In Vulture Capitalism, Grace Blakeley focuses on perhaps the central question of our time, namely: “Is it possible to imagine a world beyond capitalism?” The fact that many, particularly most mainstream economists, will dismiss the question as absurd underlines the difficulty involved in such imagining. But Vulture Capitalism is a serious scholarly work which convincingly urges readers to entertain the thought that alternatives to capitalism really are possible.
Blakeley marshals her argument in four strands. First, she describes clearly the contemporary capitalist system that has emerged since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution. Second, she describes how this system was constructed by deliberately dismantling the system of social democracy that had prevailed since the end of the second World War. Third, she highlights some of the disastrous consequences that have resulted from the removal of democratic control over capitalist planning. Finally, she argues that simply returning to social democracy is no longer an answer, particularly given the accelerating impacts of climate change. Bolder thinking, she argues, is needed urgently.
Vulture Capitalism aims to show that far from being the free-market model beloved by mainstream economists, actually-existing capitalism is instead a system of pervasive planning among powerful players who work together to determine the distribution of wealth and resources in the global economy. “What makes capitalism capitalism.” Blakeley writes, “is not free markets, but the domination of society by capital.” In today’s globalised world, the owners of capital comprise four powerful actors — corporations, financial institutions, states and empires. Blakeley considers each of these in turn.
Banks and financial institutions, too, are not simply neutral lenders of finance. Their power is such that they now determine which companies can survive, which innovations are developed, and which states can borrow
Corporations are not simply actors in the economy, she writes. They are also major actors in politics and wider society. The owners of large corporations also own media companies, have the power to influence legislation to avoid tax payments, and can persuade states to minimise social spending in favour of policies supporting “business”.
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Banks and financial institutions, too, are not simply neutral lenders of finance. Their power is such that they now determine which companies can survive, which innovations are developed, and which states can borrow. Investment banks, through their facilitation of mergers and acquisitions, from which they profit handsomely, have played a major role in the creation and maintenance of the current corporate-financial-state model of capitalism.
In turn, the scale of corporations and financial institutions is such that they can organise within a state to ensure the state’s bureaucratic resources are deployed in their interests. Real politics now increasingly takes place within this corporate-financial-state system, with citizens largely excluded from participation, and citizens’ interests placed secondary to the interests of capital. What remains in the place of true democracy is a politics of narcissistic theatricality entirely impotent in addressing the deep structural issues that are the cause of contemporary crises.
As Blakeley outlines, the same logic of exclusion of public interest also applies to the relationship between developed and developing countries. The stark divide between the rich core and the poor periphery in the world economy is not only a function of different levels of historical development. It is also a design feature of corporate-financial-state capitalism. The hyper-development of the rich countries depends on ongoing transfers of wealth from the world’s poorest countries. China’s current attempt to break out of this system, and the west’s attempts to prevent it from doing so, is one of the primary factors shaping geopolitics today.
Blakeley argues that the emergence of this corporate-financial-state system has been the result of the consciously planned erosion of social democracy, which had emerged as the postwar settlement between democracy and capitalism. Social democracy gave workers a seat at the table, however limited. The Reagan-Thatcher revolution, however, set about the systemic destruction of unions and worker power, and the exclusion of workers from both corporate and state planning. Rather than seeking to mediate between bosses and workers, the state increasingly acted in the interests of capital. As Wendy Brown has argued, the result has been the systemic erosion of real political spaces that previously enabled “deliberation about justice and other common goods, contestation over values and purposes, struggles over power, pursuit of visions for the good of the whole”. The impotence of contemporary democratic politics, Blakeley argues, is by design.
As David Graeber has put it, it turns out that maintaining a free-market economy requires a thousand times more paperwork than a Louis VIX-style absolutist monarchy
The current model of global capitalism then is one marked by immense concentration of power in the corporate-financial-state system, the morphing of the state into alignment with corporate-financial interests, and the erosion of social democracy. The consequences of this for the lives of citizens and the planet are immense. Aside from the growth of the power of billionaires and huge increases in inequality, Vulture Capitalism outlines three consequences that have a detrimental impact on us all.
First, decades of economic changes have led to an enormous increase in bureaucracy and a dramatic expansion in middle management, particularly in the public sector. As David Graeber has put it, it turns out that maintaining a free-market economy requires a thousand times more paperwork than a Louis VIX-style absolutist monarchy. Public sector governance has now largely become management by numbers, focused on value for money and efficiency audits. This has created a culture of meaningless measurement and stultifying micromanagement which has been enormously detrimental across a range of meaningful professions, from teaching to social work to healthcare, where money is neither the primary motivation nor principal intended outcome.
