The Expropriation of Universal Rights in the Wake of the Assetization of Welfare

This essay draws on the extensive debate on financialization that has been developed across various disciplines and heterodox schools of thought, in an effort to grasp the intricacies of the trajectory of contemporary capitalism amidst structural crises and transformations in the way wealth is generated, as well as the mechanisms that lead to its extraction and concentration. Central to this reflection is the concept of capitalization, which drives financialized accumulation. Through valuation techniques, investors expect anticipated future returns on initial investments, creating new income flows. The key question explored here is whether rights are also swept into the dynamics of assetization, being transformed into a particular class of assets that reconfigures social reproduction and the very essence of social policy. Or whether, stripped of their collective dimension, inherent to citizenship and the emancipatory promise, they materialize in the form of (individual or corporate) property rights over capital that characterizes assets.

Three core assumptions guide this reflection. First, financialization represents a shift in the pattern of capital accumulation, where income derived from capital ownership, safeguarded by legal forms and subjective rights, now surpasses income from production. Second, accumulation under the dominance of high finance undermines the reproduction of social and collective property, allowing only for the expansion of individual or corporate ownership of capital. The third assumption driving this essay is the understanding that the universal rights that served as the normative model of so-called democratic capitalism, and which, in fact, ensured provisions and social protection throughout the 20th century, notably in advanced economies, are no longer operational in understanding the new cycle of capitalism’s expansion, as they no longer function as an organizing mechanism for current social relations. Under the rule of financialized capitalism, universalism becomes a category emptied of its intrinsic meaning.