Hu Leming and Li Lianbo: New Characteristics of Capital Movements in Western Developed Countries Since the 21st Century
"Correctly understanding and grasping the characteristics and behavioral laws of capital" is a major theoretical and practical issue proposed to us by General Secretary Xi Jinping. He has pointed out that the problems of the disorderly expansion of capital, its wanton manipulation, and profiteering that have emerged in some fields in China in recent years are closely related to our insufficient understanding of capital and the absence of regulation. Under the conditions of a market economy, although capital in capitalist society and capital in socialist society are fundamentally different, both will follow the same logic of accumulation when faced with external competitive pressures and internal impulses for valorization. Therefore, systematically reviewing the new theories of Western scholars regarding the movement of capital and accurately grasping the new characteristics of capital movement in developed Western countries can, on the one hand, deepen our understanding of the laws of capital movement and, on the other hand, provide beneficial insights for regulating capital behavior and promoting its benefits while mitigating its harms.
I. Introduction
Capital accumulation is the core driving force of capitalist economic development. The actual evolution of the capitalist economy undergoes periodic switches between prosperity and depression; at different developmental stages, the movement of capital exhibits different characteristics. According to Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) theory, every expansionary phase of the capitalist economy is linked to a unique, supportive social structure of accumulation, which consists of a set of institutional systems capable of promoting capital accumulation. Since the 1990s, the developed Western capitalist countries, represented by the United States, established a new social structure of accumulation. Its core components include seven aspects: the strengthening of capital's power relative to labor; financing system reforms favorable to investment; deregulation; institutional changes in the nature of the corporation through restructuring, downsizing, and re-engineering, alongside continuous reforms in corporate governance; limited government; a continuous increase in international agreements accelerating international trade and investment; and capital markets favorable to small, entrepreneurial firms. However, under the interaction of internal contradictions and external transformations, this neoliberal social structure of accumulation gradually exhausted its potential to support capital accumulation, ultimately triggering the first "Great Depression" of the 21st century.
Since entering the 21st century, and particularly following the outbreak of the 2008 global financial crisis, against a backdrop of intensified international trade frictions, the rapid development of digital technology, and the continuous deterioration of the ecological crisis, global capitalism has entered a new developmental stage. Consequently, some new changes have appeared in the capital movement of developed capitalist countries. In terms of capital forms, the rapid development of the digital economy has made the importance of digital capital increasingly prominent. Natural capital (or green capital, ecological capital) is being vigorously advocated for, with high hopes placed on it for addressing the ecological crisis. Financial capital, which was heavily battered in the 2008 financial crisis, has made a comeback and has become closely integrated with the previous two forms of capital. Regarding the extraction mechanism of surplus value, capital has increasingly distanced itself from value creation in the sphere of production, instead grabbing surplus value through economic rent and redistribution, degenerating into "rentierism." Finally, the progress of digital technology and the deepening of financialization have pushed the logic of capital to unfold more comprehensively and deeply, dominating all fields from daily life to ideology.
Although the movement of capital exhibits different characteristics at various stages of capitalist development, capital accumulation always follows a triple basic logic: the logic of scale, the logic of space, and the logic of power. First, capital endlessly pursues the expansion of its own scale; this logic of scale expansion manifests in different ways across various historical eras and spatial fields. The scale expansion of capital has its own evolutionary logic and developmental trends: the speed of expansion tends to accelerate, the magnitude of expansion tends to increase, and the dominant form of capital tends to "shift from the real to the virtual." Second, the scale expansion of capital is inevitably accompanied by its spatial expansion; moreover, after capital has completely occupied geographical and physical space, it increasingly penetrates into social and living spaces. Finally, the process of capital's scale and spatial expansion is always accompanied by the expansion of capital's power. As a form of power, capital manifests as economic, political, social, and cultural power, as well as a structured totality of power. The new changes in the movement of capital in developed capitalist countries since the 21st century are the result of the full unfolding of the logic of capital expansion—achieving accumulation on an unprecedented scale, opening up more spaces for valorization, and becoming an all-dominating power.
II. Capital Forms: Digital Capital, Natural Capital, and Financial Capital
Faced with the persistent crisis of over-accumulation, capital must constantly open up new fields of investment and create entirely new forms of capital. The booming development of the digital economy in the 21st century has produced a corresponding form of capital—digital capital; some scholars even believe that digital capital has replaced financial capital as the dominant form. With the intensification of the capitalist ecological crisis, the capitalization of nature has become a response, opening the path for the accumulation of natural capital. Financial capital rapidly recovered from the blow of the 2008 financial crisis and became closely integrated with digital and natural capital, which has also made judging the dominant form of capital more difficult.
