Capitalism in Transformation

With the rise of AI, venture capital, private credit and the far right, our economies are experiencing a deep transformation
About this Event

After the Global Financial Crisis, much of the political economy literature anticipated a decline in the power of capital interests in advanced market economies. The combination of severe financial distress, populist countermovements, and renewed regulatory intervention was expected to truncate business power and restore state authority vis-à-vis capital.

However, this decline in power did not materialise. In the two decades since the crisis, business power has not diminished, but it has transformed. Asset-management firms now pool vast amounts of global savings, while venture capital and private credit have contributed to an unprecedented concentration of corporate control in private markets. More recently, the rise of AI has accelerated investment flows into technology sectors, potentially ushering in new forms of capital concentration.

At the same time, new state-business alliances appear to be forming. We now know that far-right and nationalist political projects do not consistently resist the expansion of capital power. Instead, they appear to increasingly align with concentrated power in finance and technology.

This symposium explores these recent transformations of the capitalist order.

PROGRAMME

11:00 to 11:30 Arrival and Welcome

11:30-13:00 Panel I: Finance, Tech and New Forms of Capital

1) Kean Birch (York University) Custodial regimes of assetization: Alternative asset classes, tokenization, and the tensions in digital custody arrangements

2) Franziska Cooiman (TU Berlin) Where entrepreneurship meets wealth: unpacking the wealth chains of Berlin’s startup elite

3) Daniela Gabor (SOAS) The Wall Street AI consensus

13:00-14:00 Lunch Break

14:00-15:30 Panel II: Capitalism, Legitimation and the Far Right

1) Mònica Clua-Losada (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) Capitalism’s gravediggers or saviours? Texas ideology and the attempted mutation towards technofascism

2) Albena Azmanova (City St George’s) Capitalism’s paradoxes as engines of its mutation

3) Inga Rademacher (City St George’s) The new governance of capital: The far right, finance and big tech

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

16:00-17:30 Panel III: Big Tech, Geopolitics and the Future of Capitalism

1) Milan Babic (University of Amsterdam) Who owns the future? Digital infrastructures on a decarbonising planet

2) Scott James (KCL) Privatizing dollar dominance? Digital currency statecraft and the geoeconomics of stablecoins

3) Photis Lysandrou (City St George’s) Core-satellite structure of US hegemony

17:30-18:00 Closing Discussion