The problem with the struggle for rights today is that citizens’ rights and citizenship tend to be associated with the constitution and with the state, which would be fine if the national state remained the major institution in society.
But with growing financialization and the increasing power of transnational capital in an ever more integrated world market, demands should be for rights against financial capital rather than vis-à-vis the national state, because the territorial state is losing its territorial and temporal sovereignty — just think of TTIP, TPP, and, worse yet, TiSA.
When I was writing my book The Future of the Capitalist State, I was thinking in ideal-typical terms and aiming to identify what kind of economic policy and welfare regime would work for a knowledge-based economy. The latter notion still provided the hegemonic economic imaginary at the time. What we actually got was not the knowledge-based economy but finance-dominated accumulation.