Financialization Again

Just putting a bug in people's ears. I agree with the folks at Monthly Review who explain that the phenomenon of the financialization of the economy is a response to the declining rate of profit in practical economic activity in the developed countries, and that it isn't a policy decision that can be changed by persuasion or by government fiat. Very simply, the declining rate of profit at the end of the capitalist "golden age" from 1945-73 was met with a trio of policy responses: liberalization, globalization, and financialization. All three were meant to lower the operating costs of capitalism, but all three simultaneously demolish the foundations of the wealth of the society from which capitalism (like a parasite) feeds.

Liberalization removed rules, regulations, restrictions, that impeded immediate profit maximization in the capitalist centre. Taxes, unions, environmental regulations, barriers to trade, etc., all had short-term costs to capital but all contributed in one way or another to creating a stable, equitable, and therefore wealthy society from which capitalism reached unprecedented heights of prosperity.

Globalization removed the barriers to capital moving about the globe putting labour into competition again and putting governments on notice that there was now a competition between regulatory and taxation regimes. These are the "free trade" deals which have always been more about the competing centres of world capitalism (USA, Europe, and Japan) constructing their own economic zones wherein their capitalists were free to create systems of domination over weaker national "partners." This influx of capitalists' rights has raised living standards in some cases (South-East Asia, China) while lowering them in others (Mexico, India). I don't think the prosperity of any of these places is guaranteed. China itself is building its future on supplying dirt-cheap labour to North American and Japanese capitalists to supply North America's debt-drowned consumers.

Financialization has been the capitalists' attempts to sever their bonds from all this messy bothersome business entirely and to create fortunes out of thin air called derivatives made up of esoteric products designed by complex mathematical equations. Alas, for them, these derivatives have to be based on something in the real world and since there's really nothing going on to satisfy the needs of this increasingly huge pool of liquid capital, this leads to speculative bubbles that inevitably explode. These bubbles have been getting increasingly large and increasingly unstable.

The point though, is that this response is RATIONAL from a capitalist's point of view. There's no other option for them. That's why there needs to be a revolution so that the wealth of society is not controlled by profit-maximizing elites but by the whole of society itself. How to run this society is in dispute but it MUST be as democratic as imaginable.