ABSTRACT
Global Reach (Barnet and Müller 1974) was one of the first popular books on the growing significance of transnational corporations as global economic actors. Since it was published, production, consumption and finance have all been reorganised across national borders (Dicken 2007) to an extent that was difficult to imagine in the 1970s. One of the most familiar manifestations is the deindustrialisation of much of the high-income world, as manufacturing reconcentrated in jurisdictions where wages are low, employment relations are ‘flexible’, and working conditions are reminiscent of those that drove trade union organising and fuelled public outrage in high-income countries a century ago. Another manifestation is the emergence of global financial markets, which have shifted power from national governments to investors whose priorities constitute the collective wisdom of ‘the markets’ (see Schrecker 2009). In the aftermath of the financial crisis that swept across the world in 2008, it should no longer be controversial to assert that new forms of predatory capitalism can devastate the lives of people half a world away, as well as those living in the shadow of bank towers who had no role in the origins of the crisis and no control over its resolution.
