ABSTRACT
The ‘winners’ in oligarchic capitalism are financiers, bankers, rating agencies, intelligence officials and political insiders whose strategic decisions determine the allocation of capital through public-private partnerships, as well as corporate contractors who have replaced government agencies in the supply of many public services. From an Austrian economic perspective, the postliberal evolution of capitalism reflects the accelerated decline of the liberal concept of right embodied in concrete form in the principle of exclusive ownership of property and individual entrepreneurship. Capital reinvents itself yet remains fundamentally the same: a self-expanding substance derived from surplus value which subsumes economic and cultural processes into the logic of the commodity form, the function of which is to valorize value and transcend an immanent contradiction between new productive forces and decadent relations of production. It is equally apparent that financial socialism in advanced economies coincides with a power transition in the international system.
