Private planning: The emerging capitalism of financial and technological centralisation

In the political economy, centralisation is a relevant economic phenomenon that has received little attention. This concept points to the architecture of allocative decision-making in an economic system. The economic and financial concentration of the last thirty years and technological change have progressively forced dependence on increasingly fewer decision centres. We single out three dimensions of centralisation—namely, the increased size of relevant corporations and their dependence on a few financial players (the Hilferding problem), the diffusion of technologies that produce interactive or social environments in which an increasing part of economic evaluations and transactions take place (platform capitalism) and the diminishing relevance of national political jurisdictions concerning decisions on how to legally and institutionally frame the economic space. The consequence is that the ability for economic and democratic self-determination is progressively reduced, while social control is increased, but not in favour of democratic governments.