The Phase of Capitalism after the 2008 Great Financial Crisis: An Extended Polanyian Approach [before doctoral defense]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

We live in an era of uncertainty, where one crisis follows the other. More than five major global crises have converged in the last ‘long decade’: the 2008 global financial crisis, the COVID pandemic, the geopolitical tensions involving the Russia-Ukraine war and the China-US conflict, and the climate crisis. There is no doubt that these crises are signs. The question is: what do these signs indicate about the current phase of capitalist development? The answer to this question is inescapable for political economy because it determines the economic era in which we live. It is, of course, impossible to give a perfect answer, since the processes that are unfolding concern the present and the future, but it is the task of political economy to at least formulate the premises that follow from the recent phenomena and to create an interpretive framework for dealing with this possible change in economic formation. But this framework can only be developed after careful analysis. This is our undertaking in this dissertation. This kind of investigation is not alien to political economy. There have been many political economists who have tried to understand the unfolding historical phase of capitalism in which they lived. We can think of Schumpeter (1939), Polanyi (2004 [1944]), Arrighi (1994) or Galbraith (1967). Of course, some of these authors also wrote about the capitalist system in general, not just its development and manifestations over time. Kornai's (2000a) concept of the system paradigm describes the first type of approach. It is therefore important to emphasise that the aims of our dissertation are more modest than adding to the level of the system paradigm. Rather, our focus is on the historical phases of capitalism and, within these, on the interpretation of the changes that have occurred since the 2008 crisis.