A response to Jodi Dean and Ben Burgis on the latest phase of capitalism

Daniel Russo

July 14, 2025

Both Jodi Dean and Ben Burgis are grappling with the present state of capitalism; its changing compositions of capital, labor, and power. While they each identify fundamental dynamics, both fail to attend to capital’s latest underlying governance structures. 

Drawing on Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno’s The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From JP Morgan to BlackRock (Verso, 2024), I argue that we are neither on the cusp of neo-feudalism nor returning to “the very form of capitalism Marx was writing about in the 1860s.” Instead, as Maher and Aquanno show, we’re in a phase of capitalist domination rooted in asset capital and its centralized risk management. (Remember when bond vigilantes were the only group that could get Trump to back down on U.S. hegemony-shaking tariffs?)

Where Dean sees non-capitalist forms re-emerging within capitalism and Burgis defends the centrality of wage labor exploitation as the locus of class struggle, I believe that Maher and Aquanno offer a more institutional account of capitalist domination that highlights asset managers and central banks as constant disciplinary forces on both capital and labor. This has implications for class struggle, so I want to use Maher and Aquanno’s framework to deepen the Dean-Burgis debate by attending to new “nerve centers of capitalist power” that have inevitably produced zones for resistance beyond the workplace. [1]

The Limits of Dean’s Critique of Capitalism

In her response to Burgis’ critique of Capital’s Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle, Jodi Dean stresses that the dominant tendencies of modern capitalism reflect a breakdown of capitalist logic and a turn toward neofeudal characteristics. She writes, “Capital’s laws of motion are coming into contradiction with themselves and driving non-capitalist behaviors,” and argues that accumulation is increasingly compelled by strategies of "hoarding, destruction, and rents, within a general setting of extra-economic coercion, privilege, and dependence.”

Dean is right to sense the non-market and non-democratic qualities of today’s political economy, but capitalism isn’t just a liberal market economy. While I am attracted to the feudal analogy as a slight relief to our “affective environment of catastrophe, psychosis, and anxiety,” she stretches it to theorize a powerful non-capitalist system emerging from within the otherwise dominant, but historically determined to be superseded, capitalist mode of production.

Where Dean sees "servants" untethered from surplus value production and capital circuits as they both serve lords and rent from them, constantly re/producing these feudal relations, Maher and Aquanno see “infrastructure workers” within a capital system that now depends on their labor to maintain collateral-asset values. Dean writes that service workers often “aren’t producers. They are servants attending to the consumption requirements of the ruling class,” but this misidentifies the direction of value governance.

These workers are not mere appendages to elite consumption (which Burgis convincingly uses Marx to reject); rather, they perform labor and suffer disciplining essential to the circulation of credit and asset capital. Service workers are integral to the logic of cost containment and price stability that underwrites asset accumulation. For instance, teachers and healthcare workers operate within heavily bond-financed public sectors, where wage increases or service expansions are constrained by municipal credit ratings and debt obligations. Rather than marginality to capital flows, they operate at the fault lines of asset managers’ influence over municipal bond ratings and public sector borrowing creates systemic pressure to suppress wages and limit investment in care, education, and social infrastructure.

And in the private sector, low-wage service workers in cafes, retail, and logistics are key to cost and performance benchmarks/metrics that firms must meet to remain attractive within mutual fund or index-based investment regimes. I discuss this more in the following section, as Burgis runs into a similar problem regarding class discipline and power, but I first want to get to Dean’s understanding of state power.

Dean’s concept of parcellated sovereignty sees “the fragmentation of the state” where Maher and Aquanno’s concepts of new finance capital and the risk state see increased centralization of political economy (as understood in Smithian terms of scientific management of national wealth/strength via the state-market nexus). While Dean doesn’t dismiss coordination of capital nor accept the state retrenchment theory (she emphasizes state-subsidized capital accumulation and other capital “privileges”), she doesn’t discuss how institutions like the Fed actively coordinate macroeconomic conditions not just through subsidies and private contracts but through steering markets that fail to self-regulate.

