CLaSP invites you for a seminar on finance capital, the state, and politics

It's undeniable that the actions of states, multilateral organizations, and local governments globally and over the last few decades have often privileged the interests of finance capital. From widespread financial deregulation, to austerity, to various schemes to 'derisk' private investment into clean energy or development projects, regulators often appear to act as handmaidens to financiers. Critical work on these trends has mapped a range of important consequences of such measures, including widening inequalities, deepening financial volatility, and the steady erosion of state capacity and policy space. 

 Important questions about why states have tended to adopt these kinds of measures, though, have generally been paid much less attention. The arguably dominant critical narrative attributes these state actions to a tendency towards 'financialization'—the dominance of finance capital over ever-wider areas of social life. States privilege the interests of finance because they are dominated by finance capital. Drawing on examples around efforts to mobilize private finance for development, I show how such narratives misinterpret the nature of financial power and capitalist statecraft. States have absolutely fostered financial accumulation, but not always deliberately, and not necessarily because they are captured by financial interests. Rather, the continued recourse to fostering financial accumulation reflects the fact that in many circumstances states have few levers with which to address the social and ecological contradictions wrought by global capital accumulation.

Nicholas Bernards is Reader in Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. He is author, most recently, of Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation, and Twenty-First Century Capitalism (Pluto, 2025).