Financial rentier capitalism

Abstract

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, there have been three basic social classes: the capitalist class or bourgeoisie, the working class, and the professional class or technobureaucracy. In the first part of the century, high-level technobureaucrats replaced the business entrepreneurs in the management of the corporations; from the 1980s, rentier capitalists, most of them heirs, replaced the entrepreneurs in the ownership of such corporations. To manage their wealth, a special class of professionals emerged, the financiers, young and bright people who graduated from the best universities, who also took on the role of ideologues, or organic intellectuals, and adopted the neoliberal ideology and either the neoclassical or the Austrian economics as their supposedly scientific justification.