The Crisis of 'the Crisis of Capitalism'

Where is the coveted, prophesied, dreaded crisis of capitalism? Why has the economic and social turmoil that recently afflicted Western democracies triggered such faint attempts to replace the apparently moribund socio-economic model? The alleged crisis of capitalism, I claim, has been a catalyst in the metamorphosis of neoliberal capitalism – a transmutation that began well before the recent economic meltdown and in many ways triggered it. This has led to the emergence of a fourth historical modality of capitalism, which I call ‘aggregative capitalism’ (after the entrepreneurial nineteenth-century capitalism, the ‘organized’ capitalism of the post-WWII welfare state, and the neoliberal, ‘disorganized’ capitalism of the late twentieth century). In this lecture, I trace the features of this new form of capitalism and the dynamics that activate it. Based on a public lecture at the London School of Economics (4 Nov. 2014) and University of California, Berkeley (22 Jan. 2015).