The era of neoliberal globalization has unsettled the labor-capital relationship in the capitalist world, particularly in the advanced capitalist world. It has brought to an end the period of a strong welfare state and has replaced it with an all-out war of capital against labor — introducing into the global North much of what has been transpiring in the global South since the days of colonialism.

The dominant forces within global capitalism are represented by what Egyptian theorist Samir Amin has entitled the “triad”: the US, European Union and Japan. The principal enforcement arm of the triad is that of the US, sometimes acting in concert with other imperial powers. The triad finds itself sometimes at odds with and other times in sync with the countries associated with the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Yet even where there is contention, it does not match that which was a major feature of the international picture in the first half of the twentieth century when the world was divided into distinct empires based in Europe, Japan, and the US.

There are indications of the development of a transnational capitalist class, but such a class, though at this point largely limited regionally, has no state apparatus through which it is operating. There is, however, an immense level of cooperation between and among the global capitalist classes, particularly regarding their relationship to global labor and efforts at limiting national sovereignty.