Financialization is one of those terms that came in the 1990s with a rush of popularity. Like its precursor, globalization, it describes something palpable in the world about the nature of economic and social change and the spread of financial practices, but it is a term without an agreed general meaning.
In Marxism, analysis of the social impact of finance has a much longer tradition. This entry looks first at those antecedents before focusing on the current meaning of “financialization,” which is now prominent in describing the way the advanced capitalist economies have reorganized in response to crises, and especially the 2007–8 global financial crisis.
Marx’s writing is rich in its engagement with money and finance, and they are integral to his examination of the contradictions of capitalism and crisis. Money itself first appears in Marx as the fetishized form of alienated social relations between people and production and between classes, before it later becomes central to his exposition of value and capital accumulation. Accordingly, the money substance (gold, dollars, etc.) is always ambiguous, for it is treated as an objective unit of measure (things are equivalent in terms of money), but it can never exist outside the contradictory social relations it is used to describe (and measure).
When Marx framed money as the universal equivalent form of value, he vacillated between treating money as just another commodity (like gold) with its own value defined in terms of its costs of production, and a highly abstracted unit of measure, which could not be tied to the specifics of its own production costs. To explain trade, the former sufficed, for money merely converted the value of one good into another, and the money commodity is really a proxy for a unit of socially necessary labor time. But to explain accumulation in all its dimensions, money had also to cover paper documents (financial contracts) and bank deposits, none of which could adequately be thought about in terms of gold: finance had to be an abstraction from the domain of labor values. We can think of this as the difference between medium and mediator of exchange.
Reconciling these perspectives (money as cash in simple exchange and finance as credit over time) has always been a challenge for Marxism (and indeed for all theories of money). Rosa Luxemburg (1913) notably sought to address this problem by making money a discrete “department” of the economy, distinct from the departments of producer goods and consumer goods. Others, invoking Marx’s early writings on money, point to the irreducibility of these two dimensions of money, and focus on the tensions between the two as an expression of class contradictions (Žižek 2005).
Finance (or money over time, with a rate of interest) not only carries the ambiguities of money, but itself is integral to the circuit of capitalist reproduction, and hence to breaks in that circuit. In the first chapter of Capital, Marx talks of the problem for capitalist accumulation when there are breaks in the circuit because money is not converted into commodities (e.g. hoarding).
As Marx built his analysis of accumulation in Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, these insights on breaks in the circuit became elaborated, by considering the role of money as a form of capital, alongside productive and commodity capital. Here, a central question is the role finance plays in capital accumulation: is it used to purchase extant “output” in the form of commodities for consumption (or existing financial and physical assets), or channeled specifically to the acquisition of assets for the future production of surplus value (interest-bearing capital, which lays claim to a share of the produced surplus)? The former is circulating titles to ownership, and hence producing nothing new; the latter produces new value (and surplus value). Further, interest-bearing capital itself can be bought and sold, creating the analytical problem that finance initially acquired to advance the production of new value may be transformed back into “mere” credit.
From the perspective of capital accumulation, credit not directed to promote new production of value was deemed “fictitious capital”: fictitious in the sense that it would be double counting to measure both interest-bearing capital for accumulation and credit for the acquisition of existing assets (Fine 2013).
This distinction became critical to 20th-century Marxism. In the late 19th century Rudolf Hilferding was observing the institutional unification of industrial, mercantile and banking interests in Europe, and their capacity to use the state to build or protect monopolistic practices. In 1910 Hilferding published Finance Capital, focusing on the power of these combines to accumulate fictitious capital. Hilferding’s work on finance directly influenced not only Lenin’s writing on Imperialism, but also the “neo-Marxist” school of Monopoly Capitalism, which focusses on the combined capacity of big banks and big industry to create market control in capital accumulation and acquire wealth via monopoly rents, disconnected from the production of new value. More broadly, Hilferding’s work opened up the question of how we think about connections within the capitalist class between industrialists who oversee the production of surplus value and financiers who fund investment, trade capital assets, and appropriate a share of that surplus. For Hilferding, this problem arose because of the institutional blurring of finance and industry, but it also raises conceptual questions about the relationship of different temporal (and spatial) moments of money and finance in the circuit of capital. Herein lies the basis of a distinction between “productive” (of surplus value) and “unproductive” (or “fictitious”) capital, which features prominently in current debates about financialization.
