p The anti-monopoly movement is highly diverse, for it includes trade unions, the middle strata, democratically-minded intellectuals, a section of small and middle business a"nd the peasantry oppressed by the TNCs, and even some sections of the state apparatus, especially in the localities. The Communists are the most consistent fighters against the monopolies. The TNCs are also under criticism from the Social Democrats, members of the ecological movement, and some religious circles. In the LDCs, this movement is largely identical with the movement for economic decolonisation and a New International Economic Order (NIEO). The TNCs are also opposed by critically-minded liberal and left-radical mass media.

p The trade unions are engaged in active day-to-day struggle against the TNCs, striving to set up their branches at TNC enterprises, to have them affiliated with national trade-union centres, and to wind up "employer unions". The forms of the working people’s international solidarity countering the TNCs’ anti-trade-union actions have also been multiplying, including refusal to work on orders switched from strike-bound enterprises, solidarity strikes, exchanges of information, establishment of international secretariats of trade unions from TNC enterprises, a struggle to raise working conditions at various subsidiaries up to their highest level, and so on. Such efforts are most active in the metal, motor vehicle and chemical industries, but one has to admit that the TNCs are well in advance of the international working-class movement in the practice of internationalising their operations. One reason is certainly the lack of unity within the international working-class movement, and the conciliatory and separatist tactics of the "free trade unions"—the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) and the World Confederation of Labour (WCL)—which have refused to join in anti-monopoly action with the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), although unity has been making headway at the grassroots.

p There is resistance to exploitation by TNC agribusiness, while small and middle businessmen have been fighting for their very survival. Restoration of national sovereignty over their natural resources and economic activity is the main anti-monopoly slogan in the LDCs.

p All of these movements have diverse slogans and different objectives. While the left-wing bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties often propound Utopian projects for “checking” the TNCs through a return to "free competition", which is definitely at odds with the growing socialisation of production, and while the Social Democrats claim that TNC abuses can be remedied by legislative enactments, the Communists take a different stand. They propose different 91 national anti-monopoly programmes depending on the concrete conditions in each country; their common element is that the communist parties do not oppose large-scale production as such. It is, after all, an inevitable outcome of the progressive development of the productive forces, and is the soil on which the modern industrial proletariat develops. But the communist parties want greater social control over highly socialised production to make it serve the interests of the whole people rather than the self-seeking interests of small groups of shareholders and managers.

p Accordingly, they have demanded the nationalisation of the TNCs (something that was partially done by the left-wing forces in France and in Portugal), establishment of democratic controls over TNC activity at enterprises, preservation of jobs, improvement of working conditions, etc. None of these measures is regarded as an end in itself, but only as a part of labour’s general struggle against capital on the way to the attainment of the ultimate goals of the working-class and communist movement.

p Practice shows that the TNCs can be brought to heel, and that there is a realistic possibility of using their technical and economic potential without any negative social or political consequences, as the socialism-oriented states have already demonstrated. That is the objective of the anti-monopoly, general democratic movement.

p We find, therefore, that the TNCs have definitely sprung from some of the objective processes in the capitalist economy, and in their specific ways, the TNCs have been boosting labour productivity and advancing technical progress, even if in a contradictory manner. This also applies to their operations in the LDCs, and here we find a relevant analogy with 19th-century Russia, where, as Lenin said, the "work of our capitalism" can be regarded "as progressive when it draws ... small, scattered markets together into one nationwide market, when, in place of the legion of small well-meaning blood-suckers, it creates a handful of big ’pillars of the fatherland’, when it socialises labour and raises its productivity, when it shatters the subordination of the working people to the local bloodsuckers and subordinates them to large-scale CAPITAL. This subordination is progressive ... because it AWAKENS THE MIND OF THE WORKER, converts dumb and incoherent discontent into conscious protest, converts scattered, petty, senseless revolt into an organised class struggle".  [91•1 

A scientific analysis of TNC practices, ideas, schemes, values and ambitions as a whole shows that recognition of the progressiveness of their role is quite compatible "with the full recognition of the negative and dark sides of capitalism, with the full recognition of the profound and all-round social contradictions which are inevitably inherent in capitalism and which reveal the historically transient character of this economic regime".  [91•2  These ideas of 92 Lenin’s also help to see the future of the TNCs. The free competition envisioned by some bourgeois “neo-romantics” and left-wing radicals cannot be expected to remain on the scene once it has generated monopoly. While the TNCs do give capitalism an infusion of fresh forces and so provide it with a reserve, considering the level of socialisation of production which they signify, they can be abolished only with capitalism itself, as the competition between the two systems and the class struggle demonstrate that they are economically and socially irrelevant.