The re-emergence of state capitalism has coincided with an epochal shift in the organization of capitalist firms: the rise of digital platform companies to the commanding heights of the global economy. Tech firms’ boosters welcome a ‘second machine age’ of ‘brilliant technologies’ which promise dramatic increases in productivity and wealth (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2014). Meanwhile critics argue that big tech amounts to extractive, parasitic organizations driving economies towards ‘techno-feudalism’, in which predatory tech elites extract labour from digital serfs amidst economic stagnation (Durand, 2020; Varoufakis, 2024). Amidst this debate, there is broad consensus that digital platform firms have increasingly come to exercise ‘state-like’ governance functions that erode the power of public authorities (Lehdonvirta, 2022; Törnberg, 2023). As platforms continue to expand, governments are understood to be waging a zero-sum ‘global battle to regulate technology’ – one which they are commonly understood to be losing (Bradford, 2023).
State capitalism and platform capitalism, then, appear to represent deeply contradictory trends. On one hand, states’ role as economic actors continues to multiply and intensify. Yet on the other hand, states seem powerless to regulate the largest platform firms such as Google, Amazon, and Alibaba. Which is it? And which side will win out? We present an alternative view. We show how contemporary state capitalist and platform capitalist practices – while initially distinctive and relatively autonomous trends – share deep historical roots, were both significantly driven by the global economic crises of 2008 and 2020, and are mutually reinforcing rather than contradictory trends.
Our starting point is to claim that state capitalism and platform capitalism should be conceived in the first instance as organizational and institutional ‘fixes’ to the structural problems encountered by global capitalism (Peck and Tickell, 1994; Alami and Dixon, 2020a). The concept of afix was first developed by Harvey (1981) in order to identify how capitalists and state managers devise temporary solutions to the structural crisis tendencies that frequently disrupt capitalist accumulation. They may engineer moves of money from manufacturing into real estate and infrastructure or into underdeveloped regions or economies (spatial fix), restructure businesses, outsource and offshore activities (organizational fix), or restructure policy environments to secure new avenues for growth (institutional fix). However, rather than resolving crises, fixes tend to defer, displace or redirect them. As such, fixes forestall crises, but they create novel contradictions that ultimately culminate in new crises: such is the crisis-prone nature of capitalism.
State Platform Capitalism
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