ABSTRACT

This chapter examines how capitalism has become globalized through three lenses: genetically modified, as a key player in the auto industry; Apple, as a key player in the high-tech industry; and the international financial system, as a key beneficiary of technological change. Globalization has been a powerful force of transformation, sweeping across the world and changing people’s lives. Globalization has connected the world in a vast array of networks. The auto industry provides one of the most powerful illustrations of how national production has transformed into transnational production. Transnational capitalism is a global system of accumulation, cross-border financial investments, and world-spanning networks of production. The financial industry has also radically changed under globalization—with an assist from advances in technology—in what many economists call the “financialization” of capitalism. The chapter concludes with considerations of how the practices of all three represent huge transformations in transnational economic power across national boundaries.