Democrats: Don’t Let Trump Define What State Capitalism Can Be

Importantly, this is not just a story about China. State enterprises account for over 20 percent of the largest companies in the world, and include iconic companies like Renault, Mercedes-Benz, and Sweden’s green steelmakers. Sovereign wealth funds of Norway, Alaska, and other jurisdictions now control more assets than hedge funds and private equity firms combined, and include the planet’s top holders of private stock. Even the George W. Bush and Obama administrations temporarily became majority owners in financial and auto firms during the Great Recession—though they refused to steer those industries toward less destabilizing, lower carbon futures. And this gets at a further structural change.

The climate crisis, called the biggest market failure in history, will require massive amounts of government intervention to address, whether proactively, through building clean energy industries to mitigate the worst impacts, or reactively, through adaptation efforts to resettle people and rebuild economies if and after we accept those impacts as given. Already, many of the big players in the energy transition are wholly or partly state-owned.

None of these policy changes means that the profit motive or class relations have faded as organizing principles of our economy. Rather, they are pragmatic responses to changes in technology and regulation since the 1970s that accelerated corporate concentration and weakened workers’ power to keep capital domestically rooted.