Abstract
According to Marlène Benquet and Théo Bourgeron, neoliberalism is dying. What is to replace it? Clues abound in recent changes to what the authors term the political regime of accumulation, and the manner of Britain’s exit from the European Union provides a singularly illustrative case study of the transnational forces at work. Their ultimate political victory will “threaten the minimum level of social harmony, peace, and environmental resources required by free societies” (136) of the Global North as much as in the Global South.
There is much to unpack here. First, what do they mean by neoliberalism? This was the regime that was ushered into being within the Lockean heartland or Anglosphere (van der Pijl 1998) during the 1970s by the New Right in its overthrow of the Fordist-Keynesian national welfare state regime (Jessop 2002) and its replacement by a financialized liberalism comprising market primacy subject to technocratic regulation, corporate governance subject to shareholder value maximization and stock market control (Aglietta and Rebérioux 2005), a reduction of social safety nets toward a more punitive regime of workfare, and restrictions on organized labor amid the elevation of competition as a hegemonic comprehensive concept of control (Bode 2019: 31). Second, the authors “distinguish between the institutional arrangement of legal rules that allows capital to circulate and the political regime that spawns this arrangement” by referring to the latter as a political regime of accumulation (54). This would appear to be a subset of the broader social structure of accumulation concept (Wolfson and Kotz 2010), and in line with the book’s clearly Marxist analytical framework.
Financialization is the term commonly used to describe the process by which the regime of accumulation that accompanied neoliberalism became established in its mutually reinforcing social structures (Martin 2002). Benquet and Bourgeron focus on the emergence of financial actors accompanying the breakdown of the Fordist regime, describing these as a “first wave” whose origins they trace to the early 1960s and the flourishing of the Eurodollar market (52; see also Foroohar 2016). The arrival of their “American” practices in London during that decade started a process later observed as the “induced reproduction of American monopoly capitalism [and] the extended reproduction. . . of the political and ideological conditions for this development of American imperialism” (Poulantzas 1975: 47; for the significance of these practices’ US origins, see Konings 2011). The nature of such inducement is elaborated with even greater clarity in Alt-Finance regarding what the authors describe as “second-wave finance.”
The “emblematic” beneficiaries of the neoliberal regime of accumulation established in Britain were financial actors like investment banks, institutional investors, and pension funds (55), along with a burgeoning financial services sector, collectively comprising “first-wave finance.” The removal of fixed exchange rates, capital controls, and other practices and institutional holdovers from the earlier, more insular era of “imperial preference” depicted by its contemporaries as “gentlemanly capitalism” (Augar 2000; see also Ingham 2002), culminated in the “Big Bang” of 1986—“. . . but it was not British-owned businesses which prospered, but giant foreign banks which moved in, taking over small enterprises, and transforming the culture of the City from a leisurely, gentlemanly one to something distinctively meritocratic and money-driven and American” (Edgerton 2018: 471).
For Benquet and Bourgeron, an important clue as to the decline of the neoliberal regime of accumulation lies in the emergence of a second wave of financial actors with a very different approach to the regulatory apparatus that enabled neoliberalism to function and, for a time, flourish. This second wave of actors, self-consciously alternative with respect to their preferred investment strategies, represents and promotes the “alt-finance” that is the book’s ultimate focus. Their affinities with the politics of the “alt-right” are also very deliberately connoted by this term (6).
In distinguishing these waves, the authors acknowledge that “the two modes of accumulation often coexist within a single organization” (38). The positing of “ideal types” aids conceptual clarity, especially as some practices, such as quantitative trading, belong to both types of accumulation (39). Sometimes this can lead to formal separation due to divestment or management buyout, but it can just as easily tilt the strategic focus of an organization’s business toward the more profitable accumulation type—a point with particular political significance.
What became the competition between London and New York as rival financial centers was founded upon the New Labour government’s wholehearted embrace of a deregulatory agenda as a means to attract business to the City (Shaw 2012). Together with the competitive lowering of corporate taxes (Heimberger 2021), “light touch regulation” was a signature part of New Labour’s efforts to make the City of London the world’s premier finance hub. It was this, more than anything, that destroyed Gordon Brown’s political credibility following the onset of the financial crisis.
Nevertheless, before losing the 2010 general election, he and others set to work trying to restore legitimacy amid a collapsing banking sector. The 2008 appointed head of the Financial Services Authority, Adair Turner, made waves by publicly describing some finance activity as “socially useless” (Turner 2010: 1321), but the incoming Conservative government was not minded to keep either him or his regulatory body. Both were replaced in April 2013 by the Financial Conduct Authority, whose first chief was quickly deposed in favor of someone with a predictably lighter regulatory touch (Treanor 2015). This, of course, is a recurrent theme in British financial regulation, whose structural orientation toward a laissez-faire position can be seen at work in the efforts of the recently elected Labour government’s declared goal of correcting policies that have moved the balance “too far in regulating for risk” (Parker et al. 2025).
