p For all the novelty of the TNCs as a phenomenon, they do not in themselves signify any transition by capitalism to some new “transnational” stage. The national monopolies, assuming the form of TNCs, have up to now been growing mainly in breadth without noticeably interlacing with each other, so that it is still too early to say that some new “transnational” financial oligarchy or “ transnational” state-monopoly capitalism has emerged. But even in their present form, the TNCs undoubtedly tend to produce important changes in the capitalist economy. Thus, a sizable part of the productive forces of capitalism are under TNC control, being increasingly shaped as international productive forces and functioning as such within the system of the international division of labour.

p The socialisation of production is a process that has also been acquiring new features. TNC production is ripe for being taken into state public ownership, whose alternative is monopoly private ownership. The apologists of capital and the managers of the TNCs hope that these will help to direct the further socialisation of the productive forces towards the wide scope of the world market, so that its in-depth development in the individual capitalist countries does not create situations of class conflict. This makes it possible to keep the growing socialisation within the old, private- ownership integument, however partially and for however short a time.

p In the sphere of production relations, the TNCs tend to internationalise the immediate process in which surplus-value is extracted by exploiting more than 30 million workers in other countries, thereby lifting some of the national limits for the accumulation and concentration of capital. For their part, international production relations, which in the context of the 19th century Marx regarded as only “secondary”, "derived" and “transmitted”,  [74•3  begin 75 increasingly to acquire primary elements, no longer mediating exchange alone, but also the deep-seated conflict between labour and capital itself. In the sphere of international production relations, the TNCs operate as the main conductor of neocolonialism, reproducing through their activity the dependent and inequitable condition of the newly liberated states within the capitalist economic system.

p The reproduction process has not remained immune to changes either, as the TNCs increasingly orient it towards external economic ties: the United States receives 48 per cent of its overall imports, and the developed capitalist countries send out 33 per cent of their exports through TNC channels.  [75•1  The reproduction process is given fresh impulses by internationalisation, thereby creating the possibility of supply being at variance with demand on the scale of the capitalist economy as a whole, and hence also the possibility of crises.  [75•2  Indeed, the TNCs have done much to give greater scope to the postwar cycle, so that the boom in their activity was naturally followed by the deepest and most protracted crisis of the early 1980s. Foreign control over entire sectors of the host economy also makes it much more difficult for the sovereign states to conduct a national economic policy and this produces an acute "nation- corporation" conflict, which will be considered below.

p TNC activity has far-reaching consequences for the international division of labour. On the one hand, its forms are diversified, and there is a wider range of scenarios for conducting external economic operations. New economic zones are involved in international commerce, but there is also a contradictory process in which the TNCs’ intra-firm division of labour is superimposed on the existing international division of labour, generating disproportions, contradictions and conflicts. The French economist Charles-Albert Michalet says: "The specialisation of nation-states ceases to be the expected result of their factorial endowments, and becomes the actual product of the choice of competitive activity by firms.”  [75•3  International TNC intra-firm deliveries simultaneously provide the basis for the formation on the world market of vast closed zones ( involving almost a third of international trade in manufactures), and this, together with TNC control of other segments of exchange, substantially reduces the size of free markets and the sphere of market competition in world trade.

The TNCs have, therefore, once again provided visual confirmation of Marx’s fundamental conclusion that under capitalism everything seems pregnant with its opposite.  [75•4  While opening up fresh potentialities for the development and internationalisation of the productive forces, the TNCs tend to implant monopolistic elements 76 everywhere, and to internationalise their negative effects as well. Polls taken in Britain, France and Canada showed that 50.2 per cent, 45.8 per cent and 58.2 per cent, respectively, of those polled believed that the TNCs had a negative impact on their economy, while 46.7 per cent, 44.1 per cent and 52.8 per cent held their activity to be on the whole at variance with the national interest.  [76•1