Following the end of the post-war Bretton Woods Agreement and the associated floating of currencies and increasing international financial mobility, many measures of financial activity, both by market value and by turnover, started increasing rapidly. The 1970s and especially the 1980s saw increasing international investment, both direct and portfolio. This period also saw the growth of “offshore” lending for such investment, known initially by its location as Eurofinance, where hard currency reserves of the Soviet Union and the surpluses of the oil-rich Middle Eastern countries were part of a growing global market for debt. Wholesale money market traders (then referred to as merchant banks, but now called investment banks and hedge funds) were borrowing at exchange rates and interest rates different from those available in the formal, national markets, creating both large volumes of lending and expanding opportunities for arbitrage (profiting between multiple prices for the same type of commodity or financial asset). These markets were also largely beyond the capacities of nation-state regulation, and any possible forms of regulation were being opposed by financial institutions that wanted to be part of this newly emerging frontier.
So just as the initial debates about globalization were about how capital mobility was breaking down nation-state capacities, so there was a variant of the financialization debate, concerning the way in which the increasing mobility of finance was a challenge to nation state capacities and whether financial mobility was contributing to the creation of a single, global market. This debate sits inside wider debates about the nature of neo-liberalism, and whether we are seeing a declining role and capacity of nation states, or states themselves, implementing policies to facilitate the development and global expansion of financial markets and institutions.
With the growth of off-shore financial markets and increasing capital mobility came the growth of awareness of interest rate and currency risks, and that awareness saw the initial growth of financial derivative markets and products. Arbitrage and risk trading were the catalyst of a process of financialization beyond the domain of borrowing and lending. Eurofinance markets may have offered lower interest rates, but borrowers carried foreign exchange risks on those loans. There was also the issue of borrowing at variable interest rates offshore, compared with fixed rates at home. The variable rates may have been lower, but they could change, and in the environment of the mid-1970s and 80s, those changes could be dramatic. Hedging these currency and interest rate risks was the domain of interest rate and foreign exchange futures, options, and swaps markets, and the development of these derivative markets from the 1970s proved critical to “financialization.” Derivative markets could be framed as providing means to insure against currency and exchange risks (linking the present to the future) by means of diversifying risk exposures (via swaps) or locking in some or all of the risks of future exchange rate or interest rate movements. In the process, they provided opportunities to speculate on future price movements.
Concurrently, in the late 1970s there were two critical developments. One was the publication of the Black Scholes formula for pricing financial options, framed exactly in terms of how much an option should cost to hedge the value of a portfolio (or in this case, loan). The other was release by Texas Instruments of the first hand-held computer into which the Black Scholes formula could be loaded, giving the possibility of instant calculation of the cost of a hedge. Derivative trading expanded rapidly. But wherever there is a platform to hedge, there is also a platform to take speculative positions on the future. So people on the “other side” of a hedge could be an organization with the opposite risk, or it could be someone merely placing a bet on what the future holds. We will return shortly to issues of “speculation.”
These derivative market transactions grew far more rapidly than the growth in the underlying international loans, for to hedge any position requires active trading whenever circumstances change (and that became an ongoing threat for many internationally oriented firms). Moreover, because financial derivatives trade exposure to change in the value of an underlying asset but without necessarily trading the asset itself (the change in interest rates or exchange rates, but not the loan itself), derivatives offered a cheap and effective way to take financial positions: to move out of one position (for example a bet that the Euro would fall) meant simply placing a bet in the opposite direction (a bet that the Euro would rise), all of it escalating trading volumes.
This trading activity was also related to the growth of specialist sorts of banks (or branches of banks) and other financial institutions. Organizations like investment banks and hedge funds came into being precisely to trade risks for hedgers and speculators alike. These institutions also started trading on their own behalf (proprietary trading, which is now banned), using what they thought was their close knowledge of movements to take financial positions on trends in a range of financial and “real world” indicators.
The effect, from the 1980s, was a rapid growth in financial market activity. In this context a range of other factors also warrants mention, like the rise of private pension schemes, the privatization of publicly-owned assets and the dot-com boom (and bust). They all pointed to financial market activity growing much more quickly than the production of goods and services, investment in new plant and equipment, or the level of global trade.
These sorts of developments were associated with an interpretation of financialization as a “pattern of accumulation in which profit making occurs increasingly through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production” (Krippner 2005).
With technology (software and hardware) changing rapidly, these volumes of trade continue to grow, with the current driver being algorithmic high frequency trading. Toscano (2013, 68) contends that “in 1945, US stock was held on average for four years; this dropped to eight months in 2000, two months in 2008, and 22 seconds in 2011.” In a similar vein, the Bank for International Settlements (2013, 9) triennial survey of global foreign exchange markets estimates that daily turnover (in 2013 dollars) has increased from $1.5 trillion in 2001 to $5.3 trillion in 2013. For many Marxists this is evidence of financialization as the growth of fictitious capital.
Discrete from, but compatible with, the identification of the growth of finance-as-industry is an emphasis on finance-as-calculative-logic, and the way in which financial practices are coming to pervade the way in which decisions are made, in business, governments and wider society. This emphasis is at the core of the oft-cited definition of financialization provided by Gerard Epstein (2005) as . . . “the increasing importance of financial markets, financial motives, financial institutions, and financial elites in the operation of the economy and its governing institutions, both at the national and international levels.”
There is a number of strands in the emphasis on finance as a calculative logic.
Shareholder value refers to the influence placed by shareholders (or the institutions that represent them) on corporate managers, pressing them to cut corners and invest shorter-term in order to get high profits and declare higher dividends for shareholders. In effect, shareholder value is an agenda both to intensify the rate of surplus value extraction and to bring forward profits based on yet-to-be-produced surplus.
Whilst companies owned by shareholders (called joint stock companies) started in the 1850s, shareholder value recognizes the shift from large personal family shareholdings to financial institutions as the primary nominal shareholders. (This has been a challenge for Marxian notions of a capitalist “class,” for it de-personalizes the notion of capital ownership.) Shareholding institutions now have significant voting rights and their agendas are often short-term, looking for immediate share value appreciation rather than long-term growth. So the proposition is that pressure comes onto corporations to deliver short-term yield, and this flows through to pressures in the workplace, with demands for higher surplus value and more flexibility. With the rise of pension funds (sometimes called superannuation) there is the irony that it is increasingly workers’ savings in the form of ownership stakes in corporate equities that become the source of pressure for the delivery of shareholder value. So it could be said that in “pension fund capitalism” workers have contradictory interests: as owners they seek to intensify their own exploitation in the workplace! For Resnick and Wolff (1987) this contradictory position can be understood as workers being involved in both a fundamental class process as producers and also in a subsumed class capacity as receivers of surplus value: the “worker” is variously constituted.
The shareholder value approach to financialization remains centered on the workplace, whilst other approaches extend beyond the workplace. Resnick and Wolff were significant in creating the conceptual space to theorize these multiple modes in which workers’ engage capital accumulation.
Credit and debt have a long history. Marx wrote about “the credit system” as integral to the funding of investment in large-scale production. But credit and debt have changed markedly in the era of “financialization,” and it could be argued that the category of “interest-bearing capital” used by Marx to explain a circuit of industrial capital, is now too general a category to permit precise explanatory capacity. The period since the 1990s has seen significant growth in debt-like instruments. In the corporate world these instruments have become quite complex, where the distinctions between debt and equity has been blurred, so they do not show up so much as bank debt on corporate balance sheets, but rather as a range of leveraged positions. Preference shares, for example, are part share (exposure to share price movements) and part debt (guaranteed “dividend”; no voting rights). These sorts of blended assets signal the importance of a more general term like “capital,” for it signals that ownership in all its variations involves a command over the path of accumulation. Nonetheless, there are familiar versions of explaining the 2007–8 global financial crisis in terms of mounting debt and leverage.