(1) Digital Capitalism and Digital Capital The American political economist of communication Dan Schiller proposed the concept of "Digital Capitalism" in 1999, arguing that it represents the latest stage of capitalist development. Each stage of capitalist development inevitably features a dominant form of capital; merchant, industrial, and financial capital have successively occupied the dominant positions. If the booming digital economy has led the 21st century into the stage of digital capitalism, then digital capital has become its dominant form. Lan Jiang argues that digital capital refers to companies that control "general data," which is a vast relational system formed by data and cloud computing. In the future, digital capital will certainly rise to a position of comprehensive control over industrial and financial capital, becoming the complete form of digital capitalism: "Digital capital is essentially an actor-network composed of the behavioral trace data of all internet participants, but once this network is formed, it seems to possess a power independent of the individual actors. The potency of this power lies not only in its ability to guide consumer behavior but also in its direct influence on industrial and financial capital; that is to say, once the big data network is transformed into power that can be possessed and used, it becomes a new form of digital capital, which is precisely the latest form of capitalism today."
Digital capital possesses unique modes of exploitation. Building on Dallas Smythe’s concepts of audience labor and audience commodification, Christian Fuchs proposed the concept of the "prosumer" to explain the mechanism of exploitation of users by social media. Fuchs argues that all online activities of social media users are recorded by platforms, creating a data commodity: "Corporate social media sell user data commodities to advertisers at a price higher than the constant and variable capital they invested. The surplus value contained in this commodity is created partly by users and partly by corporate employees. The difference is that users provide unpaid labor, and therefore, from a monetary perspective, users are being infinitely exploited." Digital capital adopts a concealed mode of exploitation: "Users are productive consumers who produce commodities and profit—their user-labor is exploited. But this exploitation does not look like toil; it is more like 'playbor' [1]. It occurs during leisure time outside of wage labor—it is unpaid labor and playbor labor. Thus, labor time extends into leisure time, and leisure time becomes labor time."
A new economic model will inevitably produce a corresponding form of capital, which retains the commonalities of capital while possessing characteristics bestowed by the new model. Therefore, digital capital is two-sided. On the one hand, from the perspective of productive forces, digital capital is a form of capital integrated with digital technology; its accumulation can, to some extent, promote the improvement of productive forces, thereby creating the material basis for a higher social form. On the other hand, from the perspective of the relations of production, digital capital utilizes digital technology to establish a brand-new mode of exploitation, allowing the exploitation of labor by capital to break through all temporal, spatial, and physiological limits. Marx’s words analyzing the capitalist application of machinery apply perfectly to digital capital as well. Marx pointed out: "Because machinery in itself shortens working time, while its capitalist application extends the working day; because machinery in itself lightens labor, while its capitalist application increases the intensity of labor; because machinery in itself is a victory of man over the forces of nature, while its capitalist application makes man the slave of those forces; because machinery in itself increases the wealth of the producers, while its capitalist application turns the producers into paupers [2] needing relief, and so on..."
(2) Ecological Crisis and Natural Capital To address the deepening ecological crisis, mainstream economics in developed capitalist countries introduced the concept of natural capital. This concept appeared in the 19th century, initially concerning matter and use-value. For example, in The German Ideology, Marx examined "naturally-evolved capital" (自然形成的资本) in the Middle Ages, emphasizing the difference between it and "capital calculated in money": "The capital in these towns was naturally-evolved capital; it consisted of a house, the tools of the craft, and the naturally-evolved, hereditary customers; and not being realizable, on account of the backwardness of intercourse and the lack of circulation, it had to be handed down as an heirloom from father to son. Unlike modern capital, which can be assessed in money and which may be indifferently invested in this thing or that, this capital was directly connected with the particular work of the owner, inseparable from it." However, in recent decades, neoclassical economics and corporate finance have completely separated the concept of natural capital from its original use-value-based critique, turning instead to an interpretation purely from the perspective of exchange value, viewing it as a form of financialized capital. John Bellamy Foster argues that the period from September to November 2021 was a turning point for the "financial expropriation" of the Earth, coinciding with the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26). Three major changes occurred during this time: the establishment of the "Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero"; the consensus reached at the UN Climate Change Conference on the main contents of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, creating unified financial rules for the global carbon market; and the New York Stock Exchange's announcement of a new type of security related to "Natural Asset Companies" (NACs). Foster points out: "These changes represent a major shift toward the capitalization of nature, where all natural processes involving ecosystem services to the economy are increasingly governed by profit-seeking market exchange under the banner of environmental protection and climate change. The mainstream economic paradigm, which seeks the infinite accumulation of total capital, now includes natural capital as well."
