fundamentalism, but they needed to be seen as responses to the crisis of humanity, the crisis of masses of people. But a lot of that resistance worldwide is progressive, there’s mass social movements everywhere, there’s a regeneration of the left worldwide. There’s also of course a regeneration of neofascist and far right authoritarian responses to the crisis. But going back to the issue of redistribution, first of all, there’s pressures worldwide and mounting struggles around redistribution. And secondly, and very interestingly, and very importantly, the transnational elite is split. There is an emerging reformist sector among the transnational elite – and that includes transnational capitalists – that recognizes that these levels of inequality and these structural problems in global capitalism is generating an intractable crisis for the system. And so, they are actually pushing for a reform of the system in which there’s a redistribution of wealth downwards. We can call that the pushing for a global Keynesianism; many of you are probably familiar with Keynesianism – those are the sets of policies associated with the redistributive programs and the social welfare programs of the 20th century. And so, my hope, at least on this, is on the one hand, there will be more and more transnational coordination and coherence in this global fight back against the transnational capitalist class and also against these levels of inequality, but that we have the possibility here for an alliance, or what I call a “united front”, against what’s an emerging far right authoritarianism, and really a global neofascism, against a global police state. But part of this united front, which brings together reformist elements among the elite with this mass rebellion from below, part of that project, that united front, will be seeking global redistribution. I think that’s really our hope here.

Will Brehm 17:04
So, in America, where you’re based, and a lot of the figures you’ve been talking about are coming from, I mean the last few years, ever since the global financial crisis, since then unemployment has been going down, and I mean I know today of all days, the stock market has crashed tremendously. But, the stock market, as Trump will over and over and over say, that it has been increasing since he’s been elected. And there’s been economic growth. So, I mean in a sense, is this the calm before the storm that Hyman Minsky might talk about?

William Robinson 17:43
Well, absolutely. Yes. And then they get back to the calm before the storm in just a moment. But let me also say that, of course, what anything that comes out of Washington is propaganda. But if you look behind those propaganda and those headlines, it’s true that unemployment, and then there’s unreported unemployment, and then there’s underemployment. So, if you add up official unemployment, which is I think 4.7% right now, with unreported unemployment, and then with underemployment, you have a much higher figure. But putting that aside, we can, and we have analyzed the jobs that are created. It’s been created since 2008, and for that matter since the turn of the century, and these are precarious, low paying jobs, they’re McJobs, if you will. And increasingly, work is becoming polarized actually between a deskilled, massive work and automation and robotization and so forth, and a small sector of the workforce, which is actually skilled and highly paid. That’s, of course, reflected in the data we already saw – the 80%:20% divide of the population. So even if unemployment is going down, the types of jobs being created are not jobs that can sustain global capitalism, much less sustain decent living standards for the majority of the working population. But let me go back to the other issue of the calm before the storm, because we analyze in political economy, that there are three types of crises under capitalism. One type is cyclical. That’s what mainstream economists call the business cycle, and about every 10 years, there’s a recession, almost with clockwork. There was one in the early 1970s, although that was a deeper crisis, early 1980s, early 1990s, the turn of the century, to 2000, 2001, and then 2008, of course, was the second type of crisis that we see, which happens more rarely, once every 35 to 50 years. That’s what we call not cyclical, but a structural crisis, and it’s called a structural crisis because the only way to get out of it is to fundamentally restructure the way capitalism is working. So, we had a giant structural crisis in the 1930s that led to social welfare, capitalism, and Keynesian New Deal capitalism. Then we had the next giant structural crisis was the 1970s, and that led to capitalist globalization, which we have been analyzing when capital went global, then restructured the system through neoliberalism and free trade, and a globally integrated production and financial system and so forth. Then 2008, for me, is the next big structural crisis, and we’re still in that structural crisis. The third type of crisis that we analyze is systemic. And what that means is really the only way to get out of the crisis is to move beyond the system itself, to transcend the system. And I believe that we’re moving towards a systemic crisis for reasons which I’m sure there’s not enough time to get into now, but because of the impossibility of capitalism to reproduce itself ecologically, and because it will be called a crisis of social reproduction, meaning the mass of the world’s population has no real chance of sustaining its own existence. But okay, putting aside that, the calm before the storm, absolutely. Let us recall 2006, well into the beginning of 2007, the mainstream economists and the political pundits and government officials were saying, “Everything’s fantastic. The economy’s never been better.” In fact, they were even saying, “Capitalism has overcome it’s crisis tendencies. The business crisis cycle is even over.” Remember, they said that, into early 2007. And then the collapse began in mid-2007 with the mortgage crisis. So, we’re absolutely in the calm before the storm. Having said that, though, I don’t want to tie myself in a corner by saying the storm will come in six months or one year, or in what form the storm will come. But as I’ve already analyzed, the structural conditions that led to the collapse of 2008 are not only still in place, but they have deepened. We’ve already analyzed the speculation has deepened, that debt driven consumption has deepened, that militarized accumulation has deepened, that inequality, and therefore over accumulation constraints, have deepened since 2008. So really, as a social scientist, there’s really no way to imagine that we don’t have a storm coming up.

