January 18, 2024 - February 29, 2024

4th series of Crash Course Economics

Crash Course is a series of online seminars on the urgency of changing our global economy organised by TNI and SOMO.

Organiser: TNI and SOMO

Crash Course on Rentier and Monopoly Capitalism

For every product you buy on Amazon, 40% of the price goes directly to Amazon. Corporate titans dominate the market, leveraging their control over technology and resources to outpace smaller rivals and impact value chains, labor, and economies. Why compete, when you can own the market? Why produce when you can lay back and collect monopoly rents?

We delve into the rise of so-called Rentier Capitalism and the dynamics of monopoly power fueling it. We take a step back and see how we got here; what we can learn from the rise and fall of an earlier era of monopoly capitalism. We will uncover the current key institutional frameworks and actors. We investigate prominent investment funds as well as Big Tech and Big Pharma.

We all know how that game of monopoly ends: winner takes all. But in the real world, there is hope: the hegemony of this system is being challenged. New battle lines are being drawn as the interests of different sectors of capital diverge. Consumers and workers are fighting back.

We face multiple existential crises and need to re-evaluate our existing economic systems. If these corporate behemoths continue to hold sway, they are potentially jeopardising the future of our planet. So, we will ask: how to bring them down? How to break them up?

Find out more about the courses and sign up here!