The book Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet centralizes the attitude of mainstream economics toward natural capital. Oxford professor Dieter Helm vigorously advocates for the concept, stating that "refusing to set an economic price for natural capital may lead to environmental disaster. If carbon emissions are not priced, the ongoing excessive emissions will continue, resulting in catastrophic consequences." He views natural capital as one category of assets among many, and the introduction of the concept as a way to embed the value of nature into the economic system. Helm not only advocates for the capitalization of nature but also argues for "financing natural capital" to achieve the financialization of nature: "The scale of revenue generated just by the consumption of oil and gas in the United States or even the United Kingdom could establish a massive natural capital fund, far exceeding the imagination of most environmental groups. With these financial resources as a guarantee, there is no reason why the environmental problems we face today cannot be solved, and the general rules will inevitably be met. Our economy can and should grow on a sustainable basis." In response, the American Marxist geographer David Harvey points out that monetary valuation methods are inherently anti-ecological: "If the environment is viewed from an organic, ecological, and dialectical perspective, rather than as a Cartesian machine with replaceable parts, then this monetary valuation method is inapplicable. In fact, overemphasizing monetary valuation traps us in the Cartesian-Newtonian-Lockean 'anti-ecological' ontological error regarding the natural environment."
The concept of natural capital reflects an attempt to capitalize nature. Its core proposition is to resolve the ecological crisis through market mechanisms, while its primary objective is to open new spaces of accumulation for surplus capital. David Harvey points out: "Much of what we see about environmental pressures and environmental degradation are manifestations of the problem of surplus capital absorption seeking a solution. It's visible that the core problem is the absorption of surpluses. Once this capacity for absorption fails, it leads to a crisis of devaluation." To address environmental crises, Western capitalist nations once introduced the idea of the "Environmental State," but this was ultimately supplanted by the neoliberal concept of "environmental governance," which consistently ensures the primacy of capital accumulation. "Environmental governance means private interests play a greater deterministic role in the field of environmental regulation. These private interests include corporations, corporate foundations, NGOs, international financial institutions, and intergovernmental organizations. The field of environmental regulation encompasses various certification processes, carbon markets, and the financialization of conservation. By legitimizing so-called green capitalism, environmental governance creates new markets for capital accumulation." The concept of natural capital is part of neoliberal ecological governmentality; its essence is to save capitalism in the name of saving the ecological environment. "Nature is effectively subordinated to capital, becoming an important strategic field for capital accumulation. Capital wraps itself in a green cloak to continue seeking the maximization of surplus value, which is to say, it uses the 'ecological' field to 'repair' its own inherent contradictory crises."
(3) Modern Financial Capital
The traditional concept of financial capital mainly involves the fusion of industrial capital and bank capital, with bank capital maintaining a certain dominance. In Rudolf Hilferding’s view, financial capital is "capital at the disposal of the banks and used by industrialists." Lenin pointed out: "The concentration of production; the monopolies arising therefrom; the merging or blossoming together of the banks with industry—this is the history of the rise of financial capital and the content of that concept." Following Hilferding and Lenin, Paul Sweezy advocated replacing financial capital with "monopoly capital," while his successor John Bellamy Foster termed monopoly capital in the stage of financialization as "monopoly-finance capital." Since the 1980s, with the deepening development of financialization, the movement of financial capital has undergone changes in three aspects: capital in the sphere of material production has engaged in more profit-oriented financial activities (i.e., the financialization of non-financial corporations); driven by information technology and financial innovation, financial capital has greatly enhanced its capacity for self-accumulation and expansion within the financial sphere itself; and finally, financial capital has increasingly penetrated non-material production spheres to open more channels for profit sourcing. These changes clearly exceed the traditional concept of financial capital in the sense of "fusion," necessitating a new connotation for the term. We argue that modern financial capital has transformed into a pure mode of capital appropriation and income extraction—that is, it exists in the form of financial assets and acquires profit through financial channels. Marx once noted: "We may consider the accumulation of money-capital as the accumulation of wealth in the hands of bankers (professional lenders), as middlemen between private money-capitalists on the one hand, and the state, communities, and reproducing borrowers on the other; because the entire credit system is expanded to an enormous extent, in short, all credit is utilized by them as their own private capital. These people always possess capital and income in the form of money or as direct claims on money." Modern financial capital is increasingly distanced from actual value creation, conducting the appropriation and accumulation of capital and income in the forms of money capital and fictitious capital.
