The USFG will not solve capitalism - IPR regime exists to consolidate power and capital in the hands of the few - its try or die for resistance outside the imperial state

As the accumulation process swells and consequently metamorphoses—since the composition of capital and ownership changes—banking capital plays an indispensable role in securing the flow of this process. This particular form of capital has the existential advantage of being virtually rootless, as its reproduction of capital renders superfluous the immediate first metamorphosis of capital in commodities through production, skipping directly to the second in which the appropriation of surplus-value enables the expansion of capital. However, to avoid a zero-sum game, it presupposes an ongoing real economy to expropriate and appropriate from. Lenin sagaciously perceived this movement in which banking capital merges with industrial capital, thus becoming financial capital (Lenin, 1971, p. 230). Furthermore, this financial capital—which presupposes the state to secure and legitimate itself as private property—becomes ubiquitous and further metamorphoses with the capitalist state. Lenin calls this process imperialism.

It is, however, vital to distinguish between imperialist capitalism and pre-capitalist imperialism. While “classic” imperialism has a centre, a particular locality from which it unfolds, capitalist imperialism is a much broader and more complex social relation in which different centres (nation-states) are intertwined and operated in a subordinated fashion to capital, which knows no bounds and constantly expands outwards as well as inwards (Hobson, 1902; Lenin, 1971; Rodney, 2018). It goes without saying that this process is not free from contradictions because while capital accumulation and appropriation know no national borders, its legitimation requires many national and international institutions which, as sine qua non, are located within national borders. John Atkinson Hobson’s study—which inspired Lenin’s own analysis—claimed that imperialism “is a constant menace to peace, by furnishing continual temptations to further aggression upon lands occupied by lower races”; furthermore, it consumes “physical and moral resources of the nations” within a mortifying logic of militarism (Hobson, 1902, p. 160).

The logic of imperialism driven by finance capitalism was extraordinarily grasped by Marx himself, who probably could not have seen more than the faintest concrete emergence of this capitalist legality. The contradictions described above—in which capital expropriates capital only to engulf it in a process of further primitive accumulation—culminate in finance capitalism, in which a complete separation between ownership and management takes place. This contradiction “establishes the monopoly in certain spheres and, therefore, challenges state interference. It reproduces a new financial aristocracy, a new breed of parasites in the shape of project makers, founders and merely nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and fraud with regard to incorporation, share issue and share dealing”; with this, Marx unveils a capitalist legality of internal contradiction, in which capitalist development antagonises capitalism’s own ontological basis: “it is private production without the control of private property” (Marx, 1964, p. 454).

Almost one hundred years after Lenin’s analysis, despite any critique it may deserve, Thomas Piketty’s research has both the merit of having “reopened” the discussion about such capitalist accumulation and concentration4 and of having shown that this is a broad historical and geographical phenomenon (Piketty, 2015). After the 2008 crisis, the roles of banks and the so-called unfettered capitalism5 have increasingly become subjects of critiques—most of them simply moral criticisms. Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis reinforce Hobson’s sentiment of menace arising from the upsurge in inequalities (Klein & Pettis, 2020). While organisations such as OXFAM, World Inequality Lab, and Institute for Policy Studies (Chancel et al., 2022; Christensen et al., 2023; Collins et al., 2020), among many others, emphasise the problem of inequality from a perspective of bourgeois enlightenment, they nevertheless do not detune from the rhymes of the financial sector. Mariana Mazzucato notes that in 2014, the CEO of Blackrock—an asset manager with over 10 trillion dollars in assets under its management (Brush & Wittenberg, 2022)—expressed concern about the excessive profit distribution of the S&P 500 companies (Mazzucato, 2018).

Blackrock is no exception in realising that profit extraction requires the subsistence and maintenance of the labour class or the so-called deplorables (Roberts, 2021). In its Equity Strategy, the Citigroup was blatantly clear: “The World is dividing into two blocs—the Plutonomy and the rest” (Kapur et al., 2005). In other words, there is the rule of the rich and the rest. The greatest global “Plutonomy”, the United States, is ruled by the wealthy—the capitalist elite—who represent only a tiny fraction of society, which is composed of much more complex and vast elements. Capitalist concentration is pushing society towards deteriorating living conditions. For instance, while the San Francisco Bay Area accounts for one of the country’s wealthiest parts, poverty is nonetheless soaring. The combination of being “underpaid” and skyrocketing housing prices creates a mass of poor people being pushed to live on the streets (Walker, 2018). However, this problem is not exclusive to the San Francisco Bay Area but is becoming systemic in the United States. People can hardly survive and are living from paycheck to paycheck (Pfeffer, 2018). Meanwhile, while US-American society seems to implode slowly, the spectacle distracts any politicised critical mass of people from being able to take responsibility for changing and creating new social relations to avoid total social anomy (Hedges, 2018).

As a central hub of global capitalism, the United States has a worldwide impact on capitalist relations. Perceiving and analysing these relations, William I. Robinson states that the “TNS apparatuses have exercised economic and extra-economic coercion in order to impose new labor regimes worldwide” (Robinson, 2014, p. 91). The TNS is composed of transnational (and supranational) organisations—the United States, the World Trade Organization, and the European Union (Robinson, 2014, p. 29). The capitalist mode of production has grown to become a system dominated by the so-called global financial giants in which few financial firms control a vast quantity of social resources and assets (Phillips, 2018). The “rest”—the “deplorables”—are not simply left to their own devices. Poverty is managed within a process of social (urban) segregation and the need for constant primitive accumulation.6 Mike Davis’ brilliant investigation sheds light on what he calls “surplus humanity”. The structural death of formal jobs and a permanent state of unemployment have had a considerable impact on the spike of labour informality, which conversely transforms a formal working class into an informal one (Davis, 2006, p. 175). Robinson complements well: “New rounds of primitive accumulation have generated a vast army of internal and transnational migrants who have swelled the ranks of the precariat and the structurally marginalized” (Robinson, 2020, p. 46). It is along these lines that the so-called primitive accumulation of knowledge in the form of intellectual property(private) must be understood. These are some of the concrete conditions for two Pandora’s boxes to be opened: TRIPS—as the intellectual property(private) Pandora’s box (see supra)—and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (Kroszner & Strahan, 2014; Nersisyan, 2015)—as the financial system Pandora’s box—came to life with hitherto significant effects upon societies worldwide. Thus, capitalist ruthlessness intensifies and enables harsher and more immanent mechanisms of expropriation and appropriation.