Sean Starrs
There are various ways that the world dominance of American TNCs boosts American state power. The global dominance of Wall Street (financial services in figure two), for example, helps to ensure that the US dollar remains the de facto world currency.
The dominance of American tech firms helps to ensure the continued supremacy of the US military, while the dominance of American media helps to ensure that the US state can shape the ideological narrative (including support for US capitalism and imperialism). In general, the dominance of American TNCs ensures that the US state can leverage them in various ways as both carrot and stick against other capitalist powers.
The best recent example of how this dominance enhances US state power is the US tech war against China that began in 2019 under Donald Trump and really ramped up under Joe Biden. American firms have virtual monopolies in various crucial technologies, from smartphone operating systems to semiconductor design software, and the US state can pressure its allies whose TNCs also have crucial monopolies (like ASML from the Netherlands). This means the US state can severely constrict China’s continued global tech competitiveness in advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence, supercomputing, etc.
Notably, Huawei was China’s most technologically advanced global competitor in the 2010s. Its smartphones were briefly world number one in the second quarter of 2020. After the US Department of Commerce placed Huawei on its “Entity List” in May 2019, embargoing US TNCs from doing business with them, they could no longer update their Google Android operating system nor access the most advanced semiconductors.
Huawei’s global market share in smartphones went from 20 percent in Q2 2020 to zero outside of China from 2021 to the present. Within China itself, Huawei’s smartphone market…
Auteur: Sean Starrs
