Description: Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND license. In Capitalism Reloaded, Peter Bloom charts a pivotal shift from the well-known military-industrial complex to a new 'Authoritarian-Financial Complex'. Unlike its predecessor, which centred on armaments and defence, this emerging power structure fuses financial interests with advanced surveillance and digital control, turning social repression into a lucrative industry. Bloom introduces a ground breaking theory of 'complex power', where control itself becomes a central driver of capitalism, shaping economies and societies. Bloom explores how this insatiable demand for security and profit extends beyond traditional authoritarian regimes, permeating everyday life and eroding democratic freedoms. This book challenges readers to confront the deep entanglements of modern capitalism before they solidify into a techno-authoritarian order.
Brief description: University of Essex
Review Quotes: "In Capitalism Reloaded, Peter Bloom lays out the dynamics that are reconfiguring our economies and societies as authoritarian-financial complexes. Financial risk is turned into a tradable security, while everyday livelihoods and security are turned into objects of surveillance. As finance and surveillance meld together to constitute contemporary society, we are left with an increasingly repressive and regressive capitalism in which increasing and reproducing precarity has become a strategic choice for elites. Bloom concludes with stirring and hopeful call to arms to challenge this repression, centred on creating radical breaks in the prevailing financial and technological apparatuses that underpin contemporary capitalism." Kean Birch, York University