Financial capital, which was heavily battered during the 2008 global crisis, did not collapse; the injection of massive bailout funds by capitalist states allowed it to recover its strength rapidly. After the financial crisis broke out, developed capitalist countries implemented "re-industrialization" policies, yet neoliberalism remained firmly dominant. Consequently, "the trend of financialization in the US economy after the crisis has not been reversed; financial capital remains powerful. After failing to find an accumulation model driven by industrialization, the original capitalist accumulation model dominated by financial capital continues to function stably." After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the US stock market crashed, and the Federal Reserve once again acted as the savior of financial capital—not only promising unlimited purchases of government bonds but also taking the unprecedented step of buying corporate debt. As a result, "just as the US unemployment rate soared to its highest level since the Great Depression, with nearly 17 million people unemployed, the US stock market experienced its largest gain since 1974 during the week of April 6 to 10. Wall Street's profits in the first half of 2020 alone grew by 82% compared to the previous year." Wang Weiguang [3] argues that the economic base of contemporary capitalism remains the monopoly of international financial capital. Technological innovations such as digitalization and intelligentization have greatly promoted the clustering and concentrated development of international financial monopoly capital, strengthening its penetration, fusion with, and control over all global industries.
(4) The Nature and Combination of the Three Capital Forms
From the perspective of the circuit of capital, these three capital forms have all detached from the sphere of material production and belong to what Marx called "circulation capital." According to Marx's definition, circulation capital "exists in forms belonging to the process of circulation, that is, in forms belonging to formal changes mediated by exchange (metabolism of matter and change of ownership), and thus exists in the forms of commodity capital and money capital, as opposed to its form belonging to the production process, namely, productive capital." Specifically, financial capital is the product of the movement of money capital and interest-bearing capital. Digital capital, represented by platform capital, belongs primarily to the category of commercial capital, profiting through targeted advertising or by brokering transactions and extracting commissions. Green capital essentially belongs to fictitious capital; the object of carbon trading is the right to emit carbon dioxide—behind which there is no creation of actual value, but rather the capitalization of a flow of income. The rise of these three capital forms indicates that contemporary capitalism is increasingly shifting from an emphasis on the production of value to an emphasis on the distribution of value.
Digital capital, natural capital, and financial capital are increasingly and tightly interwoven, sometimes making it difficult even to distinguish them. The development of the digital economy and ecological environmental governance have provided new investment fields for financial capital; the combination of financial capital and digital capital has produced the "financialization of the digital economy," while the combination of financial capital and natural capital has produced so-called "green finance." Felipe Pozza Ferreira argues that the link between the digital economy, the Internet of Things (IoT), and financialization is the establishment of a feedback system—the movement of financial capital appropriates the profits and the immense instrumental development capabilities created in the digital age, while these tools enable finance to expand into new domains. Financial capital, represented by venture capital, has played an important role in the development of the platform economy, leading some scholars to propose the concept of the "financialization of the platform economy." The purpose of financial capital investing in platform enterprises is to obtain entrepreneurial profit; thus, it exerts every effort to increase the market value of platform enterprises for their future initial public offerings (IPOs), causing platform enterprises to exhibit the characteristic of "accumulation for valuation." This manifests as the blind expansion of market share, "enclosure-style" seizing of new fields, and the predatory production of data. Matthieu Montalban and others argue that the platform economy does not represent a new regime of accumulation, but is endogenous to the regime of financialized neoliberal accumulation, serving merely as an internal transformation and intensified version of that regime. Financialization created the preconditions for the development of the platform economy, while the platform economy is based on a similar institutional hierarchy; technologies like blockchain and cryptocurrency have also driven the development of financialization.
III. Surplus Extraction: Rentierism, Economic Rent, and the New Enclosure Movement
The "accumulation by dispossession" proposed by David Harvey has taken on new manifestations in the 21st century. His concept primarily includes four aspects: privatization and commodification, financialization, the management and manipulation of crises, and state redistributions. These four aspects can be boiled down to two accumulation strategies: opening new spaces for accumulation or accumulating through redistribution. The accumulation of financial capital is mainly realized through redistribution; natural capital treats nature as a new space for accumulation; and digital capital adopts both strategies—opening new spaces by enclosing the "digital commons" while also seizing income in the form of rent. The 21st-century version of "accumulation by dispossession" far exceeds that of the 20th century in both depth and breadth, causing capitalism to degenerate into "rentier capitalism." In his latest work, Harvey points out: "To some extent, industrial capitalism is increasingly subordinated to commercial capitalism and rentier forms of capitalism. The operating mechanisms of rentier and commercial capitalism are more and more concerned with dispossession and accumulation, rather than organizing production and exploiting living labor in production. This is the kind of capitalist society we have stepped into."
(1) The Resurgence of Rentierism
Financialization embodies capital's trend of attempting to achieve expansion while detaching from the process of value and surplus-value creation. This reflects a major shift in contemporary capitalism: capital has opened many new types of income sources outside the production sphere, increasingly transforming into rentier capital and directly obtaining profit in forms such as interest and rent. Paramjit Singh argues that the overall economic activity of contemporary capitalism has been seized by the logic and rules of interest-bearing capital, ultimately degenerating into speculative capital; actual capital accumulation in the real economy or commodity production sphere has become a subordinate to finance. Some scholars call this capitalist shift "neo-extractivism," arguing that it is not a new stage of capitalism but a reflection of the limitations and contradictions of existing capitalism, and an indispensable part of global capitalist accumulation today.
