What do you think?
Rate this book
The Violence of Financial Capitalism
An innovative analysis of financialization in the context of postfordist cognitive capitalism.
This first English-language edition of Christian Marazzi's most recent book, The Violence of Financial Capitalism makes a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis available to a new audience of readers. Marazzi, a leading figure in the European postfordist movement, first takes a broad look at the nature of the crisis and then provides the theoretical tools necessary to comprehend capitalism today, offering an innovative analysis of financialization in the context of postfordist cognitive capitalism. He argues that the processes of financialization are not simply irregularities between the traditional categories of wages, rent, and profit, but rather a new type of accumulation adapted to the processes of social and cognitive production today. The financial crisis, he contends, is a fundamental component of contemporary accumulation and not a classic lack of economic growth. Marazzi shows that individual debt and the management of financial markets are actually techniques for governing the transformations of immaterial labor, general intellect, and social cooperation. The financial crisis has radically undermined the very concept of unilateral and multilateral economico-political hegemony, and Marazzi discusses efforts toward a new geo-monetary order that have emerged around the globe in response. Offering a radically new understanding of the current stage of international economics as well as crucial post-Marxist guidance for confronting capitalism in its newest form, The Violence of Financial Capitalism is a valuable addition to the contemporary arsenal of postfordist thought. This expanded edition includes a new appendix for comprehending the esoteric neolanguage of financial capitalism—a glossary of “Words in Crisis,” from “AAA” to “toxic asset.”
This first English-language edition of Christian Marazzi's most recent book, The Violence of Financial Capitalism makes a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis available to a new audience of readers. Marazzi, a leading figure in the European postfordist movement, first takes a broad look at the nature of the crisis and then provides the theoretical tools necessary to comprehend capitalism today, offering an innovative analysis of financialization in the context of postfordist cognitive capitalism. He argues that the processes of financialization are not simply irregularities between the traditional categories of wages, rent, and profit, but rather a new type of accumulation adapted to the processes of social and cognitive production today. The financial crisis, he contends, is a fundamental component of contemporary accumulation and not a classic lack of economic growth. Marazzi shows that individual debt and the management of financial markets are actually techniques for governing the transformations of immaterial labor, general intellect, and social cooperation. The financial crisis has radically undermined the very concept of unilateral and multilateral economico-political hegemony, and Marazzi discusses efforts toward a new geo-monetary order that have emerged around the globe in response. Offering a radically new understanding of the current stage of international economics as well as crucial post-Marxist guidance for confronting capitalism in its newest form, The Violence of Financial Capitalism is a valuable addition to the contemporary arsenal of postfordist thought. This expanded edition includes a new appendix for comprehending the esoteric neolanguage of financial capitalism—a glossary of “Words in Crisis,” from “AAA” to “toxic asset.”
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
20 people are currently reading
566 people want to read
About the author
Christian Marazzi
28 books21 followersChristian Marazzi was born in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1951. He obtained a degree in Political Science at the University of Padova, a master's degree at the London School of Economics and a doctoral degree in Economics at the City University of London. He has taught at the University of Padova, the State University of New York, and at the University of Lausanne. He is currently Director of Socio-Economic Research at the Scuola Universitaria della Svizzera Italiana.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
June 19, 2012
The most interesting aspects of Marazzi's economic analysis of the debt crisis (to me) are his noting that many companies now rely on free labor to increase product value (think of the public being asked to beta test software) and his describing the various private-sector bailouts as a "communism of capital," "where the state, i.e. the collectivity, caters to the needs of 'financial soviets,' i.e. banks, insurance companies, investment funds, and hedge funds, imposing a market dictatorship over society"--and *this* coming from a leftist who doesn't like what he sees!
January 9, 2017
Our struggle is not just against financial capitalism but against authors who do not seek to be understood.
It has been a long time since I've read a book this dense. A long time. Maybe grad school, maybe in the years after grad school when I tried to re-read or finish lots of books that I felt I hadn't spent enough time with in school. Either way, I don't think my brain is trained for this stuff any more. And, well, I never took economics. So that's a problem.