For Maher and Aquanno, state governance is thus not so splintered, unregulated, or privatized. Key developments in the neoliberal period (and some before), provoked by both inter-class and intra-class conflict, retooled the state-market nexus and created a technocracy to meet the needs of “a more volatile and dangerous” asset-based accumulation regime.

The state’s central economic power now operates through what the authors call the risk state: a state architecture oriented not toward public provisioning, Keynesian demand stimulus, a “compromise” between corporate capital and organized labor, and a suppression of speculative finance – together understood as the New Deal state – but toward money supply and asset stabilization to manage systemic risk.

Assets like treasuries, corporate bonds, and mortgage-backed securities (and increasingly, ETFs, auto, and student loans), function as the collateral for interbank secured lending, typically running through the Federal Reserve System. Every day, over $4 trillion is swapped between financial institutions; a sudden change in the value of the collateral backing these transactions creates risk for one of the counterparties.

With both public and private debt (government, household, small business, corporate) at all-time highs, trillions of this debt asset-ized and tied up in “collateral chains,” and literally quadrillions in derivatives (future claims on value), only a central force like the Fed can protect this risk from the dually desirous and paranoid whims of private finance.  

As the Fed noted early on in COVID, amidst “conditions of high volatility and illiquidity,” there was increasing worry “about the disruptions to the functioning of [U.S. Treasury securities and MBS] markets, especially in view of their status as cornerstones for the operation of the U.S. and global financial systems…” The pandemic was itself unprecedented as a public health crisis, but the Fed’s anxiety over the fragility of securities markets to external shocks played a key role in triggering the largest and quickest state creation of private finance capital in history. [2]

Central banks, especially the Fed, serve as institutional anchors of capital governance, ensuring financial market confidence and managing expectations through interest rate signaling, asset purchasing, backstops, and other “technical adjustments.” As Maher and Aquanno put it, “[g]overnments have not withdrawn from the economy; they have taken on a new function – to act as the insurer of last resort for financialized capital.” The Fed marks not the reduction of the state’s sovereignty vis-à-vis capital but the emergence of sovereignty as monetary sovereignty.

In this authority they have also increased their control over working class households. Rather than invoking overt coercion, the risk state manipulates life by turning the credit system into a mechanism of population regulation, tightening or loosening access to money in ways that determine consumption, employment, and public spending rhythms. 

The Federal Reserve as monetary sovereign is a basic foundation of today’s new finance capital alongside the SIFIs (“systemically important financial institutions”) that they construct such an elaborate maintenance system around. The various mechanisms that the Fed has established for the sake of stable financial flow have resulted in enormous concentration of state power over the normal flows of finance capital. 

As I show below, these financial flows, “stewarded” by the state economic apparatus but ultimately concentrated in the hands of private asset management companies, have enormous disciplinary power over Big Business and their management of labor.

The Limits of Burgis’ Critique of Capitalism

Ben Burgis, whose commentary I owe much of my socialist awakening to, mainly critiques Dean for misunderstanding Marx’s theory of productive labor. He argues that most service workers still produce surplus value and thus remain central to the working class and its capacity for resistance. He finds it not only technically wrong to see in these service workers a “servant” relation, but also politically unhelpful, obscuring working class solidarity.

Quoting Marx, Burgis notes: “The cook in the hotel produces a commodity for the person who as a capitalist has bought her labour… On the other hand, if I buy the labour of a cook for her to cook meat for me, not to make use of it as labour in general but to enjoy it... then her labour is unproductive.” Burgis also states that “Whether the commodity in question is a 'good' or a 'service' has absolutely nothing to do with Marx’s distinction.” Both of these points make a lot of sense to me. For Burgis, following Marx’s 19^th century analysis, accumulation is still fundamentally rooted in wage labor at the firm, the “predominant relation of production.”

