Core exports

The mode that since the 1970s has underpinned the global political economy is that of neoliberalism or financialised capitalism, which since the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the ensuing recession has only become further entrenched, and has been assuming overtly authoritarian features. The most prominent aspect of the latter are the ongoing financialisation and enclosures, that is, the privatisation of publicly owned assets and the assaults on social welfare provision. Market-based constitutionalism is the new world order where we see the socialisation of corporate losses combined with extreme disciplining in the workplace and systemic social exclusion of labour with added extortion by indebtedness, in-work poverty and austerity policies. All of the above are popular and successful exports from the core of the capitalist system to its semi-/peripheries to which Ukraine is no exception…

—Yuliya Yurchenko, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketisation to Armed Conflict, (London: Pluto Press, 2018).

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