Marazzi is writing from the midst of the crisis (2010) and so much of what he says in the majority of the book is directed at things happening in 2010, or things that happened between 2007 and 2010. One needs an accompanying history of the financial crisis to fully understand what he's talking about (as he certainly feels no need to elaborate). I paid as much attention as I could at the time, but it's been years now and I am not able to remember the minutiae of the economic maneuvering that he is critiquing. Without some kind of explanation by the author, one needs a compendium or one needs to spend hours on the internet. And, frankly, I have better things to do with my time.
But in addition to this book's existence in a moment in time that we've mostly collectively forgotten, we have another problem: it's mostly written for (Italian?) post-Marxist economists. This is a jargon-heavy book where the author feels zero compulsion to explain what he means (until the Afterword). He thinks you should know. And, I mean, shouldn't we?
So it's a real struggle reading this. There's the odd clear insight, but so much of it is buried in two layers: one is the layer of time and distance from these events, the other is the layer of academic and financial jargon that smothers his argument. He is not a clear writer (in English) and the jargon just makes this worse.
Fortunately, the Afterword feels like it was written for the general public. Though still written in the midst of the crisis, it's much more direct in its writing and less reliant on jargon (and, when jargon is used, he sometimes deigns to explain it!).
But without a history of the crisis, it's hard for me to evaluate the points I don't fully comprehend (and/or the points made about events and policy decisions that I do not remember). And that's a problem for a book like this. It's worth mentioning that, in the glossary (which is barely referenced in the book, by the way...), Marazzi writes
"Finance has its own language and, moreover, a rather esoteric neolanguage. Many Anglo-Saxon terms are unstranslatable into other languages and, above all, designate complex processes not always accessible to the uninitiated, which is to say, to almost everyone. It is thus under the shelter of this linguistic opacity that finance prospers, a situation which raises the question of democracy, that is, the possibility of publicly debating strategies, procedures, and decisions concerning the lives of all citizens."
Marazzi attacks others for being unclear so that we cannot criticize them and yet that is this book (and so many other academic books on economics and/or Marxism). Ugh.
It has been a long time since I've read a book this dense. A long time. Maybe grad school, maybe in the years after grad school when I tried to re-read or finish lots of books that I felt I hadn't spent enough time with in school. Either way, I don't think my brain is trained for this stuff any more. And, well, I never took economics. So that's a problem.
Marazzi is writing from the midst of the crisis (2010) and so much of what he says in the majority of the book is directed at things happening in 2010, or things that happened between 2007 and 2010. One needs an accompanying history of the financial crisis to fully understand what he's talking about (as he certainly feels no need to elaborate). I paid as much attention as I could at the time, but it's been years now and I am not able to remember the minutiae of the economic maneuvering that he is critiquing. Without some kind of explanation by the author, one needs a compendium or one needs to spend hours on the internet. And, frankly, I have better things to do with my time.
But in addition to this book's existence in a moment in time that we've mostly collectively forgotten, we have another problem: it's mostly written for (Italian?) post-Marxist economists. This is a jargon-heavy book where the author feels zero compulsion to explain what he means (until the Afterword). He thinks you should know. And, I mean, shouldn't we?
So it's a real struggle reading this. There's the odd clear insight, but so much of it is buried in two layers: one is the layer of time and distance from these events, the other is the layer of academic and financial jargon that smothers his argument. He is not a clear writer (in English) and the jargon just makes this worse.
Fortunately, the Afterword feels like it was written for the general public. Though still written in the midst of the crisis, it's much more direct in its writing and less reliant on jargon (and, when jargon is used, he sometimes deigns to explain it!).
But without a history of the crisis, it's hard for me to evaluate the points I don't fully comprehend (and/or the points made about events and policy decisions that I do not remember). And that's a problem for a book like this. It's worth mentioning that, in the glossary (which is barely referenced in the book, by the way...), Marazzi writes
"Finance has its own language and, moreover, a rather esoteric neolanguage. Many Anglo-Saxon terms are unstranslatable into other languages and, above all, designate complex processes not always accessible to the uninitiated, which is to say, to almost everyone. It is thus under the shelter of this linguistic opacity that finance prospers, a situation which raises the question of democracy, that is, the possibility of publicly debating strategies, procedures, and decisions concerning the lives of all citizens."
Marazzi attacks others for being unclear so that we cannot criticize them and yet that is this book (and so many other academic books on economics and/or Marxism). Ugh.
