p No one, including the managers of the TNCs, will now deny that TNC activity is being politicised, usually assuming a threefold form: participation in shaping their governments’ foreign-policy line; TNC conduct of such policy abroad; and claims to pursuing their own "corporate diplomacy”.

p The TNCs conduct their activity along a number of channels: a personal union between business and government agencies and a personnel rotation between them; financing of political parties and the attendant lobbyism and corruption; use of the mass media; and finally, consulting the authorities on matters of common interest.

p Bourgeois diplomacy is a true “friend” of finance capital. The state funds TNC operations, underwrites (insures) their foreign investments, "showing the flag" in conflicts with host countries, providing them with intelligence services, and so on. Thus, the embassies of France and Italy put pressure on the Spanish government to prevent the opening in Spain of a General Motors subsidiary that could compete with Renault and Fiat. Petroleum TNC shipments of oil from the Persian Gulf are protected by US, British and French naval forces. The CIA organised the overthrowing of progressive anti-monopoly governments, among them those of Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadiq in Iran, Manley in Jamaica, and Allende in Chile.

p But the TNCs keep to their part of the bargain. The Indian journal Commerce says that the TNCs have already developed into the "fourth instrument", alongside diplomacy, the army and the intelligence service, the three instruments bourgeois governments use to conduct their foreign policy. The TNCs find it all the handier 89 to do this through their far-flung network and their clout in the local corridors of power. The TNCs recruit as share-holders and directors local politicians and members of their entourage, put pressure on local planning, electoral and military agencies, and handle missions which official diplomats prefer not to touch. Some TNBs, for instance, got President Albert Bongo of Gabon to become one of their shareholders. The son of Togoland President Sylvanus Olympio and a nephew of the late Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta are members of the board, of the Anglo-South African Lonhro corporation. Antonio Tepedino, President of Venezuela’s national oil company, was on the payroll of the petroleum TNCs and supplied them with confidential information.  [89•1  Intelligence information also flows through the closed channels of TNC communications, as was the case in Nigeria, where a petroleum TNC was discovered to have a secret communications centre plugged into the CIA’s African department system. In defiance of UN sanctions, it is the TNCs that have been rearming the South African militarists.

p TNCs often try to conduct their own "corporate diplomacy" abroad and meddle in the domestic affairs of the sovereign states hosting them. "The transnational corporations are undermining the sovereignty both of developing and developed capitalist countries. They make active use of state-monopoly regulation, when it suits their interests, and come into sharp conflict with it when they see the slightest threat to their profits from the actions of bourgeois governments.”  [89•2  Thus, interference by US TNCs hampered Belgium and Holland in pursuing their "incomes policy", the FRG and France—in effecting programmes for trade-union participation in industrial management, and Italy—in setting up its own nuclearpower industry to substitute for oil imports. But TNC operations are not confined to economics. In Madagascar, TNC agents were behind the assassination of the country’s progressive political leaders and financed the "private army" of local adventurist Andre Resampa. Through the puppet separatist outfit known as FLEC, Gulf Oil tried to cut off the territory of Cabinda from Angola. It is not surprising, therefore, that with the spread of such political banditism, the UN Commission on Transnational Corporations decided to issue a Code of Conduct for the TNCs, which prohibits illegal political TNC activity in the host countries.

The governments of the TNCs’ home countries do not object to such a code either, and that is not as paradoxical as it may seem to be. As the TNCs lose touch with their national soil, they also tend to challenge their “own” authorities, whenever the interests of the two diverge. There is, for instance, a very large illegal remittance of funds from Italy to Switzerland, which tends to depress the exchange-rate of the lira.  [89•3  Whenever they find it advantageous, the TNCs resort to large-scale anti-national acts. During the energy crisis, for instance, Royal Dutch Shell cut back the supply of oil 90 to the British market by 10-15 per cent, ignoring the government’s request not to do so. French oil companies have been known to demand of local consumers even tougher supply terms than those of the US oil corporations.