Neither neoliberalism per se nor state capitalism. What we are seeing emerge today is a mixture of both in which the government assumes a leading role in co-managing private markets.
The US is experimenting with a new model of economic accumulation that marks a historic break with the neoliberal and globalist model that has prevailed for the last 40 years. It is not classic state capitalism, because it does not create large-scale state-owned enterprises. Nor is it a state merely a tool of capitalists, since government decisions are not regulated by competition among them. What we are seeing emerge in the US today is a state that uses all its economic power (tariffs, public investment, debt, wars, and political blackmail) to direct and control those business sectors that will form the core of accumulation and national economic growth.
It all began to manifest itself during the 2008 crisis. The American housing bubble, which triggered the global financial crisis and the Great Recession, could only be mitigated by the Federal Reserve’s injection of money, equivalent to 6.5% of GDP. In 2020, the new “bailout” for private companies reached 25% (IMF, Fiscal Monitor, 2021). Clearly, markets cannot save themselves from the crises they create. They need government intervention to protect themselves and public resources to grow.
Then came the tariffs, not only against the most powerful industrial economy (China), but against the entire world. By 2026, the average tariffs imposed by the US were 13%. For China, 33%; for the EU, 15%. Twenty years ago, these did not exceed 1.4% (World Bank, 2025).
But the most significant aspect of this exacerbated neoprotectionism is its coercive use. It is being used to force countries and transnational corporations to invest in the U.S. in areas the government considers priorities, in exchange for not being strangled by new tariffs.
In 2025, Trump secured commitments of nearly $9 trillion in investment from the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Japan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and the European Union; and from companies like Apple, which pledged to invest $600 billion in the United States, and Nvidia, with $500 billion in chips and artificial intelligence. Another $500 billion in AI is coming from OpenAI and SoftBank. IBM and TSMC, the world’s leading chip manufacturer, are also among those committing to investment (El País, August 16, 2025).
If the founding fathers of liberalism must already be turning in their graves at this point, I don’t know what they’ll do when they learn that, on the altar of “national security,” the US today is championing the crusade of “industrial policies” or state interventionism to prop up the development of local industries based on subsidies, cheap loans, tax breaks, or direct transfers. President Biden passed the IRA Act, which allocates up to $500 billion for relocating energy supply chains to the US. The CHIPS Act allocates $280 billion to support the goal of technological self-sufficiency in microprocessor manufacturing. The Infrastructure and Jobs Act mobilizes $2.2 trillion for the construction of federal infrastructure to make “domestic industry competitive” (NBER, 2026).
The Trump administration has gone even further. It has tasked the Export-Import Bank of China (Eximbank), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Development Finance Corporation (DFC) with investing in “projects that counter China’s presence in strategic regions and strengthen the critical minerals supply chain.” The DFC has a $40 billion portfolio in more than 50 countries, with a focus on critical minerals, energy, and infrastructure projects in Africa and Eastern Europe. By 2026, it has an additional $205 billion available. This has allowed the US, after decades, to surpass China as the leading investor in Africa by 2025.
The preferred financing method is the purchase of equity stakes in companies. This is the case with the Congolese state-owned company Gécamines, for copper and cobalt, and Serra Verde in Brazil, with a $565 million investment to extract magnetic rare earth elements. In Mozambique, they have become partners in a graphite processing plant. In Kazakhstan, with $900 million from the Export-Import Bank of Kazakhstan (Eximbank), they have acquired ownership of a tungsten mine (NYT, June 28, 2026). Within the US, the government has acquired a stake in Thacker Pass, a lithium mine, and has allocated $1.6 billion to support USA Rare Earths in a value chain “from mine to magnet” (Phenomenal World, June 2026).
But state support isn’t just financial; it also includes guaranteed returns and leverage. Minimum purchase prices are set, along with a guaranteed stock market appreciation. For example, the state’s purchase of 10% of the microprocessor company Intel boosted its market value from US$176 billion to US$543 billion in just a few weeks (Bloomberg, May, 2026). Similarly, the Financial Times reports on negotiations for the state to acquire 5% of the shares of OpenAI and Anthropoic before their initial public offerings (FT, July 2, 2026). Although on a smaller scale, the same has happened with other companies like Lithium Americas and MP Materials, whose share values have increased by 200% as a result of state investment.