August 21, 2025
“capital (as the totality of "linguistic machines") dispersed in society and variable capital (as the totality of sociality, emotions, desires, relational capacity, and... "free labor") deter-ritorialized, despatialized, dispersed in the sphere of reproduction, consumption, forms of life and individual and collective imagination. New constant capital, differently from the system of (physical) machines typical of the Fordist age, is constituted, beyond information and communication technology (ICT), by a totality of immaterial organizational systems that suck surplus-value by pursuing citizen-laborers in every moment of their lives”
“It could be said that the forms of life undermining the social body are equivalent to land in Ricardo's theory of rent. Only that, unlike Ricardo's rent (absolute and differential), today's rent is subsumable to profit precisely in virtue of financialization processes themselves. Financialization, with its specific logic particularly the autonomization of the production of money via money through directly productive processes-is the other face of the externalization of value production typical of biocapitalism.
Financialization not only contributes to the production of the effective demand necessary for the realization of the product of surplus-value (i.e., it does not only create the mass of rent and consumption without which the growth of the GDP would be modest and stagnant) but also fundamentally determines continuous innovations and continuous productive leaps in biocapitalism, imposing on all companies— quoted or not-and on the whole of society its hyper-productive logics centered around the primacy of shareholder value. These productive leaps determined by financialization are systematically carried out through the "creative destruction" of
capital, through successive extensions of valorization processes at the very heart of society with evermore sophisticated crowdsourcing models. Through closer and evermore frequent crises, access to social wealth, after having been structurally stimulated, is then destroyed again and again.
Starting with the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s, economic bubbles should thus be interpreted as moments of crisis within a long-term process of
"capitalist colonization" of the sphere of circulation.
This is a global process, that is it explains globalization as a process of subsuming growing quotas of global and local socio-economic peripheries in accordance with the logic of financial (bio)capitalism. The passage from imperialism to empire, i.e., from a relationship of dependence between development and underdevelopment where the economies of the South essentially functioned as external market outlets in addition to being the sources of downmarket raw material, to imperial globalization where the dichotomy between inside and outside breaks down, is also to be included in the capitalist logic of the externalization of value production processes.
Financialization represents the adequate and perverse modality of accumulation in this new capitalism.”
“after the '97-299 crisis. This specificity (in his day, Alan Greenspan spoke of "conundrum"), already pointed out by Michel Aglietta and Laurent Berrebi (Désordres dans le capitalisme mondial, Odile Jacob, Paris, 2007), refers to the consequences of a liquidity influx from developing countries and from the coun tries producing and exporting oil to the American bond market—particularly Treasury bonds and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds. The massive and continued liquidity influx from developing countries in fact reduces long-term interest rates on bonds, such as T-bills. In fact, when bonds (providing fixed income) increase in value because they are in high demand on the market, corresponding interest rates decrease proportionately in order to be able to ensure the same earning.
The reduction of long-term interest rates occurs despite the Fed's repeated attempts between 2004 and 2007 to stop the increase in the amount of credits with the increase in direct, short-term interest rates (that jump from 1% to 5.25%). "It is this very special situation of an inverted curve where long-term interest rates have become less than short-term rates-an atypical situation for such a long period that made it so that the cost of credit remained very low for quite some time in the US, despite an evermore restrictive monetary policy" (Aglietta, La crise, p. 39). Able to borrow currency in bulk from money markets, banks have the means to give out loans with an ever higher…The crisis of governance of the American monetary authorities is thus explained as the incapacity to manage the effects of liquidity influx from the rest of the world, especially from developing countries. In fact, the post-crisis Asian globalization obscures the increase in risk of crisis internal to the transaction cycle within developed countries because the reduction of premiums on bond risks (long-term bonds) increasingly exposes the financial sector to the val-orization of all patrimonial assets. Once again, in this process, it is the temporal dimension that is central in the analysis of the crisis. The signs of a real estate crisis were already manifesting themselves in 2004, so much that the Fed began its race to increase interest rates. But the influx of foreign liquidity annulled this monetary policy so that the bubble was swelling undeterred until August 2007. And not just that: already in the middle of 2006, real estate prices halted their rise to then drop towards the end of the same year. But the bubble popped in August 2007 when the rating agencies finally decided to declassify (now toxic) assets issued in credit; which is to say, a Year after the inversion of the transaction cycle (co confirm this reconstruction of the post-Asian crisis,
“In other words, the crisis of monetary governance reveals a gap between the economic and financial-monetary cycles, in the sense that the former develops in a shorter time than the latter. In the cycle of the real economy, like in all business cycles, the crisis begins at the moment when the inflationary increase in prices (for example, of real estate) provokes a falling increase of demand. Demand grows, but grows ever more slowly because actualizing the flow of future incomes no longer justifies the "irra-tional" increase in prices on goods on which the bubble is concentrated.
