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Hans G Despain

January 13th, 2025

Vulture Capitalism – review

0 comments | 15 shares

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Hans G Despain

January 13th, 2025

Vulture Capitalism – review

0 comments | 15 shares

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Grace Blakeley‘s Vulture Capitalism critiques the alliance of corporations, finance, and states underpinning the capitalist system that drives inequality, stifles democracy and enriches elites. Brilliantly combining theory, analysis and practical solutions in engaging prose, this book offers a blueprint for reclaiming power through economic democracy, writes Hans Despain.

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Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom. Grace Blakeley. Bloomsbury Publishing. 2025 (paperback); 2024 (hardback).


Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakeley coverPopulist movements across the globe have expressed a chorus of complaints that national and international political economies are not being governed for the benefit of citizens. Instead, it seems that a narrow segment of wealthy, well-connected insiders reap the greatest gains during economic booms and are safeguarded and bailed out following a bust. Meanwhile, massive costs are imposed on everyone else. 

Grace Blakeley’s new book Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom provides a narrative that substantiates the populist sentiment. Indeed, she argues the logic of capitalism necessarily generates concentration of economic power. This concentration has been used to centralise political power, which in turn is used to pass regulations and policies that are highly favourable to Goliath multinational corporations and Titan financial institutions and further increase economic power. Blakeley is inspired and informed by a plethora of recent economic literature documenting the “death of competition,” rise of a “new gilded age” and “new monopoly capitalism.” It is a “war between monopoly power and democracy,” whereby it is argued oligopoly “competition is killing us.”  

Hundreds of economic studies have shown corporate concentration has increased persistently over the past century. The bulk of these have been conducted by advocates of capitalism concerned with the diminishing degree of competition and the lack of enforcement of anti-trust laws in recent decades. Blakeley embraces the mainstream concerns of economic concentration generating higher prices, fewer start-ups, lower productivity, less investment, lower wages, increasing income and wealth inequality, political polarisation, and withering democracy. However, she contends that monopoly power and economic concentration is an ontological feature of capitalism. 

Blakeley argues that it is a categorical error to identify the differentia specifica of capitalism as free markets. First, this is because, as most recently argued by David Graeber, all human societies have markets and exchange. Second, markets in capitalism are not necessarily “free,” but instead managed and planned. Thus, the notion of “free market” capitalism is a rhetorical smokescreen, behind which lies the brutal, despotic power of Goliath corporations (29). Third, Blakeley fully embraces David Graeber’s “iron law of liberalism,” which contends that any extension of market activity, rather than reducing bureaucratic red tape, invariably increases regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.  


Modern corporations are not merely economic entities, but political entities without democratic accountability 

Part One of Vulture Capitalism brilliantly unpacks four primary insights. (1) Market exchange is not unique to capitalism. (2) The differentia specifica of capitalism is the specific relationship between employees and employers. (3) The relationship between the employee and employer is radically undemocratic, indeed totalitarian. (4) Historically, as capitalistic markets have been extended, nation-states get bigger and more involved in economic activity. For these reasons Blakeley subscribes to an insight of her mentors Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin. Namely, the nation-state needs to be placed at the centre of the search for an explanation of what makes capitalism, capitalism. In contrast to mainstream myths, neo-liberal “free market” policy does not constrain the nation-state. Instead, neo-liberal policies extend the reach of nation-state. 

Watch a recording of Grace Blakeley’s lecture at LSE on 13 January 2025 on YouTube.

According to Blakeley, the treble-headed Behemoth (i.e., the nation-state, Goliath firms and Titan finance) constitutes the “planners” of the modern capitalist order. In what John Kenneth Galbraith called the “planning-system” Goliath firms no longer necessarily maximise profits nor compete with price. Instead, they “push competition into the realms of advertising, relationship-building, branding, and other tools of what Baran and Sweezy (in Monopoly Capital) call the ‘sales effort’” (110). They also predicted that the secular stagnation tendency of capitalism would necessarily (1) enlarge nation-states, fiscal intervention and government spending, (2) US military spending would become permanent, and (3) finance would explode as a percentage of GDP. 