The second consequence Blakeley describes is the fact that the immense concentration of corporate power means that large companies now control what technologies are developed and for what purposes. The idea of the individual entrepreneur as creative genius is largely a thing of the past, as giant corporations buy up or squeeze out new start-ups that are developing technologies that might rival their own. Such an undemocratic concentration of technological power in an era of AI, deep fakes, transhumanism and brain chips is an immense failure on the part of governments to protect the common good.
Third, Blakely argues, the system of corporate-financial-state capitalism has acquired an alarming dynamic, whereby successive cycles of boom and bust are being deliberately used to siphon ever more wealth from the majority of citizens into the hands of already wealthy elites. Every recent crisis, from the 2008 financial crisis to the pandemic, to the cost-of-living crisis, has seen the state stepping in to solve these crises in the interests of capital. What has happened in each case is that governments have distributed billions of euro of public money to large companies, which went on to pay out dividends to shareholders and lay off workers. The cumulative result has been a remarkable upward redistribution of wealth.
And so, to Blakeley’s central question: “Is it possible to imagine a world beyond capitalism?”
The current system of capitalism is having a wide range of severely detrimental impacts — economic, political, social, environmental and psychological. A return to social democracy, Blakeley believes, is neither feasible nor sufficient, particularly given the accelerating effects of climate change. The same small group of people and institutions that gave us climate breakdown, and which profit greatly from it, she argues, cannot now be expected to develop a solution to the problem.
It is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And that, in itself, poses perhaps the greatest challenge to the reimagining of our economic system
But as Queen’s University Belfast’s professor of green political economy John Barry remarks, it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And that, in itself, poses perhaps the greatest challenge to the reimagining of our economic system. “The greatest barrier to the emergence and spread of movements which provide possible alternatives to capitalism,” Blakeley writes, “is not the power of capital. It is the conviction, held by so many millions of people, that change is impossible.”
Indeed, it is one of contemporary capitalism’s most spectacular successes that it has made the current system appear normal — the result of natural forces which cannot be questioned or resisted. In helping to achieve this success, the discipline of economics has played a central role. In fact, rather than playing the usual function of an academic discipline in opening up new areas of knowledge, it can be argued that the primary role of mainstream economics has been a closing down of imagination.
One powerful idea that is emerging in discourses on global warming is the idea of consensual knowledge. Consensual knowledge is the knowledge that policymakers, and citizens also, use to make decisions. But just because something is a fact doesn’t mean it makes it into consensual knowledge, which is essentially a power game. Lots of things, like feminist perspectives, ecological perspectives, Marxist perspectives and indigenous perspectives do not get admitted to the consensual knowledge in mainstream economics, severely limiting the discipline’s imagination and ability to contribute creatively to a better future.
The freedom offered to all, beyond corporate-financial-state capitalism, Blakeley writes, is the freedom of the architect – the power to create worlds. Vulture Capitalism makes a powerful case that a change in consensual knowledge, and a demotion of economics as the central authority in ordering contemporary civilisation, is necessary to move beyond the current destructive model of capitalism to reimagine an economics that is a better fit for our humanity.
- Ian Hughes is author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personalities are Destroying Democracy
Further reading
Martin Wolf’s The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Penguin, 2024) is the Financial Times’ chief economic commentator’s warning that the excesses of contemporary capitalism are destroying democracy and his impassioned call for a restoration of the balance that characterised social democracy.
Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press, 2019) is a masterful account of the ideological underpinnings of the free-marketeers’ decades-long campaign to undermine social democracy, showing clearly how dismantling democracy was fundamental, not incidental, to their programme.
Stephan Lessenich’s Living Well at Others’ Expense: The Hidden Costs of Western Prosperity (Polity, 2019) is a hard-hitting critique of the contemporary global economic system in which he argues that an exclusive focus on the super-wealthy avoids the fact that many of us in the rich developed world are also complicit in perpetuating the injustices of capitalism.
Joan Tronto’s Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice (NYU Press, 2013) challenges the idea that economic life is the most important political and human concern and argues instead that caring, with its components love, friendship and solidarity, should be the highest value that shapes our societies and the central concern of democratic political life.
