Criminal capitalism: a new socio-economic formation

Abstract

Criminal capitalism, fuelled mainly by drug trafficking, creates social consensus and determines a social order that plays a not-always marginal role in the fragmented social reality of the contemporary capitalist mode of production. Drug trafficking not only feeds the sophisticated machine of corruption that reaches the highest institutional spheres, but, in some regions, also represents the only form of subsistence economy. The growing importance of criminal capitalism is in large part the consequence of financial liberalisation, which has facilitated the mechanisms for the laundering and illegal investment of accumulated wealth.