Dick Bryan

Financialization and Marx: Giving Labor and Capital a Financial Makeover:

Financialization challenges some established ways of thinking within Marxist categories. We explore the way in which financialization is not simply shifting the balance of power between classes and generating economic volatility, but also re-constituting our understanding of class (as a formal economic category) and class relations. In particular, we examine how financialization is re-constituting labor as a form of capital, and giving capital a fluidity which serves to intensify competition. JEL classification: B51, G32

Financial derivatives and the theory of money

Abstract Financial derivatives are used and counted as money, but it is unclear exactly what sort of money they are. This article explores the monetary role of financial derivatives in securing the global financial system. It finds that derivatives commensurate the values of different forms of financial assets, and, in the process, they facilitate continuity across different forms of money. In this role they are a form of commodity money, but very different from conventional understandings of commodity money. In developing this idea, the paper engages recent debates in Economy and Society about the nature of money. In particular, it takes issue with Inghams state theory of money, which cannot adequately engage exchange rate volatility and extra-national roles of money, and Lapavitsas’ approach to a Marxist theory of money, which relegates commodity money to a historical abstraction.

Financialization, Risk and Labour

The term ‘financialization’ has acquired significant popularity. This paper evaluates some of the leading applications and identifies the need to link the process of financialization to capitalist class relations. The link we focus on is the way in which financial derivatives impose global competitive calculation on capital, with direct implications for the disciplining of labour. This class dimension becomes the basis of a progressive, transformational politics that focuses not on growing financial fragility in capital markets, but on the ways in which financialization is socializing both accumulation and daily life.

Financial Derivatives as Social Policy beyond Crisis

The period since the global financial crisis has seen financial derivatives not only grow quantitatively in financial markets but also expand socially as a calculative logic, giving increasing precision to the concept of capital and hence class relations. The logic of derivatives involves deconstructing ‘things’ into a spectrum of tradable risks. The article identifies the ways in which this logic is spreading into an increasing range of social, economic and political policy domains. It posits how, through the logic of derivatives, a range of sociological issues can be seen and re-thought through the eyes of financial calculus.

An important failure: knowledge limits and the financial crisis

Abstract This paper introduces a theme section on knowledge limits in and after the financial crisis. It explores how and why practitioners have generally responded less conservatively to crisis than academics, and argues that academics within a variety of problematics could do more by reflecting critically on the heroic ideas about the role of knowledge which were current across the social sciences in the decade before the crisis. It then turns to introduce the sections papers before finally raising the possibility of a more explicitly political approach to understanding finance.

Fundamental value: a category in transformation

Abstract ‘Fundamental value’ is a canonical category in both Marxian and neo-classical economics. In application to finance and financial crisis, it is laden with complexity. For Marxists, it has underscored a focus on the distinctions between production and circulation, real and fictitious capital. These debates have dominated Marxian responses to the financial crisis. In mainstream finance and economics, the term has undergone transformation and historically driven adaptation. Marxian analysis could fruitfully follow this lead. This paper identifies that transformation as an expression of capitals transforming calculation project. As capital becomes more liquid, the concept of fundamental value itself must embrace liquidity, yet, in embracing liquidity, fundamental value loses its established definitive capacity.

Shoplifters of the world unite! law and culture in financialized times

The last two decades have seen significant growth and change in the character of the interactions between working-class households and financial markets. Individuals and households are bearing more and more of the risks that were once managed by governments and employers, and financial markets have developed a vast range of products to facilitate that risk transfer. This has put households at the centre of financial innovation, requiring the extension of regulation and consumer protection into a whole new suite of financial products and a project of financial literacy and advice. Along with this financial development and its associated regulatory demands has come a new cultural project of capital seeking to normalize the expanded integration of individuals and households into capitals frontiers of accumulation. The project invites and invokes new forms of subjectivity (and subjugation) on the part of households. The developmental project required of state regulatory regimes is increasingly articulating not just a discourse of financial literacy but subordination to the individualism and discipline implicit in financial calculation. Contrary to its conception as spontaneous and individualist, this is an intentional and universalizing project of producing and managing labours financial risks. In the collective self-management of these risks, the household is now not just a site of risk absorption; it is a major source of investment products (and, therefore, at the frontier of accumulation). Increasingly also, in the name of financial stability, households – not just those reliant on state support – are becoming subjects of surveillance and administration in their internal financial functioning. It is these dual aspects of households as both consumers and producers of financial claims that give materiality to conceptual and historical claims about the financialization of everyday life.

Financial Derivatives: The New Gold?

For many economists, the current period of globalized finance lacks an apparent material anchor such as gold once was. This paper contends that in an important way the anchoring function is currently undertaken by financial derivatives. These contracts are not just about risk management and speculation. Critically also, they are commensurating the values of different financial assets, including different currencies. In so doing they can be seen to be imposing a competitive benchmark into the management of financial assets. Indeed, via this benchmarking, derivatives bring the management of labour to the fore in the stabilization of global financial markets, just as it was at the centre of adjustments under the Gold Standard in the nineteenth century. The paper explains this role of derivatives at the centre of contemporary global finance via a comparison with the way in which gold anchored the globalization of the late nineteenth century.

Political Economy and Housing in the Twenty-first Century – From Mobile Homes to Liquid Housing?

Abstract The recent Global Financial Crisis started as a crisis in the US sub-prime mortgage market, and rapidly spread to a wider financial crisis. This article suggests that beyond the crisis, we can now see that households are playing an evolving role as a site of risk absorption. In so doing, households have become a frontier of capital accumulation, not just as producers and consumers, but also as financial traders. Households are increasingly buying financialized products as an ordinary part of daily subsistence – houses, insurance, education, electricity and mobile phones. But at a level beyond the household’s daily reality, these regular purchases are being re-specified as assets, on which asset backed securities are built and then traded. It is in this way that by securitizing mortgage debt, finance has given global liquidity to housing. The size of securitized markets on housing as well as household assets and payment streams now dwarfs stock markets. The requirements of this emergent financial citizenship for the house and households extend beyond just honouring payments on a home purchase, it is requiring a culture of financial calculation that becomes absorbed as part of the daily norms and dispositions of social being. The presumption of rights of access to housing, education and health care are being replaced by the acceptance of individual financial participation and calculation. Here, we argue housing is being reconstructed as both the capital base for, and site of, individualized life course risk management.

Global accumulation and accounting for national economic identity

As accumulation has globalized, national economic indicators such as the balance of payments have been increasingly called on to provide popular measures of national economic performance. Yet at the same time the possibility of defining the national economy as a unit is becoming more ambiguous. Reliance on conventional national indicators in the context of globally integrated accumulation is leading systematically to reinforce the subordination of labor to capital on a global scale.