It is more in relation to households that debt has acquired greater focus in the analysis of financialization. Whilst Marx had focused on households as the site of the reproduction of labor power, the focus in financialization is on growing mortgage, auto loan, student loan and credit card debt. Central to the rise of financialization from the 1980s has been the way in which debt has funded consumption in a period of stagnant or falling real wages (Resnick and Wolff 2010).
This recognition opens a number of dimensions of financialization. One is the notion of debt as a “second round” of increasing appropriation of surplus value—the first round in the workplace via falling wages in the context of increasing productivity; the second in the home, via the increasing amount of household income that is required to service debt (Lapavitsas 2013). Another dimension of financialization relates to predatory lending practices in which individuals and households are encouraged or pressed to undertake loans that they cannot afford to repay. Subprime lending, made infamous in the mortgage-backed securities defaults that triggered the global financial crisis, is the most conspicuous case here, but education debt, leaving university graduates with debts that will prevent them saving to acquire other assets, is a looming expression of this problem. For many, this is a form of life-long austerity, or expropriation.
Following the work of Graeber (2011), this new focus on debt as a generalized form of social subordination has fostered a politics of debt resistance, found in the “occupy” movement, leading to organizations like “Strike Debt” (2012).
A newer frontier addressing the social and economic meaning of financial change involves going “inside” financial markets, institutions and the design of financial products. This has become the analytical domain of anthropologists, social theorists, geographers and “radical” accountants, who approach financialization and Marxian economics via micro-foundations, somewhat akin to Marx’s interest in social and technological change in factories. In finance, this research involves ethnographies of trading rooms and markets, studies of the discourses of money, finance and financial data, and of the design of financial products like subprime loans, credit default swaps (CDSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Collectively, the message of this body of analysis is that the details of finance need to be taken seriously in Marxian economics. It is insufficient to treat financial innovation by taxonomic judgments about the difference between credit and interest-bearing capital or ethical judgments about its social worth.
In the context of the global financial crisis, this body of work has sought to identify how products and financial practices operated so as to generate a crisis that no-one had predicted; at least not in terms of the details of the cascading crashes of mortgage-backed securities, CDOs and CDSs bringing down leading investment banks, creating a crisis of liquidity. In this context, some Marxists draw on Hyman Minsky’s propositions about corporate propensities to increase their leveraging either by borrowing too much or carrying levels of debt that are only sustainable in boom times, and the financial instability that inevitably follows as boom conditions wain. Minsky’s “financial instability hypothesis” is framed within a post-Keynesian framework, but its emphasis on financially-generated instability clearly resonates with some Marxist interpretations of the crisis-propensity of capitalism. It remains a point of contention whether Minsky and Marx provide (or could provide) a unified theory of crisis in relation to finance (e.g. Crotty 1986; Bellofiore and Halevi 2011) or whether Minsky’s Keynesian roots constitute his and Marx’s as competing theories (e.g. Ivanova 2012; Magdoff and Bellamy Foster 2009; Palley 2010).
Aside from specifics of the recent financial crisis, there is a number of strands to this “inside finance” analysis of financialization that resonate with Marxian economics.
One is the relation of financialization to households. There was mention above, in relation to debt, that households taking on more debt generally means an increasing proportion of wages going to debt repayments. The formal economic question here is about how this process relates to the value of labor power and to the measurement of surplus value. It leads to the question of how we think about accumulation and surplus value in relation to finance as well as production.
