p Finance capital nowadays tries to place the TNBs and the TNCs in the van of the fight in defence of capitalism along the key lines on which its general crisis has been deepening.

p The competition between the two systems is the most important of these lines, for it is there that the survival of capitalism as a social system is being decided. In the confrontation with world socialism, the TNCs have a two-fold role: as the basis of the production potential of capitalism carrying the main burden in the economic contest, and as an active aide of the bourgeois state in conducting its reactionary anti-socialist policy.

p In its first function, TNC activity largely determines the overall positions of capitalism in the competition between the two systems, but it is nowadays no longer even a matter of synthetic quantitative indicators. The specific feature of the TNCs’ entry into economic competition is that they seek to combat socialism mostly on quality issues, and operate as the immediate rivals of socialist enterprises in all that relates to the organisation of production, technical progress, efficiency and product quality. Here, TNC management are truly in earnest in their hopes of pushing socialism into second place in the STR, an aspect of TNC activity which should neither be minimised nor underestimated.

p The TNCs provide the material basis for supporting the antisocialist policy of the bourgeois state, and are also actively involved in conducting it, although their behaviour in this sphere tends to vary. One US politologist says that the "multinational corporations and their rapidly growing foreign earnings were recognised as major national assets ... to help to finance America’s hegemonic position".  [85•1 

p This attitude on the part of international monopoly capital has its own traditions: members of the US business elite will be found in many extremist groups; prominent Italian businessmen were members of the P-2 lodge, etc. Everywhere the monopolies are eager to finance reactionary, pro-fascist and revanchist outfits.

p But concrete acts by some TNCs in their relations with the socialist countries may turn out to be two-faced and not in accord with the overall strategic line, in view of their strategic-class and concrete commercial interests. Many TNC managers want to have economic ties with the socialist world, object to trade sanctions, favour peaceful coexistence and take a positive view of the idea of detente. The Soviet Union, for its part, is prepared for business contacts with the TNCs, such as long-term and large-scale economic cooperation.

p With the TNCs’ attitude to socialism is directly connected their stand on the issue of war and peace. Referring to the TNCs’ sprawling international operations and their accumulated wealth, many of their advocates seek to present transnational business as virtually the chief champion or guarantor of peace. Indeed, the strategic parity and the growing destructive power of modern weapons tend 86 to spread peace attitudes among the share-holders and managers of the TNCs, far from all of which are involved in the arms race.

p But it does remain an incontrovertible fact that there is also a strong aggressive and militarist wing among the TNCs. Besides, many of them, while obviously fearful of the use of modern nuclear weapons, seem to have no objection to their stockpiling, which they regard as a “deterrent” against socialism and as a highly profitable business. The watershed between the pacifist and the militaristic wing in the TNC camp is a fluid one. Finally, the state-sponsored militarists simply cannot but regard the TNCs as their production and technical base. Two Finnish economists say: "Perhaps, it was so that the politicians determined why arms industries should grow ... while the industries themselves determined how the industry grows and how new weapons are being developed.”  [86•1 

p The TNCs are the adversaries of the communist, working-class and democratic movement, and they bring to the conflict between labour and capital the bourgeoisie’s cosmopolitan solidarity and try to divide the various national contingents of the working class and set them against each other, a practice Engels said was the "sharpest weapon against the proletariat in the hands of the bourgeoisie".  [86•2  Consider the TNCs’ latest large-scale move in transferring their enterprises from countries with high wages and strong trade unions to countries with minimum wages and a repressed workingclass movement. There is, of course, also a need for new jobs in the LDCs, but here the TNCs feel that they are entitled to act arbitrarily and sharply to step up the rate of exploitation.

p The TNCs also engage in direct anti-trade-union actions, such as refusal to recognise locar trade unions (IBM and Kodak), abandonment of local collective bargaining practices (US TNCs in Britain), introduction of imported forms of labour organisation (Japanese TNCs in the United States), switching of orders to other subsidiaries to combat strikes, lobbying against social legislation, and so on.

