A New Finance Capital? Theorising Corporate Governance and Financial Power

Hilferding’s work provides important theoretical foundations for a much-needed ‘Institutional Marxist’ theory of corporate governance. By tracing the evolution of state and corporate organisation since the late nineteenth century, this chapter illustrates that such a theory constitutes a key basis for the periodisation of capitalist development. Drawing on Hilferding’s theorisation of ‘finance capital’ as a fusion of financial and industrial capital dominated by money-capital, we suggest that the restructuring of capitalism since the 2008 crisis has led to the emergence of a ‘new finance capital.’ Through a process linking the internal restructuring of ‘non-financial’ corporations with new forms of concentration and centralisation of finance across the economy, new institutional linkages between finance and industry have been consolidated, constituting a new organisational form of corporate power. Finally, we reflect on the implications of this theory for the democratic socialist movement today.