From Financialization to (Re)Production? by Ben Fine

Abstract

This seminar reviews different understandings of the nature and effects of financialization, suggesting that finance has expanded disproportionately with correspondingly negative effects on the level and efficacy of capital accumulation and with dysfunction in economic and social reproduction as finance has incorporated a wider range of economic and social activities.

This is important in understanding the relatively slow growth since the end of the post-war boom and the causes and course of the current global crisis and recession. The close relationship between financialization and neo-liberalism is emphasized, the latter having gone through a shock phase (of state intervension to promote private capital in general and finance in particular) followed by more intervention both to sustain financialization and respond to its dysfunctions.

Consequently, it is important to distinguish between the often inconsistent and shifting incidence of scholarship, ideology and policy in practice that characterizes neoliberalism. And alternative strategies will need to challenge but to get beyond financialization to the material conditions of production and reproduction themselves, not least because financialization is both necessary for, and parasitical upon, the accumulation of capital as will be addressed analytically.

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Chair Person:  Susan Newman