“The overtrading and super-speculation preceding the inversion of the transaction cycle are nothing other than the creation of earnings extrinsic to the production of goods and services, of a demand additional to the one created directly inside the economic circuit. Overtrading favors the spending of a virtual income still waiting to be realized. Under this profile, the multiplication of securitized assets has certainly been at the basis of overtrading, to the extent that it allowed for the creation of virtual incomes on the basis of the presupposition, later revealed as entirely unrealistic, of their future realization. But when over-trading topples over into its opposite, that is, when it goes from the phase of casy money characterized by a credit crunch, this additional demand collapses, it vaporizes very quickly, and the economic system enters into recession. Companies in every sector are no longer able to sell, warehouses accumulate more and more supplies, and domestic economies begin to experience the reduction of their income due to layoffs and/or the difficulty maintaining consumption at the same levels as those of the preceding phase of the cycle. This is the moment when the crisis is revealed as the crisis of overproduction on a wide scale.
This is also the moment when, in order to reestablish an operative balance between demand and supply, one very often turns to scrapping of unsold surplus or, in any case, to its devalorization. The violence of crises consists in this destruction of capital”
“The idea of a super Bretton Woods would be to cancel the obligation to convert into a capital account. This convertibility has, since the 1980s, represented the precondition of international market liberalization and the accumulation of global imbalances that repeatedly produced the financial crises of the last 30 years. Today even the IME recognizes that this freedom of movement of capital significantly contributed to the destabilization of the system of commercial exchanges and international financial flows. However, the removal of the convertibility obligation into a capital account from the statutes of a hypothetical new IMF-that has as its fundamental objective the reestablishment of the economic sovereignty of nations and the symmetry of exchange relations guaranteed by a supranational monetary system-would have the inevitable consequence of disabling the apparatus that ensured, although with an impressive accumulation of contradictions and financial drifts, the development and affirmation of biocapitalism.
First off, the US would no longer be able to profit from the massive liquidity influx from the emerging countries which, as we've seen, allowed American capital to make consumption explode through the debt of American families. However one evaluates the hypothesis of a new Bretton Woods, it is certain that a reform of it in this sense would have spectacular effects on a model of society that, having dismantled the Welfare State, turned consumption and private indebtedness into the motor of its modus operandi.
"The breaking point between the partisans of the old disorder and the partisans of a real reconstruction of the financial monetary system will be concentrated on two questions: the control of capital and of the forms of protectionism that allow one to avoid importing the depressive effects of the policies of a few countries"
“In the second place, this New Deal action of the new American democratic administration seems to be able to conjoin two levels, two plans that usually conflict with each other. On one hand, there is local inter-vention, with help oriented to a determined level of demand aggregated by intervening precisely where the crisis destroys incomes, job positions, and existences.
On the other hand, this action has a global dimension to the extent that it aims at restoring economic value to financial instruments that, by definition, are created to be immersed in the global financial circulation, i.e., in portfolios of institutions and investment funds of every kind. One of the worst risks of this crisis is, in fact, the inward closure of nation-states, the race to competitive devaluations in order to regain bits of market by taking them away from others with protectionist actions. This is usually how wars break out.
Finally, this action has the absolutely crucial dimension of time, the fact being that the help to families in the form of the guarantee to a social rent is a veritable investment in the future. As we said, the interventions from the base not only allow one to avoid instantaneous and massive increases in the public debt, but these interventions are carried out on a long temporal horizon, a horizon within which the qualitative development of the new generation can be better ensured with investments in early childhood, in school and in entering the job market.