Will Brehm 21:50
Yes, for me, one of the fascinating things that I’ve looked at is the rise of student debt. And when you look at the numbers from the Fed, you realize that student debt really started rising only in about 2012.

William Robinson 22:07
Absolutely. Yes. But what you have with student debt is also what’s going on the student debt, well that’s part of debt driven consumption. It’s also part of intensified privatization and commodification of everything. So increasingly, here in the United States, at least, higher education … and it is actually, probably quite distinct … it is distinct in Europe, and it is distinct in Japan and elsewhere. But in the United States, which is the national economy, part of the globalized economy that we’re most analyzing here, higher education is more and more and more privatized. And when it becomes privatized, public higher education such as my university, the University of California, that means that increasingly, it’s tuition which finances public education, meaning students finance their own education, and they do so through massive increases in their debt. So that’s a part of that story, and that’s a part of the story of the debt driven economy. But it’s also financial speculation. And look what happened with the mortgage crisis. What the banks did is bundled together millions of different mortgages, and then sell them as derivatives, as speculation, and basically securitize them, turn them into an investment. Anyone in the world could buy shares in bundled up millions of mortgages. And then the whole thing collapsed. Now what the banks are doing with that student debt, and by the way, the debt is owed to banks, just a little bit of is owed to the government. They’re simply government-backed, meaning taxpayers are backing students going into debt and have the bank’s back. But going back, what the banks are now doing is bundling that student debt, so it’s a new bubble. Student debt is a massive new bubble and that could burst. In fact, it will burst because there’s no possible way that the generation, which is now graduating, graduated in the last few years, and will be graduating in the next few years, in these conditions of crisis and inequality and low paying jobs, are going to be able to pay back that student debt. I pointed out already that right now, there’s an emerging crisis of credit card defaults, but joined with that are going to be, I predict this, massive student debt default.

Will Brehm 24:18
I absolutely agree. This student loan asset backed securities is an excellent indicator of a bubble that will burst just like the mortgage crisis back in 2008. It’s interesting, so there’s all this pressure of workers being unable to reproduce themselves through debt currently, in many cases. And once that debt goes into default, then workers simply can’t reproduce themselves, they can’t get jobs, because jobs are precarious now, it’s the gig economy. And so, as you were saying, you were talking a little bit about the transnational capitalist class, there’s actually a split within that class of elites. And there’s two different camps. Which camp do you think is going to win out, and what will that actually mean for the global economy?

William Robinson 25:17
Really great question. But let’s just analyze a bit those two camps, and of course, that’s simplified, but it’s a good way of looking at this. On the one hand, we’re increasingly living in a global police state. And we’re increasingly seeing the rise of a far-right authoritarian project. A lot of people have called that right wing populism, but I don’t see it as that. I see that it’s this aggressive, this one of these camps of transnational capitalist classes, aggressively taking its power and imposing unbelievable levels of accumulation, even though it’s pushing the whole global economy, then the whole global system into crisis and into mass uprisings. And in order to do that it needs to impose a global police state, expressed through these right-wing populist projects. We can analyze that, and I can delve into that in just a moment. But I want to turn to this other project coming out of the transnational capital class, and you see this more, for instance, with the Davos elite. And look at some of these people, well known intellectual figures, who were the intellectual thinkers of the neoliberal project previously. So, you have Jeffrey Sachs. He’s a top IMF official, top World Bank official, he went around the world, both to Russia and Bolivia, and imposed structural adjustment programs and neoliberalism. You have Joseph Stiglitz, famously he was the vice president of the World Bank and advocated and pushed neoliberalism in the 1990s. You even have Lawrence Summers. Lawrence Summers was the Secretary of the Treasurer in the United States, he was a vice president of the World Bank, so a key figure associated with neoliberalism in its heyday of the 1990s. These and many other these intellectual figures of the transnational elite are now all against neoliberalism, all against the current course of capitals’ globalization, and are all arguing for what I call – they don’t use this language – a global Keynesianism, basically a project of redistribution downward. Now, they’re doing so not by advocating a socialist project, but on the contrary, advocating something like what you had in the developed countries in the 20th century: social welfare programs, higher taxes on capital, and we’ve gone the opposite direction on that, of course, but that’s because of the really in control is the corporate transnational capitalist class. But you see these two projects at play in countries around the world and at play in international forums. So, I think which is going to win out really depends less on them. It depends on the extent to which masses of people, social movements from below, political and social struggles from below, are going to force on the transnational elite the only option possible, which is a reformist project. The alternative to that, if we don’t succeed in doing that, that is if those from below, the mass of humanity from below, doesn’t force on the transnational elite a reformist project, a redistributed project, in alliance or in alignment with this reformist project from above, the alternative is, for me, 21st century fascism grounded in a global police state.

Will Brehm 28:34
And so, what is the role of academics in this struggle as you’re talking about, if we can’t make sure that we at least move in that social welfare direction?

William Robinson 28:46
Well, we have to ask a key question as academics and as intellectuals, and “For who are we performing our intellectual labor?” And that’s always been the challenge that faces academics. Mass social movements, and projects of political change and social justice, need intellectuals. They need organic intellectuals, they need intellectuals that can provide theoretical tools and analysis to the mass social movements, which is where the hope of humanity lies. And this has historically been the challenge that intellectuals face: Do you sell yourself? Do you become an intellectual mercenary, and sell yourself to the powers that be – in this case to the transnational capitalist class, the global corporate order, and its political agents? Or do you use your skills and your talents as intellectuals in the service of the poor majority of humanity? So that hasn’t changed, but actually, what we’ve seen, this is a really important question because we saw it in the mass struggles of the 1960s and the 1970s, that many intellectuals aligned themselves with the mass social movements, the anti-colonial struggles, that here in the United States, the Black and Chicano liberation struggles, the trade union movement, which lead to peak in the 1960s and early 1970s. And then we saw with, we can call it in simplified form, from the worldwide defeat of the left, but really what was going on there, again, is that capital went global, changed the balance of social and class forces worldwide, went on the offensive, and imposed the new global capitalist system that we’ve been analyzing. And so, in the face of that change, in the whole balance of political and social forces worldwide, many intellectuals simply sold out, they simply retreated into their academic ivory tower, or they increasingly just turned toward supplying the intellectual inputs for the global capitalist order. So, we’re back to that again, with regard to what is the role of intellectuals and academics. But I want to point out something here, and it’s also, of course, that as academics, we are more and more dependent for our own research, for our own social reproduction, on corporate capital. Here at the University of California, if you go back three, four or five decades, on the one hand, as I was mentioning, previously, you didn’t have student debt and tuition driven public education, but you had almost free public education, the University of California, and you had state financed public education. But if we go back then, we also see that academics got the research money, sure, from corporations, but most of it didn’t come from corporations. Well, they came from foundations, they came from public financing of research. Now, the vast majority of funding for research, for that matter for chairs, for hirings and so forth, that vast majority of that funding comes from the corporate world. So, corporations in the University of California virtually bought physics departments. And then the research goes to corporations using that research for their own ends. They bought chemistry departments for the pharmaceutical industry and biology departments for new corporate biotechnology. So, increasingly, it’s very difficult to be an academic or intellectual and to not be subordinate to the transnational capitalist class. And that goes for the social sciences, as well.

Will Brehm 32:01
Within that sort of contradiction, is there any way in which you see individual academics able to say be funded by transnational capitalist corporations, but still working for some of these social movements, revolutions that you were talking about earlier?

William Robinson 32:21
Well, yes. I mean, you get funding, and your funding is not cut off on what you do on the side, to put it like that, on the side. But the thing is that the foundations, which themselves are financed by corporations, are the gatekeepers for this research. So, they’ll fund the type of research they want to see. And they will not fund the type of research they don’t want to see. So, I could get funding to … maybe I could put together some meaningful proposal, this is just in the abstract, just hypothetically, to research the global economy with a view towards how you can enhance profits or enhance something that’s not threatening to the system. But I’m not going to get funding if I say I want to research global police state and how it can be combated, or I want to research accumulation by repression. So, at the individual level, I can go out and do what I want with social movements, but I’m not going to be able to play my role as an academic, as a researcher. And that’s something else as well, there’s other methods of academic repression, and you don’t get hired. Increasingly if you’re an intellectual and academic identified not with the hegemonic order, but with any counter hegemonic order, you don’t get hired. And if you get hired, you don’t get tenure. That’s not new, but there was a lot more autonomy. It was easier to have much more autonomy previously in academia than there is now. And one other thing as well I’ll add, that increasingly – and this is worldwide, but particularly in the United States – courses are taught by adjunct faculty. So, we have a transition in which there’s a small faculty which has full time jobs, which are tenured and eventually you’ll get stability if you manage to, which would be 15, 20, 25% of the faculty. And then the remainder is adjunct faculty, which are people that have got a PhD, and they have that student debt we were talking about previously. And they get paid per course, a small amount here in California, six or $7,000 for a course. So, imagine you teach six courses a year at a semester system, which is full time, and you get 30, $35,000 a year. That’s poverty wages for a family, I mean, below poverty wages. So that’s also the new face of academia. And that, again, makes it very challenging to play the role of an organic intellectual for transformative projects. Not that we shouldn’t, but that these are the obstacles that we face.

Will Brehm 34:47
Are you hopeful that these systems will be changing soon? I mean, I’m a relatively young academic, and what you just described is exactly what I face. And I’m wondering, do I stay in academia and try and get to that promised land of a tenure track job, or should I just bail and look for something else to do?

William Robinson 35:13
Right. Well, I mean I think this means that academics, and particularly young academics such as yourself, need to identify with the mass social movements that all across the economy, all across global society are facing this precariatization. Now, we talk of the new precariat, which is that group of the working class which lives under precarious conditions, flexibilization, part time and temporary labor, and of course, precarious employment. It’s exactly what adjunct professors face. So, I mean your generation facing these conditions needs to identify with all the rest of the global working class and the global precariat. Not daunted, abandon your dreams, we need academics, we need intellectuals. But somehow, we need to link, and it’s not really possible to remain ensconced in the ivory tower for your generation, and we need to link these struggles as also a larger issue that this leads to: how you link the struggles on campus and students’ struggles and academic struggles with struggles in the larger community and society?

Will Brehm 36:17
Well, William Robinson, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. It really was a pleasure to talk today.

William Robinson 36:21
My pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

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