Tatyana – ‘“politics” is a kind of tip of the iceberg, a performance for ordinary citizens. In fact, for capitalism, the friendliness or hostility of states does not matter.’
Very true!
I saw this coming several decades ago. Corporations grow by buying and thereby subsuming their smaller competitors. States cannot do this very much; they sometimes attack weaker states and then install a compliant government, or take over much smaller states, or grab a little territory or some small islands, but small states are allied to bigger states, the top of that hierarchy being the five Nuclear Weapons States and Permanent Members of the UNSC. Corporations are not restrained in this way, so the biggest can grow and grow, and are now as economically powerful as the nuclear weapons empires.
Corporations’ operations are subject to the laws of the states in which they operate, but by straddling the globe they play off states against each other, eg. US Apple manufactures in China to pay low wages and bypass unions; Google’s UK operations pay tax in the Republic of Ireland because the tax rate is much lower, etc. This way, the corporations hold the states to ransom, forcing down wages, tax and protection of workers. Unless all the states were to elect socialist governments at the same time, the corporations can always penalise the more socialist states by moving their operations elsewhere.