A Transnational Class Analysis of the Current Crisis Kees van der Pijl 1 The crisis that became manifest in 2007-08 and from which so far, no exit has been found, is a systemic crisis of the capitalist mode of production. It has opened up an epoch of political decay fraught with grave dangers because of the simultaneous disruption of the biosphere by overpopulation, pollution, and climate change, and the risks of the proliferating ‘War on Terror’ sliding into a major inter-state war. The crisis is being perpetuated by the class fraction that caused it, i.e. money-dealing capital (speculative finance), which remains the directive force within the transnational capitalist system. In contrast to a pluralistic understanding of rival class fractions competing for political influence in specific policy fields to advance their particular interests (criticized by Clarke 1978, referencing Poulantzas 1971 among other authors), the Amsterdam School proceeds from the assumption that one fraction guides the entire class structure for an extended period through the propagation of its particular perspective as a concept of control. During that period, the main classes and indeed society as a whole, voluntarily or for lack of an alternative, assimilate the underlying principles on which the dominance of a directive fraction rests, its preferred modus operandi and outlook, its ‘logic’, and regard them as normal. What Marx wrote about classes in a political revolution, viz., that a particular class ‘emancipates the whole of society but only provided the whole of society is in the same situation as this class’—1975: 184, emphasis added), may also be claimed for fractions of the capitalist class. As capital is forced, time and again, to free itself from constraints that have accumulated to the point where its operation as a particular social configuration (a closed economy centred on production, or a ‘financialised’ one with production outsourced across the globe, etc.) becomes seriously compromised, 1 A version of this piece has been printed as a chapter in Bob Jessop and Henk Overbeek, eds., Transnational Classes and Capital Fractions. The Amsterdam School Perspective Revisited. London: Routledge 2019. https://www.routledge.com/Transnational-Capital-and-Class-Fractions-The- Amsterdam-School-Perspective/Jessop-Overbeek/p/book/9780815369608 . Thanks to Örsan Şenalp for research assistance 1