In fact, because the working-class has failed, in the intervening period, to establish control over its socialised capital – itself a function of its political leadership being dominated by the ideology of petty-bourgeois and bourgeois nationalism, and social-democratic statism and liberal welfarism – other than for its cooperatives, a further development, and complication has arisen. The ruling-class has become a global class of speculators. It owns its wealth, not in the form of real industrial capital, but in the form of fictitious capital (shares, bonds, and their derivatives) The link to the industrial capital of any one nation state, no longer exists. It is only the dwarfish capital of the petty-bourgeoisie, the relics of private capital, that remains tied to the nation state, and looks to it for protection, hence the drive for Brexit and other similar petty-bourgeois, nationalist equivalents, elsewhere.
An American money-lending capitalist/speculator can own the shares of a Japanese, German, British or Chinese company, or the bonds of such companies or governments, with equal facility. A Russian money-lending capitalist/speculator, likewise, may own the shares or bonds of Microsoft, Fujitsu or Siemens, as well as the bonds issued by the US, British or Japanese states. In fact, they will always tend to do so, buying those share and bonds they gamble will provide the greatest total return (change in asset price together with interest/dividends).
The global ruling class is a footloose class of money-lenders/speculators, with homes across the globe, able to move to wherever best suits their immediate needs, just as the Internet and electronic financial markets enables them, at the press of a key, to sell shares and bonds in Tokyo and buy them in Toronto. The private industrial capitalists of the 19th century, today, are a relic, existing only in the form of the petty-bourgeoisie, and small private capitalists. They are still large in number, about 5 million small capitals, or about 15 million people, in Britain, for example, giving rise to the small business myth, but they are weak and subordinate in economic and social power.
The significance, however, of this petty-bourgeois relic is precisely in its numbers, and the consequence of that in bourgeois elections. From the 1980's onwards, it was able to capture conservative, social-democratic parties such as the Conservatives in Britain, or Republicans in the US. It pursued a petty-bourgeois, nationalist agenda, quite at odds with the interests of imperialism (large scale, socialised industrial capital), for example, manifest in Brexit, and the protectionist policies of Trump et al.
The global ruling class had an indirect interest in a further development of globalisation, the abolition of nation states, and their outmoded borders, because that reduced costs, speeded the turnover of capital, and so on, which boosted realised profits, out of which their interest/dividends were paid. But, they are tiny in number, and so their electoral power is non-existent. They rely, instead, on their control of property, and of the state, so that the continued development of globalisation, of the further integration, for example, of the EU, as a political entity, i.e. state, is accompanied by bureaucratic methods, over the heads of voters, which further antagonises the petty-bourgeoisie, and those social layers influenced by, and associated with it that sought a reactionary solution in the utopia of the nation state, of national self-determination, national independence, “taking back control”, and other such delusions.
What is worse is that the political leadership of the working-class became the conduit of these reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalist ideas into the labour movement, also. Marx and Engels had propounded the principle that the workers have no country. Lenin, and the Marxists of the early 20th century continued that concept of international socialism, stating that they fought not for national self-determination, but for the self-determination of the workers of all nations, breaking down all national borders, and forging the greatest possible unity of workers across the globe, against their common enemy, the global ruling class.
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