Taking time means giving each other the means of inventing ones own future, freeing it from the anxiety of immediate profit. It means caring for oneselt and the environment in which one lives, it means growing up in a socially responsible way. To overcome this crisis without questioning the meaning of consumption, production, and investment is to reproduce the preconditions of financial capitalism”
“Originally, the euro was conceived and created to protect Europe trom the dollar and from American monetary policy. European economic and social unification wasn't possible because the Constitution was strongly centered around the unification of capital markets. It didn't adopt wages and fiscal measures between member states that would have consolidated welfare policies suitable to new processes of production and redistribution of wealth. Such coordination may have been possible with the introduction of a
"european monetary snake" inside which each member state could have managed its own currency according to its own possibilities and needs. The euro, de facto a nationless currency, instead has worked as a vehicle for the financialization of the economy and public expenditure. It didn't reduce commercial imbalances in the eurozone, rather worsened them.”
“According to our analysis, beginning in the '80s, the expansion of finance was the other face of extending the process of extracting and appropriating value over the entire society. Financialization and the cyclic crises that characterize it should in fact be interpreted in the light of the biopolitics of labor, i.e., the post-Fordist productive strategies in which one's entire life is put to work, when knowledges and cognitive competences of the workforce (the general intellect that Marx spoke about in his Grundrisse) assume the role played by machines in the Fordist period, incarnated in living productive bodies of cooperation, in which language, affects, emotions and relational and communication capacities all contributed to the creation of value.
In these processes externalizing the production of value, the consumer is often coproducer of goods and services”
“Contemporary financial crises are moments of the redefinition of capitalist control over common goods, they produce poverty as "common poverty," moments of deconstruction-without-reconstruction of social economies based on horizontal cooperative relationships. In the crisis, the process of inclusion of common goods is overturned into a process of exclu-sion, which means that the access to common goods is downwardly redefined, transforming debt relations into control over forms of life, into austerity and poverty. This is the moment when wage constriction is violently manifested, exactly like the 16th century enclosures where access to land as a common good was repressed with the privatization of the land and the putting wages to the proletariat.”
“It could be said that the forms of life undermining the social body are equivalent to land in Ricardo's theory of rent. Only that, unlike Ricardo's rent (absolute and differential), today's rent is subsumable to profit precisely in virtue of financialization processes themselves. Financialization, with its specific logic particularly the autonomization of the production of money via money through directly productive processes-is the other face of the externalization of value production typical of biocapitalism.
Financialization not only contributes to the production of the effective demand necessary for the realization of the product of surplus-value (i.e., it does not only create the mass of rent and consumption without which the growth of the GDP would be modest and stagnant) but also fundamentally determines continuous innovations and continuous productive leaps in biocapitalism, imposing on all companies— quoted or not-and on the whole of society its hyper-productive logics centered around the primacy of shareholder value. These productive leaps determined by financialization are systematically carried out through the "creative destruction" of
capital, through successive extensions of valorization processes at the very heart of society with evermore sophisticated crowdsourcing models. Through closer and evermore frequent crises, access to social wealth, after having been structurally stimulated, is then destroyed again and again.
Starting with the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s, economic bubbles should thus be interpreted as moments of crisis within a long-term process of
"capitalist colonization" of the sphere of circulation.
This is a global process, that is it explains globalization as a process of subsuming growing quotas of global and local socio-economic peripheries in accordance with the logic of financial (bio)capitalism. The passage from imperialism to empire, i.e., from a relationship of dependence between development and underdevelopment where the economies of the South essentially functioned as external market outlets in addition to being the sources of downmarket raw material, to imperial globalization where the dichotomy between inside and outside breaks down, is also to be included in the capitalist logic of the externalization of value production processes.
Financialization represents the adequate and perverse modality of accumulation in this new capitalism.”
“after the '97-299 crisis. This specificity (in his day, Alan Greenspan spoke of "conundrum"), already pointed out by Michel Aglietta and Laurent Berrebi (Désordres dans le capitalisme mondial, Odile Jacob, Paris, 2007), refers to the consequences of a liquidity influx from developing countries and from the coun tries producing and exporting oil to the American bond market—particularly Treasury bonds and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds. The massive and continued liquidity influx from developing countries in fact reduces long-term interest rates on bonds, such as T-bills. In fact, when bonds (providing fixed income) increase in value because they are in high demand on the market, corresponding interest rates decrease proportionately in order to be able to ensure the same earning.