This state intervention to prop up or steer private companies in strategic areas of structural rivalry with China is most clearly evident in recent government actions regarding TikTok, SpaceX, and Anthropic. TikTok, owned by Chinese businessmen, was forced to sell a majority stake to local investors as a requirement to continue operating in the US. SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk (dedicated to launching reusable space rockets, including missions to Mars, global internet, and space tourism), made a spectacular initial public offering (IPO) on June 11 to raise capital, managing to raise $75 billion, despite having a revenue of only $18.7 billion and a projected loss of $4.9 billion in 2025 (Morningstar, May 26, 2026). Hours earlier, Trump unexpectedly announced that there would be no more attacks on Iran since the points of agreement between the two sides had been approved. The stock markets jumped for joy and, “coincidentally,” so did SpaceX shares.
In the case of Anthropic (an artificial intelligence company that developed the Claude assistant and advanced cybersecurity models), it was a matter of punishment and devaluation. By refusing to work with the government on autonomous weapons and national surveillance (BBC, February 27, 2026), the Trump administration excluded it from any federal contracts, prohibited foreigners from using its advanced models, and labeled it a “supply chain risk.” Ultimately, a mutually beneficial compromise was reached, but under government regulation and monitoring (CNN, June 1, 2026).
In all cases, we are no longer dealing with a state that facilitates and supports the market forces that once dominated corporate expansion and accumulation (neoliberalism). Now, the state creates markets, regulates them, strengthens those areas and value chains it considers strategic with public resources, and punishes those who do not submit to its geopolitical priorities.
Unlike the state capitalism of the 1950s and 60s, the American state does not own the economic sectors with the greatest accumulation and strategic priority. But neither does it allow the market to define the most dynamic sectors, as it did during the neoliberal era. Here, both forces are amalgamated in a hybrid model where the private sector is the economic actor—driven by accumulation and in relation to workers—but the state defines—based on geopolitical and national security priorities—which sectors are central to the new model of capitalist accumulation. We are transitioning from a state that merely supports the markets to an economic regime in which the state is a protagonist, a co-creator and manager of those markets.
This new accumulation regime certainly does not follow a pre-established plan, but rather advances haphazardly, through improvisation and converging contingencies. The grotesque and corrupt nature of the accompanying governmental actions only confirms the nature of all modes of capitalist accumulation.
If we take into account that China, the other great world power, also has the State as the planner of accumulation, the market, free trade and the balance between private and public enterprise, it is quite evident that neo-statism is the hallmark of the new economic era that is clumsily beginning to emerge.
All these global changes are leading to a fruitful discussion regarding the mutations that contemporary capitalism is undergoing. However, the approaches are still imprecise. For example, there are tormented liberals who consider state interventionism a transgression of the traditional rules of the market—as the Cato Institute argues. Certainly, this is a prejudice more akin to a ruthless consolation for the poor than a consistent argument. As Hacker and Pierson show, large corporate profits have always depended on political ties with government agencies (Winner-Take-All Politics, 2010). Others claim that what is happening in the United States is a type of “political capitalism” in the sense that “pure political power, rather than productive investment, is the determining factor of the rate of return” (Brenner & Riley, NLR, 2023). This is giving rise to a new type of rentier economic accumulation secured through privileged access to the state.
Decades ago, G. Arrighi, in his study of systemic accumulation cycles (The Long Twentieth Century, 1999), already observed that global hegemons, in their decline, transition from the productive phase to the financial phase, in which profits are obtained through speculation, credit, and monetary investments, which absorb the surplus value generated in the spheres of global production. The loss of US global industrial leadership (from 30% to 17% in 40 years) illustrates this transition. But what is interesting about the last five years is the surge in investment in artificial intelligence (AI) in the US. $550 billion was invested in 2025, while $800 billion is projected for 2026. It is possible that this euphoria surrounding AI has a speculative dimension, as it represents a bet on the belief in “future returns.” In fact, in recent weeks there has been a collapse in the market value of its shares, losing more than $2 trillion ( Financial Times , June 30, 2026). But it is also undeniable that a large portion of investments are in complex physical infrastructure such as data centers, accelerators (GPUs, ASICs, etc.), electrical systems, and cabling. A Goldman Sachs report estimates that nearly $7 trillion will be spent on this type of massive technological capital by 2031 (GS, May 1, 2026). In fact, this activity is what is currently sustaining the growth of the US economy. Nearly 30% of the increase in real GDP is due to material investments in AI (Fed, January 2026).