Maher and Aquanno do not deny the endurance of wage-based exploitation of the working class, nor do I think Dean does. But the three rightfully counter that centering waged labor relations overlooks other relations of power/labor that underpin accumulation and thereby expand the possible sites of working class resistance. More significantly, though, Maher and Aquanno go beyond Dean’s important critiques of unpaid care labor and data capitalism’s extractive, unpaid digital labor regime. The two attend instead to finance capital’s heightened control over industrial markets.

For them, capitalist intra-class power is now especially exercised in the “stewardship” of asset managers and central banks over socialized capital and its corresponding control over labor. “Rather than micro-managing firms,” the Maher/Aquanno write, “asset managers promote a form of indirect governance, using market mechanisms and performance indicators to impose discipline.” This plays out concretely when firms not aligned with ‘shareholder primacy’ find themselves subject to ‘exit’ threats or shareholder resolutions coordinated by proxy advisors. These signals steer a firm's managerial strategy, the firms finding themselves disciplined not internally by owner-investors but by external asset managers staking with aggregate client funds.

Moreover, asset managers need not intervene directly in the firm to shape working class conditions. As Maher and Aquanno argue, “finance governs not through factory discipline but by managing expectations and volatility across time.” Under financial governance, wage growth, public investment, and decommodified services all appear “risky” because they challenge the fiscal discipline that underpins bondholder and investor confidence.

Asset managers shape the decision-making environment by making alternative policies appear fiscally irresponsible or market destabilizing. Expanding social programs may require deficit financing and/or higher taxation on corporations and the rich, which can trigger bond ratings downgrades or capital flight. These constraints render redistribution and social welfare politically unviable under the logic of asset stability. 

This shift in accumulation regimes certainly does not eliminate the waged labor exploitation that is based on extracting value during surplus labor time, but it reconfigures how labor is disciplined macroeconomically, producing sites of resistance beyond the workplace or immediate employer. 

In short, Burgis remains tied to a framework that ignores how BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street wield more systemic power than Starbucks, Walmart, or Amazon. Finance, especially asset management, is now the dominant form through which capitalist accumulation is governed. 

Not that either Burgis or Dean make the following argument, but, asset managers and other investment firms don’t sever ties with production when they deal in M-M’ circuits instead of investing directly in production. Rather, they govern that corporations/production by managing claims on future revenue and assets. “The dominant mode of accumulation is no longer based on extracting surplus value directly through production, but on capturing and managing claims on future value flows,” Maher and Aquanno note. Not fictitious capital detached from real capital, rather, captured futures governing present possibilities.

In Fall and Rise, Maher and Aquanno puts the relation between finance and corporate capital like this:

As Marx observed, the development of the corporation and the banking system institutionalized a separation of ownership and control of capital. Corporate managers did not necessarily own the firm’s capital, but rather became mere functionaries overseeing the ‘capital of others.’…The separation of ownership and control of capital was thereby reflected in the separation between finance and industry. Through this process, the ‘private capital’ of individual owners became a larger-scale ‘social capital’ controlled by corporate managers and bankers. This socialization of capital implied enormous concentration and centralization, as investment became a social function carried out not by individual owners of means of production but by functionaries in institutional systems for amassing, allocating, managing, and valorizing capital...Marx described this as ‘the abolition of capital as private property within the confines of the capitalist mode of production itself.’ Because socialized capital was more efficient and obtained privileged access to credit, it was far more competitive, driving forward further socialization. Ultimately, the only way individual capitals could operate on a sufficient scale to be competitive…was to function as part of the social capital. As the ‘general managers of money capital,’ bankers ultimately came to play the most active part in organizing corporations, forming finance capital.

Marx had been speaking about the rise of what Maher and Aquanno now call “classical finance capital,” the last period of capitalist history marked by finance capital as the hegemonic form of capital (reflected in ownership and managerial control over productive capital), and where banker capital was the hegemonic form within finance capital. The classical finance period infamously fell in 1929, and decades would pass before the re-emergence of finance capital’s hegemony (hence their book title). 

