Late Stage Capitalism Is Weird Capitalism

A planned economy run by Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street

Cory Doctorow
Marker
Published in
9 min readMar 17, 2022

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An animation based on the 1911 cartoon ‘Pyramid of Capitalist System,’ depicting ‘the wealthy few on the top, and the impoverished masses at the bottom.’ The image has been animated with a rolling ‘broken TV’ effect as well as a lateral ‘wobble’ effect.

We are living in an era of extremely weird capitalism. American capitalism is usually described as a system in which top managers are rewarded with stock options, which incentivizes them to maximize returns to shareholders, who are so dispersed that they struggle to control companies by voting their stock.

A chart entitled ‘Hallmarks of historical corporate governance regimes’ from ‘Asset Manager Capitalism as a Corporate Governance Regime’ by Benjamin Braun.
Benjamin Braun

The potted history of this system goes like this: Gilded Age robber barons were horizontal tyrants, monopolizing single industries. Trustbusters broke this up, wealth was more dispersed, and households took the fore. These atomized, individual shareholders didn’t exercise much control, because voting their small holdings made little difference to companies.

This was the age of “managerialism” — where technocratic, “scientific” managers worked with strong unions and regulators to create “Fordism,” where experts from capital, labor and government structured the productive economy.

From there, we transitioned to the age of the pension fund, where pension managers began to diversify their portfolios and threaten companies with…

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow

Written by Cory Doctorow

Writer, blogger, activist. Blog: https://pluralistic.net; Mailing list: https://pluralistic.net/plura-list; Mastodon: @pluralistic@mamot.fr