The power to transform structures: power complexes and the challenges for realising a wellbeing economy

Abstract

This article draws on different strands of existing scholarship to provide an analytical framework for understanding the barriers to achieving a well-being economy. It explores the interplay between agential and structural power, where some actor-coalitions can reproduce or transform pre-existing structures. Conversely, these structures are strategically selective, favouring some actors, interests, and strategies over others. Making sense of this interplay between agential and structural power, the article introduces the notion of power complexes—time-space-specific actor-coalitions with common industry-related interests and the power to reproduce or transform structures in a given conjuncture. To understand the historical “becoming” of today’s political-economic terrain, the article provides a regulationist-inspired history of the rise, fall, and re-emergence of four power complexes: the financial, fossil, livestock-agribusiness, and digital. They pose significant threats to pillars of a wellbeing economy such as ecological sustainability, equ(al)ity, and democracy. Subsequently, today’s structural context is scrutinised in more detail to understand why certain actors dominate strategic calculations in contemporary power complexes. This reveals strategic selectivities that favour multi- and transnational corporate actors over civil society, labour movements, and public bureaucracies. The article then examines firm-to-state lobbying as a strategy employed by corporate actors within today’s structural context to assert their interests. It presents illustrative cases of Blackstone, BP, Bayer, and Alphabet. Finally, it explores implications and challenges for realising a wellbeing economy based on post-/degrowth visions. It emphasises the double challenge faced by such a wellbeing-economy actor-coalition. On one hand, it has to navigate within contemporary modes of regulation that favour corporate strategies of capital accumulation while, on the other, it must confront the self-expanding and extractive logic of capital. In this context, three key challenges are outlined: the need to form unconventional strategic alliances, operate on various spatial dimensions simultaneously, and institutionalise alternatives to firm-to-state lobbying to influence policymaking.