The wider social question is about how households (or individuals), in the context of an increasing array of risks that they now have to manage, are being incorporated into capital and accumulation in new ways, not just as borrowers but as financial subjects (what Resnick and Wolff would characterize as workers’ subordinate class roles). Household contracts for credit, and also contracts for insurance and other services are locking households into financial processes and ways of calculating, generating new political pressures to be “financially compliant.”
Framed this way, the global financial crisis was built on a failure of the financialized subject (working-class borrowers). Subprime loans leading up to the financial crisis revealed that households not complying with their contracts could crash the financial system. The response in the US, dating from before the actual crisis, was financial reforms that emphasized contractual compliance. Changes to bankruptcy laws in 2005, making it harder for individuals to default on loans, complemented President George Bush’s aspiration of an “ownership society” built on notions of “individual responsibility.” (Following the literature on governmentality [Foucault] the term “responsibilization” is applied to the expectation of households in relation to finance.) Whilst the agenda placed households in the calculative logic of capital and the vision of capital ownership for all, the effect was to place financial demands on workers that corporations, with limited liability, are not required to face.
For Marxists, this all points to a repositioning of households in relation to finance that resonates with the expectations of workers in the workplace in the 19th century in response to technological change and the need to deliver efficiency for capital. There Marx referred to the “real subsumption” of labor to capital. The recent reforms around households and finance could be thought of as an emergent shift toward the “real subsumption” of households to finance (Cowen 1976; Bellofiore and Halevi 2011).
There are direct consequences here for the understanding of gender relations within households, and caring roles within markets, as a direct consequence of financialization (Folbre 2012; Fukuda-Parr, Heintz and Seguino 2013; Adkins 2015).
Another strand of “inside finance” analysis addresses the social meaning of financial derivatives. This body of research is located in social theory and especially cultural studies, where a new body of scholars are entering debates about Marxian value theory via the analysis of money and finance (e.g. Grossberg, Hardin and Palm 2014). Randy Martin (2015) coined the term “the derivative form” or a “derivative logic” (in parallel with Marx’s value form and logic of capital). Martin has explored how the heuristic of derivatives can be used to understand many aspects of social organization, from cultural processes, to university governance, to military strategy in the “war against terror.” The essence of this analysis is the identification that the derivative involves two things: leverage (purchasing a large risk exposure on a small outlay) and decomposing things we have generally thought of as whole into a range of attributes. (In financial markets, the objective is to break down an equity or a loan or a portfolio into its elemental and different risks, so that each of these risks might be priced and traded discretely.) In relation to households, for example, we see that risks once borne by the state are now transferred to the household, and households are required to make decisions about what aspects of life and household assets should be insured, and how to leverage household positions for gain.
It will be apparent here that this framing of financialization leads to a quite distinctive version of class politics. This politics is not centered on class relations in the workplace, but class relations that engage no less consumer and financial relations: a politics that resonates strongly with the “occupy” movement and “Strike Debt,” perhaps with a conception of finance broader than both of those movements, at least as they are popularly understood.
The social theory issues just identified suggest an opening up of Marxist categories to bring them into engagement with these new sorts of developments. Issues of class, production, money, labor and value all need to be re-evaluated in the light of financialization (although not just financialization). Marxism framed in the interpretation of Resnick and Wolff, focusing on the relationship between fundamental and subsumed class processes, in which people engage in multiple class and non-class relations, is designed to meet precisely these sorts of needs.
Conversely, there is a more formal Marxian economics which holds to the integrity of the conventional categories, and claims that “financialization” is best understood in terms of its impact on long-term trends in capital accumulation and trends in the rate of profit.
It is appropriate to start with the latter. For much of Marxian economics the critical theoretical issue is the distinction between economic processes that produce new (surplus) value and processes that circulate extant value. For processes that circulate value, profitability is derived from surpluses generated in productive activities. Hence the issue of financialization is the rise of a sector which has been highly profitable, yet deemed unproductive. Some suggest that there is something unsustainable about a shrinking proportion of economic activities carrying the mantle of producing the whole of surplus value. Onto this proposition are built analyses that contend that financial sector growth was a systematic policy of central banks to reflate the global capitalist economy in the aftermath of the end of the long boom in the 1970s: it was a speculative bubble that burst in the crisis of 2007 and 2008 (Brenner 2006; 2009).
