Over Accumulation Quotes

“Subsidy dependency has been coupled with the huge upturn in the so-called ‘financialisation’ of industry, whereby a company’s funds are increasingly dedicated to repurchasing their own shares in order to boost their stock price. In 2010, for example, the US American Energy Innovation Council (AEIC) asked the US government to triple state spending on clean energy to $16bn a year, at the end of a decade in which the companies comprising the council had spent $237bn on stock repurchases.477 From 2008 to 2017, 466 S&P 500 companies distributed $4 trillion to shareholders as buybacks, equal to 53% of profits, along with $3.1 trillion as dividends.This is explained away on the social democratic left as shareholder greed. But it is driven by the need to valorise capital. We did not cover it earlier, but Marx identified the increasing role of share capital as one of the main counter-tendencies.”
― Ted Reese, Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown