I just stumbled upon an interesting Architectural Review article from last year called: Architecture is now a tool of capital, complicit in a purpose antithetical to its social mission. The author is Reinier de Graaf, who is an architect and partner at the firm OMA.
The focus of the article is on inequality; capitalism vs. socialism; Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (which is now on my reading list); and on how Modernism lost its social mission and got repurposed as a tool that just serves capitalist interests. It went from an ideology to simply an architectural style.
Here is an excerpt:
“Once discovered as a form of capital, there is no choice for buildings but to operate according to the logic of capital. In that sense there may ultimately be no such thing as Modern or Postmodern architecture, but simply architecture before and after its annexation by capital.”