Furthermore, AI is not merely a corporate speculative bubble. It is a technology that contributes to the generation of enormous amounts of market value. Its data centers are supported by all the intellectual work—data—that global society has put into digital circulation (information, images, grammatical structures, etc.). The companies that own the computing accelerators and data centers appropriate, free of charge, all that colossal individual work of millions of individuals over centuries—their data—and then, their powerful processors, by articulating, integrating, selecting, comparing, and deducing new information, also appropriate this new emerging social productive force arising from the association of individual data, guaranteeing the monopoly of a productive technology that is not exhausted by its use, but rather increases, and that will allow its few possessors—the Big Tech companies—extraordinary profits. As A. Karp, an executive at Palantier, one of the world’s leading software, AI, and data analytics companies, confesses, data is the great “treasure” of all their activity (Grand Continent, 03.07, 2026)
This also refutes proposals that capitalism has been replaced by a new economic system, technofeudalism, in which a few technology companies that monopolize access to digital platforms charge rent to those who wish to use them partially and temporarily (Duran, Technofeudalism, 2021).
Marx had already studied various ways of obtaining extraordinary profits, in the form of rent, but also, as in the case of platforms and AI, of “extraordinary surplus value” resulting from the incorporation of more productive technologies into the labor process. The exclusive use of “extraordinary productive forces” in a company allows it to have “enhanced labor” such that, within a certain timeframe, the company favored by technological innovation generates “ values superior to those produced by average social labor of the same kind ” (Capital, Vol. I, pp. 386-387). Since the value of a commodity product is social, that is, it is the average of the labor time in that branch of business, the individual value of the product of the most productive company is lower, and therefore the portion of unpaid labor appropriated by the capitalist is greater.
This can be seen in the speed and cost savings that a good, specialized AI assistant provides, for example, to an architect when designing the plans for a large building, to an engineer calculating the strength of materials for a bridge, or to a social researcher when searching for precise references from other authors, and so on. The work of days and several people is replaced by a few personalized instructions lasting half an hour. AI is a technology, and those who control its productive and self-generating processes control an “extraordinary productive force” that allows them to appropriate social value.
Similarly, there are conditions of production that capitalism continually appropriates for free, without this altering its nature or giving rise to “serfs” or technological feudalism. This is the case with associated labor, cooperation, which Marx calls “social productive force,” subsumed into production at no cost to the entrepreneur (Capital, Vol. I, p. 400). The sum of several separate jobs always yields far less than associated and combined labor. But the owner of the company does not pay for the productivity of this “global productive body,” which increases the amount of unpaid labor that he appropriates. The same can be said of domestic work, which shapes people’s labor capacity and increases the surplus value extracted, etc. Something similar happens with the expropriation of the personal data of digital consumers. Taken individually, they are useless. Although they are a type of small-scale work, their enormous value lies in their articulated volume, because this allows Big Tech’s computing centers to associate data, find regularities, establish algorithms and parameters for territorial development, influence them, etc. And this “global productive body,” this “combined workforce” resulting from the association of individual data (work), plus its directed processing, is the added value introduced by technological monopolies and the key to their extraordinary profits.
Taken together, we are neither facing a passing accident that liberal globalism will remedy with a new US election, nor the rise of predatory capitalist accumulation; and certainly not the “death” of capitalism (Varoufakis, 2024). What we are witnessing is a modification of the mode of accumulation within capitalism, of the state-market relationship, of the expansion of forms of exploitation, and of the distribution of legitimate monopolies.
Whether this will be the defining characteristic of the new cycle of global economic expansion depends on the consolidation of a robust productive base that guarantees sustained growth over the coming decades and, consequently, on a new belief system that unites today’s fractured societies. If this does not occur, all of this will become part of the new foundations devoured by the maelstrom of systemic crises, which will last even longer.
Europe knows this, and that’s why it has tried some protectionist initiatives against the overwhelming Chinese industry, and has allocated resources to bolster self-sufficiency in certain priority economic areas (defense, renewable energy, semiconductors, AI). But this is still a half-hearted, forced statism. Its liberal elites still have a mindset anchored in the defunct globalism. The capacity to withstand the daily humiliations thrown at them by President Trump speaks to the pathetic stupor of elegant technocrats who, at this point, already smell of mothballs.
And in Latin America, the situation tends to be even more dramatic due to the enormous social debts the continent carries. The conservative rulers who currently tend to predominate, in a display of historical cruelty toward their people, cling to the rotting corpse of a marginal neoliberalism that can only offer them the prospect of turning their countries into irrelevant vassals supplying raw materials, with no option whatsoever for sovereignty or industrialization.
(Ant/agon via Alvaro Garcia Linera)