The reduction of long-term interest rates occurs despite the Fed's repeated attempts between 2004 and 2007 to stop the increase in the amount of credits with the increase in direct, short-term interest rates (that jump from 1% to 5.25%). "It is this very special situation of an inverted curve where long-term interest rates have become less than short-term rates-an atypical situation for such a long period that made it so that the cost of credit remained very low for quite some time in the US, despite an evermore restrictive monetary policy" (Aglietta, La crise, p. 39). Able to borrow currency in bulk from money markets, banks have the means to give out loans with an ever higher…The crisis of governance of the American monetary authorities is thus explained as the incapacity to manage the effects of liquidity influx from the rest of the world, especially from developing countries. In fact, the post-crisis Asian globalization obscures the increase in risk of crisis internal to the transaction cycle within developed countries because the reduction of premiums on bond risks (long-term bonds) increasingly exposes the financial sector to the val-orization of all patrimonial assets. Once again, in this process, it is the temporal dimension that is central in the analysis of the crisis. The signs of a real estate crisis were already manifesting themselves in 2004, so much that the Fed began its race to increase interest rates. But the influx of foreign liquidity annulled this monetary policy so that the bubble was swelling undeterred until August 2007. And not just that: already in the middle of 2006, real estate prices halted their rise to then drop towards the end of the same year. But the bubble popped in August 2007 when the rating agencies finally decided to declassify (now toxic) assets issued in credit; which is to say, a Year after the inversion of the transaction cycle (co confirm this reconstruction of the post-Asian crisis,
“In other words, the crisis of monetary governance reveals a gap between the economic and financial-monetary cycles, in the sense that the former develops in a shorter time than the latter. In the cycle of the real economy, like in all business cycles, the crisis begins at the moment when the inflationary increase in prices (for example, of real estate) provokes a falling increase of demand. Demand grows, but grows ever more slowly because actualizing the flow of future incomes no longer justifies the "irra-tional" increase in prices on goods on which the bubble is concentrated.
“The overtrading and super-speculation preceding the inversion of the transaction cycle are nothing other than the creation of earnings extrinsic to the production of goods and services, of a demand additional to the one created directly inside the economic circuit. Overtrading favors the spending of a virtual income still waiting to be realized. Under this profile, the multiplication of securitized assets has certainly been at the basis of overtrading, to the extent that it allowed for the creation of virtual incomes on the basis of the presupposition, later revealed as entirely unrealistic, of their future realization. But when over-trading topples over into its opposite, that is, when it goes from the phase of casy money characterized by a credit crunch, this additional demand collapses, it vaporizes very quickly, and the economic system enters into recession. Companies in every sector are no longer able to sell, warehouses accumulate more and more supplies, and domestic economies begin to experience the reduction of their income due to layoffs and/or the difficulty maintaining consumption at the same levels as those of the preceding phase of the cycle. This is the moment when the crisis is revealed as the crisis of overproduction on a wide scale.
This is also the moment when, in order to reestablish an operative balance between demand and supply, one very often turns to scrapping of unsold surplus or, in any case, to its devalorization. The violence of crises consists in this destruction of capital”
“The idea of a super Bretton Woods would be to cancel the obligation to convert into a capital account. This convertibility has, since the 1980s, represented the precondition of international market liberalization and the accumulation of global imbalances that repeatedly produced the financial crises of the last 30 years. Today even the IME recognizes that this freedom of movement of capital significantly contributed to the destabilization of the system of commercial exchanges and international financial flows. However, the removal of the convertibility obligation into a capital account from the statutes of a hypothetical new IMF-that has as its fundamental objective the reestablishment of the economic sovereignty of nations and the symmetry of exchange relations guaranteed by a supranational monetary system-would have the inevitable consequence of disabling the apparatus that ensured, although with an impressive accumulation of contradictions and financial drifts, the development and affirmation of biocapitalism.
First off, the US would no longer be able to profit from the massive liquidity influx from the emerging countries which, as we've seen, allowed American capital to make consumption explode through the debt of American families. However one evaluates the hypothesis of a new Bretton Woods, it is certain that a reform of it in this sense would have spectacular effects on a model of society that, having dismantled the Welfare State, turned consumption and private indebtedness into the motor of its modus operandi.
"The breaking point between the partisans of the old disorder and the partisans of a real reconstruction of the financial monetary system will be concentrated on two questions: the control of capital and of the forms of protectionism that allow one to avoid importing the depressive effects of the policies of a few countries"
“In the second place, this New Deal action of the new American democratic administration seems to be able to conjoin two levels, two plans that usually conflict with each other. On one hand, there is local inter-vention, with help oriented to a determined level of demand aggregated by intervening precisely where the crisis destroys incomes, job positions, and existences.
