At a moment of planetary volatility, widening inequality, and democratic unravelling, the need for new economic thinking and unexpected collaborations has become acute. The Global Consortium for Re-thinking Capitalism (GCRC) responds to this need by offering a platform for examining how capitalism’s financial infrastructures shape ecological futures, emergent forms of politics, and the everyday experience of economic life.

We approach finance as neither fixed nor inevitable. It is a system that generates harm as well as possibility, a force that permeates the crises of our time, and one that can be reconfigured. By engaging critically with the tools, logics, and visions that shape finance, the consortium explores how they might be redirected towards more equitable, just, and democratic futures. We ask how financial innovation can be opened to collective use rather than private extraction, and how its architectures might be reimagined for public value.

GCRC brings together institutions across five continents: the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at the New School for Social Research in New York City, the Instituto Interdisciplinario de Estudios de Género in the University of Buenos Aires, the Capitalism Studies Network at the Australian National University in Canberra, and the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Our founding meeting was held in Hamburg in June 2025, with participants from The Financial Times, the Finance Innovation Lab, Common Wealth, Finance Watch Deutschland, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Copenhagen Business School, the National University of Singapore, Goldsmiths University of London, Leiden University, the University of California Santa Cruz, the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, and the University of Vienna.

The consortium’s aim is to reshape how citizens, governments, and institutions think through and about finance, expanding the space for democratic alternatives to the extractive financial systems that dominate the present.

GCRC is led by the UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies and was made possible through the generous support of The New Institute.

Re-imagining finance creative team: Till Wittwer, Giulia Dal Maso, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou.

Brand & Web Design: Maciej Kodzis

With special thanks to Melinda Cooper, Kimberly Chong, Jamie Pietruska, and Jamieson Webster, whose contributions as Futures of Capitalism Fellows (2024/25) helped shape the conversations that inform this project.