Yuliya Yurchenko

Neoliberal Entrenchment of North Atlantic Capital. From Corporate Self-Regulation to State Capture

After the financial crisis of 2007–8, neoliberal capitalism by all appearances has entrenched instead of being displaced. Its political–economic programme or ‘comprehensive concept of control’ continues to hold society in thrall. This was different in the crisis of 1974–5 when the corporate liberalism of the postwar years and its industry-centred class compromise were beginning to be replaced by finance-led neoliberalism and a compromise with asset-owning middle classes. Under corporate liberalism, real capital accumulation was protected from the ‘rentier’/‘money-dealing’ fraction of capital associated with speculative investment; neoliberalism has allowed its resurgence. Large corporations in the first phase of the transition (‘systemic neoliberalism’) embarked on a strategy of transnational restructuring no longer dependent on 1960s-style state support. In the process, financial group formation, here measured by dense director interlocks (≥2) amongst the largest corporations in the North Atlantic economy (where this type of corporate governance obtains), was intensified. The resurgence of money-dealing capital and rentier incomes in the 1990s led to a decline in real accumulation (‘predatory neoliberalism’), and after the crisis of 2007–8, to a demise of the financial group structure of Atlantic capital as the network of dense interlocks radically thins out and capital comes to rely on states again, this time to protect it from a democratic correction of the neoliberal regime and with state autonomy greatly reduced by public debt.

“Black Holes” in the Political Economy of Ukraine: The Neoliberalization of Europe’s “Wild East”

This paper analyses the complex interactions between ruling and emergent capitalist forces in Ukraine and the structures of transnational capital. It argues that the implementation of neoliberal market reforms along the lines laid out by the IMF, EBRD, EU, and WTO has facilitated the formation of “black holes” in the country’s economy. Through creating legal spaces for tax evasion, capital flight, money laundering, administrative and tax pressures, the country’s productive base continues to be subjected to a process of accumulation by dispossession, deepening socio-economic disparities and furthering transnationalization of the state. Covered by the discursive and legal façade of pluralist democracy, the large-scale embezzlement of economic assets undermines the stabilisation of a new social order whilst disrupting relations with foreign states and transnational business. The paper looks at (1) privatisation including the transfer of state-owned enterprises to financial industrial groups mostly controlled by oligarchs; (2) FDI regulations, the chronology of their reform, and their uneven implications for accumulation by both domestic and foreign capitals; (3) the creation and functioning of special economic zones and capital operation in those zones; and (4) tender and state-purchasing legislation reform and procedure abuse.