A lack of space—The birth-crises of ultracapital

Abstract

This analysis continues a series of pieces by the author on a theoretical research optic referred to as ultracapital, an analytical take on the mass of information concerning global financial services processes, markets and activities that became more widely available following the global systemic crisis of 2007–2008. The proposal suggested that orthodox economic analysis derived from the neoclassical mainstream was incapable of explaining the evolutionary features of the crisis, or indeed what was ‘really going on’ with 21st Century capitalism; an ideological and social construct, economic orthodoxy was incapable of addressing the agency of two critical aspects , space and connectivity. This re-envisioning began with the proposal that the ICT revolution of the 1990s has equipped globalizing capitalism with a new dimension in cyberspace of activities and processes that now dominate the older dimensions of capitalist endeavour, a revolution that occurred just as the collapse of the socialist bloc in 1989–1990 released the final fetters on capitalism itself from the restraints imposed over a hundred years by the existence of an alternative social reality.Subsequent pieces (Cloke, 2012; 2013) have moved the focus of ultracapital towards viewing it as a set of different but increasingly interlinked networks moving towards global recentralization/alter-centralization across a nested set of process spaces. Whereas the state is increasingly being subsumed by the requirements of ultracapital into a conduit for the marketization of all social activity, the term ‘market’ is applied to an increasing range of ways of being and doing that do not conform to the supply-demand-price doxa of economic orthodoxy. This piece seeks to develop theorization of ultracapital by based on the premise that the vital agencies of connectivity and space are still lacking in much economic theorizing of globalizing capitalism, in particular that of cyberspace.