Along with the “sales effort,” modern firms tacitly collude to keep prices stable, lobby the state to reduce their tax burden, pressure the state to protect them from competition, and pressure smaller suppliers to supply big firms at a loss (e.g. Walmart and Amazon). In other words, modern corporations are not merely economic entities, but political entities without democratic accountability (124). “The relationship between banks and corporations is also extremely important” (131) for understanding monopoly capitalism. When financial institutions loan money to firms, or buy their stocks and bonds, they not only determine investment, but how societies grow and evolve. Bankers quite literally decide which companies, states, and individuals thrive and even survive.  

The question should not be about the size of the state versus the size of the market. Instead, it is whose interests are being served. 

As John K. Galbraith argued several decades ago, modern capitalism functions as a dual system. Small and medium-sized businesses function in the “market system” where price competition still tends to prevail, while large corporations function in the “planning system,” whereby they enforce their will on the market by means of persuasion, manipulation, and power. Blakeley contends the planning carried out by the treble-headed Behemoth serves the one percent wealthy elite at the expense of everyone else. This planning not only enriches the wealthy and powerful but is the engine of oligopoly economic power and oligarchic political power. The planning of the treble-headed Behemoth lowers productivity, decreases private investment, destroys small businesses, undercuts public tax revenue, curtails innovation, generates lower wages and salaries, manifests higher prices and inflation, facilitates regulatory capture, and erodes democracy itself. 

F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) warned too much planning by the nation-state was compromising human liberty. Blakeley asks, “what if we were to take Hayek seriously?” (6).  If we do so, we must condemn the toxic alliance between the nation-state, Goliath corporations, and Titan finance. Blakeley’s book urges us to stop using the term “free market capitalism.” Capitalism is a hybrid system based on the fusion of small business competition and a “planning system” geared for the enrichment of the elite. As she argues, “The choice isn’t ‘free markets’ or ‘planning’’ […] whether the planning that inevitably does take place in any complex social system is democratic or oligarchic” (293). 

Instead of a universal basic income, Blakeley proposes ‘decommodify[ing] everything people need to survive by providing a programme of universal basic services’ (UBS).

Likewise, the question should not be about the size of the state versus the size of the market. Instead, it is whose interests are being served. As Blakeley demonstrates, the rise of the neoliberal order was never about free markets, nor reducing the size of the state, but rather excluding voices and the concerns of workers from the planning process. She argues we must include the voices of the disenfranchised working class in the state-corporate-finance planning process.  

Blakeley presents readers with 12 historical examples of local-level worker-planning activities and collective empowerment (235-62) to show that that workers do not have to surrender their power to the treble-headed Behemoth or the dictates of “the market.” One such example is how, in 1976, the workers at Lucas Aerospace challenged impending redundancies by proposing an alternative plan for democratised industrial development. Crucially, anti-union laws across the globe need to be removed and global collective bargaining processes need to be instituted. Working hours need to be reduced with no loss in pay. Instead of a universal basic income, Blakeley proposes “decommodify[ing] everything people need to survive by providing a programme of universal basic services” (UBS). UBS would include healthcare, primary/secondary education, higher education, social care, food, housing, transportation all for free or at subsidized prices (270-7).  

Blakeley’s proposals for effecting change are at the same time practical and realistic political-economic policies. Her proposals and insights are consistent with a post-great-recession flurry of books which are even more extensive on what comes “After Capitalism,” how to reclaim “our Wealth, and our Liberty,” make Democracy Work, and create a new institutional order with thriving small business, an expansion of worker cooperatives, with a robust economic democracy for all of us.  

Blakeley may be correct when she announces “[m]ost of the ideas discussed in this book are not new” (14). However, her theoretical synthesis of the academic literature, engaging writing, and accessibility to a wide audience is unique and breathtakingly brilliant. Vulture Capitalism will help shift the public conversation on important social issues. Moreover, financial crises are inevitable in capitalism. Since the explosion in the role of finance, crises have become more frequent and recovery slower for workers. This book will be a primary reference in preparation of, and in response to, the next monopoly-finance capitalist crisis


Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image creditIlias Bartolini on Flickr. License: CC BY-SA 2.0.

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About the author

Hans Despain

Hans G Despain

Hans G. Despain (Ph.D.) is a Lecturer in Economics and the Commonwealth Honors College, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He also teaches in the Metropolitan College, Boston University. His research interests are in macroeconomics, monetary economics and history of economic thought. His economic analysis appears regularly in the Worcester Telegram-Gazette in Massachusetts, USA. He appears regularly on the Lee Elci Radio Show, Connecticut USA, and on the Chinese Global Television Network. His email contact is: hdespain@umass.edu

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