What COVID-19 Reveals About Twenty-First Century Capitalism: Adversity and Opportunity
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What COVID‑19 Reveals About Twenty‑First Century Capitalism: Adversity and Opportunity Susan K. Sell1
© Society for International Development 2020
Abstract Twenty-first century capitalism features financialization and monopoly power. A structural perspective of contemporary political economy illuminates how these aspects shape the COVID-19 response. COVID-19 has exposed failures across health care systems, working conditions, supply chains, the depth of inequality, systemic racism, and features of globalization that exacerbate negative outcomes for the many. Examining access to medicines, personal protective equipment and vaccines, inequality and working conditions highlights just some of what is broken and what needs to be fixed. The unsparing challenge and immiseration of COVID-19 offer an opportunity to re-think basic structures of contemporary capitalism and re-imagine a more compassionate future. Keywords Financialization · Intellectual monopoly capitalism · Access to medicines · Inequalities · Globalization · Banking sector · Essential workers
Twenty‑First Century Capitalism: What’s New? While the term ‘neoliberalism’ remains popular, it has become a very large conceptual tent that obscures some important differences between the sharp shift to markets in the 1970s and 1980s under Reagan and Thatcher and the global capitalism of the twenty-first century. The Reagan/ Thatcher models of economic liberalization featured deregulation, privatization, and the transformation of social protection regimes—all underpinned by a faith in free markets. Twenty-first century capitalism has shifted in important ways that belie this earlier orientation. Key features of the contemporary era include the outsized role of intangibles in the global economy (e.g., intellectual property, services, financial instruments such as derivatives and securities), the rise of financialization, the quest for profits over economic growth, and the pursuit of competitiveness—not competition—in global markets. Twenty-first century capitalism has reduced advanced capitalist democracies’ (like the US and the UK) capacity to offer robust and effective responses to * Susan K. Sell [email protected] 1
School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University, Acton, ACT, Australia
COVID-19. COVID-19 has exposed profound weaknesses in the structure of contemporary capitalism and offers an opportunity to re-think its role in shaping global health. Going beyond the broad ‘neoliberalism’ label, John Braithwaite has described capitalism as ‘variegated’; he identified two aspects that are particularly relevant to global health—‘Wall Street’ capitalism and ‘monopoly capitalism’ (Braithwaite 2019). Wall Street capitalism captures the globalization of finance and the increased economic and political power of the financial sector. Financial markets, motives, institutions and elites have come to dominate the global economy affecting everything from production, consumption, regulation and health (Epstein 2005). Monopoly capi
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