ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, the Amsterdam School (AS) has pursued an empirically rich and conceptually sophisticated research programme addressed to transnational class formation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The programme has been cumulative, registering significant advances over time, as globalizing capitalism itself has shape-shifted. Henk Overbeek's clear conception of finance capital as 'the integration of the circuits of money capital, productive capital and commodity capital under the conditions of monopolization and internationalization by means of a series of links and relationships between individual capitals' influenced the author's dissertation research. As Henk Overbeek comments, the notion of a comprehensive concept of control enables us to understand how strategic divisions in bourgeois politics and the structural dynamics of capital accumulation are interrelated. In this way, the fractionation of the capitalist class is understood as a moment of the underlying process of class formation, rather than as an aberration or an insignificant epiphenomenon.
