The anatomy of parasitism in financialised capitalism: Entitlement and the destructive nature of permissive neoliberalism

Jeremy Leaman

doi:10.18778/0208-600X.83.01

Authors

Jeremy Leaman Honorary Fellow in German and European Politics, Honorary Member of the Language Centre, German, Loughborough University, Epinal Way, Loughborough, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, England

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/0208-600X.83.01

Keywords:

financialised capitalism, neoliberalism, misallocation of capital, negative environmental effects, ecocidal trend

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute to debates about the negative consequences of inequality, by examining the resilience of the failed and damaging doctrines of neoliberal supply-sidism in terms of the powerful hegemony of economic and political interests allied to the financial services sector, focussing the role of the UK in facilitating that hegemony. It deploys the concept “permissive neoliberalism”, signifying both the formal embedding of property rights over financial assets as the legal encoding of the short-term predatory hunt for “yield”, and the political toleration of criminal and criminogenic activity. The description of some of the most egregious examples of predatory financialisation illuminates the sanctification by the neoliberal state of ruthless value-extraction and the toleration of an increasingly chronic dependence on of the UK political economy on the City of London and its archipelago of secrecy jurisdictions.

The shorter second part of the paper charts the growth of a mindset of entitlement on the part of economic and political elites and the role of psychopathic narcissism in crafting a legitimating narrative of their hegemony. The chronic disorder in the allocation of humanity’s material and financial resources invites a strong conclusion that financialised capitalism is not simply “killing the host” qua sustainable economic order, but is threatening the very survival of humanity’s biosphere by blocking the deployment of financial and human capital at sufficient scale to rescue the world’s climate from catastrophe.

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