On the other hand, this action has a global dimension to the extent that it aims at restoring economic value to financial instruments that, by definition, are created to be immersed in the global financial circulation, i.e., in portfolios of institutions and investment funds of every kind. One of the worst risks of this crisis is, in fact, the inward closure of nation-states, the race to competitive devaluations in order to regain bits of market by taking them away from others with protectionist actions. This is usually how wars break out.
Finally, this action has the absolutely crucial dimension of time, the fact being that the help to families in the form of the guarantee to a social rent is a veritable investment in the future. As we said, the interventions from the base not only allow one to avoid instantaneous and massive increases in the public debt, but these interventions are carried out on a long temporal horizon, a horizon within which the qualitative development of the new generation can be better ensured with investments in early childhood, in school and in entering the job market.
Taking time means giving each other the means of inventing ones own future, freeing it from the anxiety of immediate profit. It means caring for oneselt and the environment in which one lives, it means growing up in a socially responsible way. To overcome this crisis without questioning the meaning of consumption, production, and investment is to reproduce the preconditions of financial capitalism”
“Originally, the euro was conceived and created to protect Europe trom the dollar and from American monetary policy. European economic and social unification wasn't possible because the Constitution was strongly centered around the unification of capital markets. It didn't adopt wages and fiscal measures between member states that would have consolidated welfare policies suitable to new processes of production and redistribution of wealth. Such coordination may have been possible with the introduction of a
"european monetary snake" inside which each member state could have managed its own currency according to its own possibilities and needs. The euro, de facto a nationless currency, instead has worked as a vehicle for the financialization of the economy and public expenditure. It didn't reduce commercial imbalances in the eurozone, rather worsened them.”
“According to our analysis, beginning in the '80s, the expansion of finance was the other face of extending the process of extracting and appropriating value over the entire society. Financialization and the cyclic crises that characterize it should in fact be interpreted in the light of the biopolitics of labor, i.e., the post-Fordist productive strategies in which one's entire life is put to work, when knowledges and cognitive competences of the workforce (the general intellect that Marx spoke about in his Grundrisse) assume the role played by machines in the Fordist period, incarnated in living productive bodies of cooperation, in which language, affects, emotions and relational and communication capacities all contributed to the creation of value.
In these processes externalizing the production of value, the consumer is often coproducer of goods and services”
“Contemporary financial crises are moments of the redefinition of capitalist control over common goods, they produce poverty as "common poverty," moments of deconstruction-without-reconstruction of social economies based on horizontal cooperative relationships. In the crisis, the process of inclusion of common goods is overturned into a process of exclu-sion, which means that the access to common goods is downwardly redefined, transforming debt relations into control over forms of life, into austerity and poverty. This is the moment when wage constriction is violently manifested, exactly like the 16th century enclosures where access to land as a common good was repressed with the privatization of the land and the putting wages to the proletariat.”
November 22, 2023
Decent. Some jargon was over my head but a pretty good description of the scam of modern finance.
February 15, 2010
The premise was one that I agreed with, but I found, as I do with many economics/business books, that the language was a bit obscuring. Still, with citations from Stiglitz, Krugman, and a slew of other American and non-american economists, this essay focusing on the economic crisis proved not only tolerable, but even interesting.
I liked that there wasn't just an assumption that our current economic system was productive, and Marazzi takes us back through a century of changing capitalism to lead us to our current finance based position. The absurdity of what was happening within the financial institutions before the downturn/plummet is one we're all familiar with, but Marazzi's insistence that it's wasn't an anomaly, but instead a natural consequence of a failing system; a systemic failure, was well supported and a welcome change from seemingly eternal optimism of mainstream economists.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, I think it would be a good supplement to other books on the subject. Thank you semiotext(e) for another fascinating, somewhat radical viewpoint. We need more of them.
I liked that there wasn't just an assumption that our current economic system was productive, and Marazzi takes us back through a century of changing capitalism to lead us to our current finance based position. The absurdity of what was happening within the financial institutions before the downturn/plummet is one we're all familiar with, but Marazzi's insistence that it's wasn't an anomaly, but instead a natural consequence of a failing system; a systemic failure, was well supported and a welcome change from seemingly eternal optimism of mainstream economists.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, I think it would be a good supplement to other books on the subject. Thank you semiotext(e) for another fascinating, somewhat radical viewpoint. We need more of them.