These details augment the story told by Benquet and Bourgeron, whose case study of Brexit delineates the political cleavages within the financial sector more widely. Just as the first wave of finance actors undermined the cloistered parochialism of the City by transforming it from within prior to the Big Bang, the seeds of the second wave were already contained within the first. As before, the US showed the way with respect to evading the reach of regulatory frameworks that had benefited the first wave, not least by the deliberate creation of para-legal structures via self-regulation. This left gaps that came to be increasingly exploited in transactions and instruments notable for their opacity, in stark contrast to the transparency supposedly the hallmark of public markets (58). Thus, private equity, derivatives trading, high-risk structured loans and other misleadingly named “over-the-counter” transactions (better visualized as under-the-counter) formed the basis of new business practices that flourished to the extent that some established banks’ new funds operating in these areas “grew their own wings and took off to fly on their own” (59), forming a vanguard of second wave actors.
With the most financialized economy within the European Union, Britain was in a weak position to defend its second-wave finance interests following the onset of crisis. EU regulators were eager to stamp their authority across the Single Market and impose an order more aligned with the interests of continental capital, which was mostly neoliberal in orientation, with the key exception of Germany, whose stock market had remained underdeveloped despite political efforts to invigorate it during the 1990s, and without a hedge fund sector to speak of (63). German banks were left badly exposed by the 2008 crash, and were now much weaker, both financially and politically. In this context, Britain’s alternative finance buccaneers were in a particularly vulnerable position. How they engineered their escape is revealed by the exposition of the delicately balanced divide within British finance and the second wave actors’ leveraging of their financial power to overcome the original majority in favor of remaining within the European Union.
It was in January 2013, in the New York headquarters of Bloomberg, that Prime Minister David Cameron promised to organize a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union if victorious in the 2015 general election (15). Much bitter commentary has since questioned why he would have made such an unforced error. Alt-Finance shows that the Conservative Party, the British party closest to the financial sector, was itself split over the political strategy best able to defend the interests of that sector. While the original beneficiaries of the 1986 Big Bang wished to consolidate their advantages within a financializing European Union, the rising (but not yet hegemonic) second wave actors were engaged in backing various Eurosceptic causes, often allied with a virulently anti-EU press that had already accumulated over more than two decades of negative campaigning against “faceless Brussels bureaucrats” (Gavin 2001: 305). Their growing influence was reflected in the composition of the parliamentary Conservative Party, which became more Eurosceptic with every general election. Cameron’s gamble was to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the European Union “to justify his support for the Remain vote during the Brexit referendum” (17), similar to Harold Wilson’s handling of Labour opponents of British membership in the 1975 referendum. Unlike Wilson, however, Cameron lost.
As a result, an ascendant second-wave “alt” finance was unleashed, able to increase the scale and scope of its accumulation and to direct some of the proceeds from that to the support of politicians and think tanks that provide the support necessary for the furtherance of its agenda. As the book makes clear, and very much despite the apparent rejection of the European Union by the working class of the deindustrialized regions still struggling to recover (Hopkin 2017), the tortuous path traversed by Theresa May’s compromise-seeking government to the “hard Brexit” “won” by Boris Johnson just before Britain’s formal departure in January 2020 was very much influenced by the second-wave actors who stood to gain the most (75–77).
Rejection of the neoliberal “new constitutionalism” (Gill and Cutler 2014) embedded in the European Union might appear to be a good thing. “Should we rejoice? Probably not” (8). Rejecting David Harvey’s treatment of Brexit, Donald Trump, and Jair Bolsonaro, among other recent phenomena, as neoliberal “business as usual” (9), the authors detect a clear turn to an authoritarian-libertarianism that is prepared to forego any pretense of maintaining even a minimal legitimation function that would facilitate accumulation in general (O’Connor 1973). If allowed to pursue its political economic agenda, the Global North can look forward to a future not unlike the typical experience of the Global South: “lack of water and other essential resources (food, medicines), unchecked pollution that threatens human habitat, extreme poverty, and the irruption of military conflicts on a scale unknown under the neoliberal world order” (135).
Under former hedge fund partner Rishi Sunak, Britain’s visibly decaying social fabric and infrastructure, alongside its increasingly preposterous pretensions to military significance, was certainly leading the way in these respects, as it continues to do so under Keir Starmer. So, too, is its steadily more anti-democratic impulse and authoritarian response to protest of any kind (Fearn and Davoudi 2022). With telling allusions to Marx’s 18th Brumaire, Alt-Finance provides a concise but extremely fertile perspective on how this has come to pass, and what sort of impoverished future lies ahead if this apotheosis of possessive individualism is more widely granted the freedom from constraint that its representatives claim as their natural right. It also underscores the futility of any strategy that depends on allying with neoliberal actors, whose adaptation to the new post-Brexit regime matches that of the Wall Street decision makers who were able to assuage their personal distaste for Donald Trump with the compensatory pleasures of increased profits (Rogers et al. 2024).