It must be noted that "rent-seeking" is not the sole prerogative of financial capital; digital capital and natural capital can adopt the same mode of self-expansion. Brett Christophers published the book Rentier Capitalism in 2020, arguing that contemporary capitalism has completely degenerated into rentier capitalism. Today’s rentiers are not just financiers and landlords; they also extract rent from natural resources, intellectual property, digital platforms, contracts, and infrastructure. "Rentier capitalism is an economic system dominated by rents and rentiers, a system essentially built around the assets that generate those rents and sustain those rentiers." The distinction between capitalism and pre-capitalist modes of production lies in having an internal dynamic mechanism that drives the continuous expansion of production. Regarding the mode of surplus extraction, capitalist society primarily employs economic means, whereas pre-capitalist societies relied mainly on political, legal, or direct violent means. Javier Moreno Zacarés argues that contemporary capitalism has lost the dynamic mechanism that drives the development of productive forces. The rise of rentierism means that the surplus extraction forms unique to capitalism are giving way to legal and political forms of exploitation, with capital gains increasingly obtained through royalties and leases. The rise of rentierism erodes capitalism's ability to drive technological progress. Taking the most advanced innovation system today—the Silicon Valley innovation system—as an example, Raúl Delgado Wise and Mateo Crossa Niell argue that Silicon Valley has transformed into a powerful patent-producing machine. This system enables large corporations to control the scientific and technological labor of a vast number of knowledge workers and profit through the purchase or misappropriation of patents, thereby promoting the private appropriation and concentration of products created by "general intellect." [4]
(2) The New Enclosure Movement and Economic Rent
Just as the establishment of the capitalist mode of production required a process of primitive accumulation to achieve the separation of the means of production from labor, the establishment of the digital capitalist mode of exploitation also requires an "enclosure movement" [5] so that digital capital can seize control over the core means of production within the digital economy. Rodrigo Alves Teixeira and Tomas Nielsen Rotta have proposed the concepts of the "knowledge-commodity" and "knowledge-rent," arguing that with the rapid development of knowledge-commodity production, knowledge-rent is playing an increasingly important role in the creation and redistribution of profit. Knowledge-commodities include privatized ideas, commodified knowledge, proprietary technology, information, and instructions for use. Although the research and development (R&D) of knowledge-commodities requires the investment of significant amounts of high-skilled labor time, the fact that they can be easily replicated at almost zero cost means such commodities do not possess value. A knowledge-commodity is not a specific quantity of value and thus cannot become interest-bearing capital. Teixeira and Rotta point out: "The profit motive creates a demand for intellectual property, patents, and copyrights, which can bring lasting or at least long-term super-profits. Acquiring privatized knowledge is like renting land; using it for production purposes requires obtaining permission from the knowledge owner. The licensing price paid by the user to the knowledge owner becomes the source of the super-profits created by this specific technology and idea. What we call knowledge-rent is the rent paid by knowledge users to knowledge producers—a new type of social differential rent." Taking a machine with the latest patents as an example, because this machine possesses higher efficiency, the capitalist who puts it into the production process can obtain super-profits. Like a capitalist renting superior land, the capitalist using this machine needs to pay a portion of the super-profit to the owner of the knowledge-commodity in the form of knowledge-rent. The acquisition of ground rent relies on the legally protected monopoly of land, while knowledge-rent relies on a "new enclosure movement" revolving around patents and intellectual property rights—the latter being a negation of labor's access to knowledge as a means of production. Teixeira and Rotta argue that even if all capitalists in a production sector use the same knowledge-commodity to increase productivity, thereby causing individual super-profits and differential rent to disappear, the existence of intellectual property protection laws ensures that knowledge-commodity producers can still obtain absolute knowledge rent, which constitutes a portion of production profits.
