Globalization and Transnational Capitalism in Asia and Oceania

News headlines warn of rivalries and competing nations across Asia and the Pacific, even as powerful new cross-border relations form as never before. This book looks behind the Asia-Pacific curtain: at the new forms of social, economic, and political integration taking place through a global capitalism that is rife with contradictions, inequality, and crisis. We are moved beyond traditional conceptualizations of the inter-state system with its nation-state competition as the core organizing principle of world capitalism and the principal institutional framework that shapes the makeup of global social forces.

These important studies examine and debate over how there is a growing transnationality of material (economic) relations in the global era, as well as an emerging transnationality of many social and class relations. How does transnational capitalist class fractions, new middle strata, and labor undergird globalization in Asia and Oceania? How have states and institutions become entwined with such processes? This book provides insight into a field of dynamic change.

Introduction 1. Global Capitalism and Transnational Class Formation in Asia and OceaniaTransnational Capitalist Class 2. Statism and the Transnational Capitalist Class in China 3. Japanese Transnational Capitalists and Asia-Pacific Free Trade4. The Rise of China and India and the Formation of a Transnational Capitalist Class in the Asia/Oceania Region5. Lean Production as a Tool of Global Capitalism in Asia: The Transnational Capitalist Class in Action Labor and the Global Economy 6. Global Capitalism and the Transformation of China’s Working Class7. Transnational Class Formation: A View from Below8. National Champions in a Global Arena: Rhetoric and Inequality in Global Capitalism Finance and Production Capital 9. Offshore Tax Havens: The Borderlands of Global Capitalism10. Conflicts within Transnational Finance Capital and the Motivations of Climate-Interested Investors 11. From Client State to Rentier State?: New Compradors, Transnational Capital and the Internationalization of Globalizing Dynamics in Australia, 1990-2013 Transnational Dynamics and (Under-)development 12. Uneven Geographies of Transnational Capitalism in Laos 13. From Missionary to New Middle Class Schooling in the Era of Global Capitalism: Dilemmas of inclusive education reform in India 14. From Transnational Trends to Local Practices: Monitoring Social Impact in a Papua New Guinea Mining Community Transnationally Oriented Elites and the State Apparatus 15. Global Capitalism, the BRICS, and the Transnational State 16. State, Capital, and Class Struggle in Australia: Reflections on the Global Capitalism Perspective17. The Regionalization of Capital in the Patchwork Economy and the Transnationalization of the Subnational StateConclusion 18. Global Capitalism and its Discontents: Toward a Political Economy of the Possible.

Jeb Sprague is in the Department of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and is a founding member of the Network for Critical Studies of Global Capitalism. View his academic website at: https://sites.google.com/site/jebsprague/.