p The monopoly bourgeoisie’s solidarity is instanced by its fight against left-wing, democratic forces whenever they are close to winning political power or are working for it. The experience in destabilising revolutionary regimes in Chile and Portugal has now been widened by the action against Italy (the TNCs mounted an investment blockade there to prevent the Communists joining the government), and especially the TNCs’ fight against the left forces’ government in France. In response to its nationalisation measures, the employers engaged in open sabotage by refusing to make investments at home and smuggling their capital abroad. The French Socialists succumbed to the sabotage and began to drift to the right, a development which induced the Communist Party to withdraw from the government in 1984.

p The TNCs have been resisting the national liberation movement, 87 especially at the present stage of its struggle for economic decolonisation. In the LDCs, the TNCs have been acting as an " expeditionary corps" for neocolonialism, with a purposeful drive to foster a class of local bourgeoisie in these countries as a potential ally and a pledge that these countries will stay within the capitalist economic system.

p Control of the commanding heights in LDC economies often enables the TNCs to dictate their own terms. In Africa, for instance, the copper and nickel Sache agreement between the government of Botswana and a private consortium was renegotiated three times between 1975 and 1982, with the result that the government’s fiscal take was reduced substantially.  [87•1  The US bauxite company Suralco, which operates in Suriname, tried, with the help of the CIA, to overthrow the local government on eight occasions. Lonhro and Anglo-American corporations of South Africa are behind the separatist activity of the UNIT A group in Angola.

p There are, of course, limits to the monopoly bourgeoisie’s international solidarity, and the emergence of the TNCs has, among other things, exacerbated the inter-imperialist contradictions to an extreme. The national imperialisms send out the TNCs to the frontline of the struggle for a repartition of the capitalist market, and here there is good evidence of an offensive by West European and Japanese companies against the positions of their US rivals. In 1964, the United States had 60 per cent of the major corporations within the capitalist world, Western Europe—30 per cent, and Japan—9 per cent; in 1976, the figures were already, respectively, 52, 31 and 12 per cent; and in 1980 they were 47, 34 and 13 per cent.  [87•2 

p For their home countries, the TNCs are now the chief providers of raw materials, export earnings and profits, but true to the logic of monopoly economic operations, they also inflict obvious harm on their countries. Lenin said that the export of capital "may tend to a certain extent to arrest development in the capital-exporting countries",  [87•3  and that is now a generally accepted fact. Apart from the “export” of jobs, which goes to increase unemployment, the price that had to be paid for the counter-offensive by West European capital on the US market has been an obvious depletion of Western Europe’s money market, which delayed its exit from the 1980-1982 crisis and caused West European exchange rates to fall.

p It would also be a big mistake to regard the TNCs of a country as some kind of team in pursuit of common national objectives. The fact is that they too are locked in acute competitive contradictions. Here is what an English writer says about their feelings for each other: " ’We all hate Texaco,’ said an Exxon man. ’If I were dying in a Texaco filling-station,’ said a Shell man, ‘I’d ask to be 88 dragged across the road.’ "  [88•1  The nasty practices of such a competition, including international competition, tend to deepen the moral crisis of the capitalist society, because it frequently involves corruption, business crime and misinformation. Thus, an Italian consortium won a hydro-power plant contract in Peru in the face of bids by its British and West German rivals by giving a bribe.

Such competition often enables countries in which the TNCs operate to secure deals on better terms, as was the case with OPEC, when it was able to go over to an offensive against the international oil cartel following the emergence on the market of more than 20 new outsider companies in the 1960s. But it can also spell tragedy for a country which happens to become an objective of inter- imperialist competition, as in the case of Nigeria: the TNCs of Britain and France were vying for its oil resources, and the French TNCs tried to settle the issue by setting up the separatist "Republic of Biafra" in the 1960s.