Stan Harrison has examined the enclosure movement launched by capital against the most fundamental means of production in the digital economy: the Internet. Unlike Teixeira and Rotta, Harrison believes that after successfully enclosing the "digital commons," capital has revived a feudal mode of agricultural exploitation—establishing digital sharecropping, collecting digital ground rent, and extracting tribute. On April 30, 1995, the U.S. government handed control of the Internet over to capital (by relinquishing the National Science Foundation Network, NSFnet), and capital began to undertake the construction of Internet infrastructure. Since then, capital giants such as Facebook and Internet service providers have become "digital landlords," while account holders have been transformed into "digital sharecroppers." Digital sharecroppers produce "digital crops" containing both necessary and surplus labor, which digital landlords extract as income through sharecropping, rent, and tribute. Jodi Dean also argues that contemporary capitalism exhibits characteristics of "neo-feudalism," where accumulation is increasingly achieved through rent, debt, and power, and the valorization process increasingly relies on surveillance, coercion, and violence. Dean notes: "We need to consider why we are no longer in capitalism, but in a worse neo-feudalism. This does not mean there are no longer capitalist production and exploitation relations, but rather that other aspects of capitalist production—such as expropriation, domination, and coercion—have become so powerful that it no longer makes sense for free and equal subjects to organize and confront each other in the labor market. It means that the role of rent and debt in accumulation equals or even exceeds that of profit, and work increasingly moves beyond the wage relationship." In Dean's view, neo-feudalism is the continuation of imperialism under the conditions of digital capitalism; our lives and communicative interactions are transformed into sources of capital accumulation. Platform capital cannot directly control the labor process of users, which leads it to adopt a mode of exploitation different from that in the realm of material production.
IV. Logical Expansion: From Everyday Life to Ideology
In capitalist society, capital is the power that dominates everything. "It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colors and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it." As the logic of capital's scale, space, and power unfolds comprehensively, capital not only thoroughly masters economic and political power but also dominates everything from everyday life to the realm of ideology. After the outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis, the economies of developed capitalist countries fell into a quagmire of long-term stagnation. With accumulation in the sphere of material production frustrated, capital has opened up more space for valorization. "Capital must do everything in its power to privatize, commodify, monetize, and commercialize all aspects of nature. Only thus can it absorb more and more natural things (now extending to human DNA) and turn them into a form of capital (this is an accumulation strategy of capital). ... Capital is accelerating its colonization of the human life-world. As capital accumulates more blindly in an exponential fashion, the 'ecology of capital' also expands more blindly within our life-world." It is currently difficult to determine whether the infinite expansion of capital has reached its limit, but "in many parts of the world, there are few resources left to enclose and privatize. Furthermore, there are many signs that further enclosure of public resources and the further commodification of life forms have encountered political resistance."
(1) The Ideological Construction of Digital Capital and Natural Capital
Just as neoliberalism cleared obstacles for the accumulation of financial capital by constructing discourses of markets, freedom, privatization, and openness, digital capital and natural capital have also constructed their own discourse systems or ideologies intended to clear the way for capital accumulation. Marx pointed out in The German Ideology: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it." Lukács [N] proposed the concept of "ideological state apparatuses," including those of education, family, religion, politics, trade unions, communication, publishing/distribution, and culture. Digital capital and natural capital will inevitably construct ideologies consistent with their own interests from these eight aspects. He pointed out: "The ideology of the state is suited to the fundamental interests of the class (or classes) holding power. The politics of the class in power, as well as the ideology of the state (holding ideology = ideology of the ruling class), aim to guarantee the conditions for the ruling class to exploit the exploited class, primarily by guaranteeing the reproduction of the relations of production in which that exploitation occurs, because in the class social formations we are discussing, relations of production are relations of exploitation."
The mainstream discourse we frequently hear is that the digital economy is a "frictionless economy" that can bring democracy, equality, and sharing. Individuals indulge in the lies woven by digital capital, styling themselves as privileged knowledge workers walking the path to freedom and liberation, while the relations of exploitation are completely obscured. "Digital technology, with its embedded progressiveness, shapes new modes of discourse, causing capitalist discursive hegemony, labor exploitation, and the phenomena of reification and alienation to become even more hidden." Digital capital links labor with "play," further masking its exploitative behavior: "Labor becomes like 'play'; exploitation and pleasure thus become inseparable. Today, 'play' and labor are in some cases indistinguishable: Eros has been fully incorporated into the repressive reality principle; 'play' has been commodified; spaces and free time not exploited by capital almost do not exist today—they are very difficult to create and defend for oneself. Today, 'play' is productive; it is labor exploited by capital to create surplus value. All human activities, including all forms of play and pleasure, have become and are incorporated under the exploitation of capital under contemporary conditions."
Regarding environmental protection, the mainstream view holds that it depends on introducing market mechanisms and consciously utilizing financial instruments: "Because market mechanisms provide people with economic incentives, they may actually be the best way to protect the environment"; "People will definitely find business opportunities in ecological protection activities"; "In the field of environmental protection, asset securitization has already been applied to improve energy efficiency." Capital is particularly adept at disguising profit-seeking behavior as benefiting all of humanity. Harvey argues that ideas about the environment, population, and resources are not neutral; many terms used in contemporary environmental debates are unconsciously integrated with capitalist values: "Ruling groups attempt with incredible enthusiasm to encompass, shape, mystify and confuse contemporary debates about nature and the environment. ... The dominant power system is able to propose and protect a hegemonic discourse—a set of discourses on environmental management and resource allocation that are sufficiently effective and rational for capital accumulation (to the extent that policies, institutions, and physical practices are even created based on those discourses)." Once capital achieves dominance over ecological discourse, it can "define nature in its own way (usually monetized, with the help of cost-benefit analysis) and attempt to address the contradictions between capital and nature in a way that conforms to the broad interests of the bourgeoisie."