December 4, 2013
There's one point to take from this book. There is no such thing as a "real" and "financial" economy. The so called real economy has been just a big part in the last forty years of financialization. At some point automobile companies like General Motors started getting larger profits from their consumer loans, ie. to customers who couldn't afford their cars and had to take a loan, rather than from actually producing cars. The so called real economy was speculating in "futures", that is, future values just as much as the so called virtual economy. Any way, the economy has always been "virtual" from time to time (and I think David Graeber is better at explaining this in his book 'Debt').
The glossary at the back of the book was a nice intention: to demystify the language of finance capital. A language that gains it's power from obscuring and mystifying what matters. Unfortunately, I don't think Marazzi live up to his intention in the rest of the book. I'm sure it would have been much longer, had he tried to fold out more of the terminology underway, but I at least would have understood more.
In other words, not recommended as an introductory book to finance capital.
The glossary at the back of the book was a nice intention: to demystify the language of finance capital. A language that gains it's power from obscuring and mystifying what matters. Unfortunately, I don't think Marazzi live up to his intention in the rest of the book. I'm sure it would have been much longer, had he tried to fold out more of the terminology underway, but I at least would have understood more.
In other words, not recommended as an introductory book to finance capital.
May 12, 2012
I was enjoying this book, when the sudden Deleuzian garbage dropped half way through. It seems so atrociously tacked onto the analysis, and stands in direct antagonism to the rest of the book--- it really seems like a different person writing. To make the claim that value is generated in circulation is simply not true, and this attempt to completely redefine all of these Marxist terms come out of pure desire to be heterodox. It is completely untrue by any stretch of the imagination that we have moved to a period of immaterial production, and there is no such thing as Empire; it seems like paying lip service to these bogus and inflated concepts is one's ticket into the Intervention Series. My only other complaint is the weird insistence on supply and demand as a source of crisis later in the book, despite that he pretty solidly identifies the rate of profit as a problem earlier. I liked the kind of corny humanism at the end---- it had a nice early Marx feel to it.
February 4, 2018
I've came back and read this twice now, once in the midst of the financial crisis and now again several years later. All that I have to say is that while I like the book and the author it really doesn't hold up very well this far down the line. Many of the discussions that were taking place at the time have now been swept up under the rug entirely and have become almost non-issues. Very weird how this has all played out over time. It would be interesting to hear from them now and see their current opinions on the relevance of this book.
January 15, 2019
A short but dense examination of finance and the 2008 financial crisis, from a Marxian and continental philosophy point of view. It can read as gibberish at times if you are not a rigorous student of both finance economics and Marxism, and the alleged thesis of the book (about how financial capitalism is a particular form of accumulation that is linked with cognitive labor) is only really discussed in one chapter, and that too in not very much depth. Nonetheless there were a few very interesting tidbits in here that "clicked" my understanding of some of the issues at hand.
October 13, 2022
Curious book. The focus on the 2008 housing crisis makes this feel more than a little dated, but the analysis of financialization of markets in the 70’s (and how financial markets and “real” markets have intertwined irreparably), the growing tendency towards biocapitalism, and the relationship between the US and Asian markets is very interesting. I’m familiar with these concepts from other semiotext releases, I really do enjoy this publisher.
A little too technical for my taste, had a hard time getting a grip on this one.
A little too technical for my taste, had a hard time getting a grip on this one.
June 2, 2022
... What?
October 2, 2012
Interesting book up until page 40, where the author confuses "housing" with "house ownership." Author spouts dogma from there to page 44. Settles back down again on page 45.
Fairly interesting until page 117, where it goes off the rails again. Finishes decently after page 121.
Fairly interesting until page 117, where it goes off the rails again. Finishes decently after page 121.
November 30, 2015
This was a very weird take on the Financial Crisis...really kind of far out & weird with not a lot of practical application. Also, not something I am very familiar with...
May 15, 2016
Has some interesting points but sometimes gets very technical so it's hard to follow.
March 24, 2015
An in depth look at the financial crisis of 2008, from a French point of view. Very informative with a balance of internal and global economics.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews