Ruling Capital

In Ruling Capital, Kevin P. Gallagher demonstrates how several emerging market and developing countries (EMDs) managed to reregulate cross-border financial flows in the wake of the global financial crisis, despite the political and economic difficulty of doing so at the national level. Gallagher also shows that some EMDs, particularly the BRICS coalition, were able to maintain or expand their sovereignty to regulate cross-border finance under global economic governance institutions. Gallagher combines econometric analysis with in-depth interviews with officials and interest groups in select emerging markets and policymakers at the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the G-20 to explain key characteristics of the global economy. Gallagher develops a theory of countervailing monetary power that shows how emerging markets can counter domestic and international opposition to the regulation of cross-border finance. Although many countries were able to exert countervailing monetary power in the wake of the crisis, such power was not sufficient to stem the magnitude of unstable financial flows that continue to plague the world economy. Drawing on this theory, Gallagher outlines the significant opportunities and obstacles to regulating cross-border finance in the twenty-first century.

The author argues that the concept of class, far from being obsolete, is actually embodied in its modern form by the fusion of banking capital and industrial capital in Great Britain. He includes a detailed analysis of the main groupings of finance capital in England. Thiry-one such groups are identified in Appendix I, and Appendix II is an an analysis of bank directorships.

The "economic elite" has long been thought to cooperate at a corporate level to impact state and national policies and programs at the expense of the Canadian citizenry. However, this work reveals the expanding reach of the elite and their current encroachment into the noncorporate arena as yet another opportunity to exert their formidable influence. Citing the increasingly unified and class-conscious aspects of the group, this text reveals the degree to which this minority continues to prosper, dominate, and threaten Canadian democracy through numerous unifying mechanisms: corporate director interlocks; concentrated economic ownership; ties to the mass media; and the many business-oriented think tanks, philanthropic foundations, and corporate policy organizations. Maintaining that these existing relations need not be considered inevitable, the author challenges concerned citizens to come together to disrupt the political and economic status quo.

In Drums of War, Drums of Development, Glassman offers an interpretation of industrialization in East and Southeast Asia that foregrounds Pacific ruling class geopolitical economic manoeuvring during the Vietnam War, challenging interpretations that ignore the effects of military violence.

With The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class, Kees van der Pijl put class formation at the heart of our understanding of world politics and the global economy. This landmark study dissects one of the most decisive phenomena of the twentieth century-the rise of an Atlantic ruling class of multinational banks and corporations. A new preface by the author evaluates the book's significance in the light of recent political and economic developments.

The intricate practices of the elite and how they maintain their dominance. In his new book, Göran Therborn – author of the now standard comparative work on classical sociology and historical materialism, Science, Class and Society – looks at successive state structures in an arrestingly fresh perspective. Therborn uses the formal categories of modern system analysis – input mechanisms, processes of transformation, output flows – to advance a substantive Marxist analysis of state power and state apparatuses. His account of these is comparative in the most far-reaching historical sense: its object is nothing less than the construction of systematic typology of the differences between the feudal state, the capitalist state and the socialist state. Therborn ranges from the monarchies of mediaeval Europe through the bourgeois democracies of the west in the 20th century to the contemporary regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe and China. The book ends with a major analytic survey of the strategies of working class parties for socialism, from the Second International to the Comintern to Eurocommunism, that applies the structural findings of Therborn’s enquiry in the ‘Future as History’. Written with lucidity and economy, What Does the Ruling Class Do when it Rules? represents a remarkable sociological and political synthesis.