The ideological barriers constructed by digital capital and natural capital impede the development of struggles against capital. As China utilizes capital on a large scale to develop its economy, ideologies corresponding to capital will inevitably emerge, develop, and erode mainstream thought. In response, Meng Jie argues that with the spread of neoliberal economics in China, a pattern has emerged within the "ideological state apparatuses" where two systems of economic knowledge or "regimes of truth" coexist—neoliberal economics and the political economy of socialism with Chinese characteristics. "The coexistence and mutual competition of these two systems of economic knowledge is an inevitable phenomenon in the primary stage of socialism [6] which practices a market economy. It reflects the coexistence of two different types of economic power—on the one hand, state economic governance under the leadership of the Party, and on the other, private capital chasing its own interests. For knowledge governance in the primary stage of socialism, the problem is not to use one knowledge system to eliminate the other, but to limit and induce the production of knowledge systems associated with capital power, and to establish and consolidate the leadership of the political economy of socialism with Chinese characteristics within various ideological state apparatuses."
(2) The Financialization and Digitization of Everyday Life
With the aid of digital technology, financial capital has increasingly and extensively permeated the realm of daily life, transforming households and individuals into objects for profit extraction, thereby leading to the financialization of daily life. "The so-called financialization of daily life is nothing more than the increasingly extensive penetration of a portion of capital from the financial and material production sectors into the non-material production sector, taking households and individuals as objects for profit extraction. The financialization of daily life reflects a systemic shift in capital accumulation." According to Agnes Heller's definition, daily life is the sphere of social reproduction; "we can define 'daily life' as the sum of those factors of individual reproduction which at the same time make social reproduction possible." Therefore, the financialization of daily life essentially reflects the financialization of the reproduction of labor power. The financialization of daily life is the result of the combined action of multiple factors. Neoliberal economic restructuring established the macro-necessity for the financialized transformation of the individual—against a backdrop of stagnating real wages, worsening income distribution, and increasing job insecurity and financial risk, it became a necessary choice for individuals to maintain the reproduction of labor power through debt. Neoliberal ideological reshaping provided the internal impetus for this transformation—neoliberalism uses governance techniques such as debt, risk, and government intervention to constrain or discipline individual behavior, making it conform to the expectations of financialization. Simultaneously, it reshaped the culture of daily life through political and media discourse, economic and financial knowledge, and financial instruments and technical apparatuses, guiding the daily practices of individuals. Neoliberal ideology and governance techniques have jointly shaped a self-disciplining financialized subject, driving the comprehensive financialization of the sphere of daily life. This new subject possesses the following characteristics: it is a rational subject, an homo economicus; it is an investor subject, actively engaged in financial activities; and it is a responsible individual who bears all the consequences of its personal choices.
The penetration of digital capital into the realm of daily life has led to the digitalization of daily life. Kang Zhai [8] argues that the digitalization of daily life manifests in three aspects: the digitalization of need fulfillment, the conversion of leisure time into labor time, and the digitalization of ideological construction. Advances in digital technology and the development of the digital economy have brought nearly all human activities into the operational orbit of digital capital, causing the exploitation of labor by capital to exceed original spatial and temporal boundaries. The digitalization of daily life has also produced new subjectivities and new forms of governance: "The pastoral power of digital technology [9] reinforces this by making individuals believe that the choices they make in performing their selves are acts of autonomy, and that the choices they make are expressions of their individualization. We are becoming subjects who are voluntary and capable of self-governance."
V. Conclusions and Implications
This article has systematically reviewed Western scholars’ new theories regarding the movement of capital from three aspects—the evolution of capital forms, the transformation of mechanisms for extracting surplus, and the comprehensive unfolding of the logic of capital expansion—and summarized the new characteristics of capital movement in Western developed countries since the 21st century. Capital movement and capital accumulation always follow a triple basic logic of scale, space, and power. In different stages of capitalist development, the "technical structure" and "social structure" of capital accumulation take different forms, causing capital movement to exhibit different characteristics. Since the 21st century, against the background of the continuous intensification of the crisis of overaccumulation, the movement of capital in Western developed countries has utilized digital technology and financialization to achieve accumulation on an unprecedented scale, opening up more spaces for valorization and becoming an all-governing power. Undoubtedly, with the continuous development of digital technology, financial instruments, and the digital economy, new changes will inevitably appear in the movement of capital in Western developed countries. Accurately grasping these trends can further deepen our understanding of the general laws of capital movement.