Today’s “new finance capital” is marked by even greater degrees of finance capital’s ownership and managerial control over production, and the hegemonic form is now undeniably the asset manager’s asset capital. Thus, Maher and Aquanno continue:

The centralization of capital that resulted from this socialization brought about the historic reversal of the separation of ownership and control that had been a feature of corporate power since the New Deal. The fusion of finance and industry was, once again, reflected in a fusion of ownership and control. Asset management companies became ‘universal owners,’ owning not merely individual firms, or groups of firms [as in classical finance capital’s trusts], but the economy itself…They own large stakes in the vast majority of publicly listed firms from every sector… [A]s these firms socialize pools of money-capital…[n]early every firm in the economy is united under the ownership and control of the combined social capital... Simply put, the Big Three…own the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy.

Class strategy in an age of asset-based accumulation

If we accept Maher and Aquanno’s account, the terrain of class struggle needs to expand. Strategically speaking, workers are not just laborers exploited at the point of production by their employer, whether in the cafe, the office, or the factory. These same workers are now, more than ever, subjects of financial governance.

This manifests in multiple ways. Rent burdens rise as housing becomes a financial asset; pension security depends on stock market returns; wage increases are constrained by cost-cutting mandates imposed by proxy investors; and debt obligations structure household and municipal budgeting. Working families are not only producing value. They are also absorbing risk, anchoring bond markets, and subsidizing liquidity through austerity. The discipline of labor’s social reproduction becomes more and more a moment of capital’s stabilization process, and it is this site of domination that has its flipside as a site of resistance. The strategic relevance of service labor today, paid and unpaid, does not depend on whether they are directly productive in Marx’s sense. Their strategic relevance lies in how they are disciplined to support the everyday systems that asset capital relies on. 

Strikes in these sectors put pressure on the very infrastructures through which finance capital secures returns and manages risk. Moreover, in being central to maintaining a “safe asset” collateral order that influences market confidence and productive conditions, debt strikers, rent strikers and even pension fund divestment campaigns may confront the structures of capitalist power just as well as traditional waged labor strikes.

Ultimately, organizing against financial capitalism requires politicizing collateral, liquidity, risk, and banking architecture; terms that sound technical but in fact govern how life chances are allocated. This strategy is not only necessary but consistent with Marx’s critique. In Volume 3, Marx argued that the credit system further mystifies the origins of capital; it appears to self-expand through interest-bearing instruments (M–M'; “the relation of capital assumes its most externalized and most fetish-like form in interest-bearing capital”), concealing its dependence on labor. 

Credit instruments represent claims on future surplus value, but in abstracted, marketable form. So, as he further argued, money breeding money is an illusion enabled by the credit system’s real extension of claims on future labor. Maher and Aquanno stress that illusions still govern, though. The illusion is not immaterial or unproductive, rather, it’s captive. Modern finance formalizes it into a durable mode of class rule under the authority of public and private risk managers. 

In conclusion, I do not think capitalism has reverted or hybridized. It is not “turning itself into something worse.” It has evolved. Maher and Aquanno offer an institutional account of this evolution, grounded in intra-capitalist class recomposition, state transformation, and the ascendancy of asset-based governance. If the Left wants to contest capitalist power in the age of BlackRock and the Fed, it must not only confront corporations, tycoons, or our immediate bosses in the factories, offices, and cafes, but also the modern structures of asset risk management that we’re all subject to.

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[1] Maher and Aquanno’s approach is rooted in the tradition of their teacher Leo Panitch, whose work challenged the idea that globalization, deregulation, and privatization meant the “retreat of the state.” Panitch showed that the U.S. state, especially the central banking and treasury infrastructure that makes up the “state economic apparatus,” played a constitutive role in constructing and sustaining U.S. Empire-driven global capitalism, and that today this apparatus is more central than ever to the maintenance of the current capitalist order. He convincingly rejected both neoliberal "state retrenchment" and globalist "stateless capital" narratives in favor of Poulantzas’ autonomous state and Polanyi’s coordinated market economy theories.

[2] The Fed’s early 2020s crisis management is the subject of my ongoing dissertation at UNC.