When the focus is on aggregated trends in productive and fictitious or speculative capital, the issues addressed by those going “inside finance” are of at best second-order concern. The political focus for the conventional Marxist economists is instead on the in-built crisis propensities of an economy over-burdened by speculative finance (Duménil and Levy 2011). For some, especially in the context of financial crisis, this points to a necessary post-capitalist politics. For others there arises the politics of regulation, the need to “contain” finance, and turn banking into a servant of real investment as a sort of financial public utility. This latter proposal articulates with broader critiques of “neo-liberalism.”
For those going inside finance, the technical processes of markets and institutions open up a challenge to a number of the popular propositions of contemporary Marxism, including challenging the dichotomy between production and speculation, and hence opening debate about the sources of surplus value production.
There are a number of themes here. One, broadly associated with autonomist Marxists Hardt and Negri (2004), challenges narrow conceptions of “production” in the factory and labor. Work inside finance could, in general, be depicted as “immaterial labor,” whose contribution to accumulation is clear, but often indirect and invariably unmeasurable. This approach thereby challenges that Marxian economics which wants to clearly delineate productive from unproductive labor (conceptually and spatially) and capital involved in production as distinct from that in the circulation of value.
Another aspect of financialization, and one with echoes of Hilferding’s concept of finance capital, is the growth of financial activities inside “industrial” firms. For many years auto and other durable goods manufacturers had credit divisions for their dealerships and to provide consumer credit. But we have seen most large industrial firms also develop specialist treasury functions to help them manage surplus cash and secure finance. These functions, akin to an investment banking role, have often gown into significant operations (see Froud, Sukhdev, Leaver and Williams 2006 for a significant study of General Electric). This development invokes the question of whether industrial firms have become speculative and risky. It also points to a need to grasp the increasing fluidity and fungibility of all capital.
A further theme points to the case that, since the end of Bretton Woods there has not been a socially agreed, stable invariant monetary unit of measure. Whilst the US dollar may have assumed the mantle, with the Federal Reserve cast as a central bank with a global agenda (Panitch and Gindin 2013), the dollar has been far from stable: it is no longer within the capacity of nation states to give stability to “their” currency or “their” interest rates. With the unit of measure itself determined within a market calculus, it is apparent that there are only relative measures of value. States seek to present relative values as absolute ones (Bretton Woods, the US dollar, LIBOR), but they can only carry the appearance of absolute measures for a finite time.
Risk trading in financial markets is the individual path available to simulate inter-temporal and cross-currency stability. Framed this way, perhaps financial trading is an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to produce individual stability, and here depicting it as an act of production is to challenge the dichotomy between production and speculation. Moreover, perhaps we need to think of risk itself as a commodity being produced and traded: this is, in effect, the nature of insurance (Bryan and Rafferty 2006).
These sorts of questions re-open how we think about value creation and measurement within Marxian theory, for they directly challenge a juxtaposition of production and speculation. They also point to a different class politics.
The conventional Marxist analysis of financialization points to agendas of confronting the capacities of banks (and states) to generate an environment in which returns to “speculation” exceed those of returns to “real production.” There are then well-recognized debates between those who would reform finance and banking, and those who foretell the likelihood of further and deeper crises as credit-driven bubbles burst, which points to the need to transcend capitalist property relations.
For those who challenge the distinction between production and circulation, there is no such propensity as a long-term trend. The focus is instead on a politics of resistance to the subordination of individuals to the calculative agenda of capital articulated as financialization. In this agenda there is no strong reason to privilege a class politics centered solely on struggles in the workplace, for capital’s domination of workers (now framed as households) can be seen as extending into more and more facets of life: work, consumption and finance. “Households” then stands as an inadequate term, for it does not innately define a class position, for all classes live in households. So is it a problem of language or of politics? Therein lies a political debate.
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