For the purposes of correctly understanding and grasping the characteristics and behavioral laws of capital, the latest changes in the movement of capital in Western developed countries in the 21st century offer the following insights.
First, we must correctly understand various forms of capital. An analysis of various capital forms shows that mainstream Western thought always finds ways to shroud capital in a sacred halo—for instance, by preaching that digital capital can bring equality, freedom, and liberation, or that natural capital is the only way to deal with the ecological crisis. Once these halos are stripped away, capital is revealed as nothing but naked relations of exploitation. We must recognize that capital is not a flood or a wild beast [10], and we should not avoid it out of fear; the emergence of any form of capital is a product of socio-economic evolution and plays a certain progressive role at specific historical stages. Nor is capital a panacea that cures all ills, as if any social problem can be perfectly solved by handing it over to capital; on the contrary, the emergence and intensification of most social problems in capitalism are inextricably linked to capital. As a factor of production, capital possesses immense potential to promote the development of productive forces, thereby playing a "great civilizing role." However, as a relation of production, the exercise of capital’s progressive function is inevitably limited by its own constraints. At the same time, we must recognize that capital as a factor of production and capital as a relation of production essentially reflect the relationship between the production of material wealth and the production of value wealth. Only from the perspective of the production of material wealth do various non-labor factors play a role; however, on the issue of the production of value wealth, labor is the only substance and source of value, while others are merely conditions.
Second, we must leverage the regulatory roles of both the market and the government. In order to seize surplus value, capital will ignore all legal, moral, and environmental limits, because "the production of surplus value or the making of money is the absolute law of this mode of production." The limitless pursuit of surplus labor by capital causes the working day to break through the physical and moral limits of the worker, such that the accumulation of capital is always accompanied by the accumulation of the worker's poverty. Simultaneously, the expansion of capital is a process of creative destruction. From a micro perspective, the expansion of individual capital passes the test of the market and is undoubtedly rational. But from a macro perspective, in the absence of effective guidance and regulation, the expansionary behavior of countless individual capitals often leads to disorder and chaos—that is, "market failure." Therefore, it is necessary to further improve market mechanisms, sound the market system, refine relevant laws and regulations, and create an open and transparent market environment, thereby giving full play to the regulatory role of the market. Concurrently, it is necessary to strengthen government supervision and management—opposing monopolies, profiteering, exorbitant pricing, malicious speculation, and unfair competition—and to strengthen the regulation and adjustment of high incomes to promote the orderly development of capital.
Third, we must leverage the leading role of social value norms. As the logic of capital unfolds comprehensively, capital will dominate all fields from daily life to ideology, leading to a "double failure" of both the market and the government. Therefore, to curb the disorderly expansion of capital, relying solely on market forces and government regulation is insufficient; society must also be constructed as the final line of defense against capital erosion. Social construction must be strengthened and the leading role of social value norms must be utilized to compensate for the limitations of market rationality and government rationality. "Social regulation based on values or justice, in addition to playing an important role in the social sphere in a narrow sense, can also function where the market and government fail, thereby better constraining the disorderly expansion of capital. The experience of modern market economy development shows that a successful market economy is one that combines the power of capital with the power of morality." Furthermore, the construction of social organizations should be standardized and strengthened, social value norms and social solidarity mechanisms should be improved and reshaped, and the regulatory role of Socialist Core Values should be fully exerted, building them into a strong fortress against the expansion of capital—especially monopoly capital—in the social and cultural spheres.
Fourth, only the socialist market economy can successfully harness capital. The governments of capitalist countries are essentially in the service of capital and bear the mission of clearing obstacles for private capital accumulation; therefore, they cannot successfully harness capital. Capitalism cannot restrain the disorderly expansion of various forms of capital, nor can it hinder capital from extracting profits through various means, much less will it renounce the power of capital to dominate everything. The digital economy, environmental governance, and the financial sector constitute different investment fields that any capital can enter freely; however, the entry of capital is not for the purpose of promoting the development of the digital economy or solving social problems like the ecological crisis, but for seizing maximum profit. Various forms of capital inevitably exist in a socialist market economy, but the fundamental difference from capitalism is that the socialist market economy is based on public ownership, and its dominant form of capital is public capital. Public capital eliminates exploitative class relations and establishes equal labor relations. Simultaneously, public capital serves the purposes of socialist production, becoming a powerful lever for the state to regulate the economy and implement national development strategies. Private capital in a socialist market economy cannot hold the lifeblood of the national economy, much less dominate political power or ideology; it can only participate in competition as an equal market subject and accept effective state supervision and social value norms. Therefore, only the socialist market economy can successfully harness capital, leveraging its positive role as a factor of production while effectively controlling its negative effects.