Towards a Marxist Theory of Financialized Capitalism

Abstract

In the rapid growth of the literature on financialization, the term risks becoming meaningless (“take x, add finance”). This article first reviews this literature, highlighting characteristic empirical features at the macroeconomic level and their variegation across different institutional contexts, then turning to meso- and micro-level multidisciplinary studies of how processes of financialization have manifest in the transformed behavior of firms, states, and households, as well as in the changing mode of provision of public services and the appropriation of the commons. Marxist attempts to theorize the essences of financialization are examined and found wanting. Two proposals are made in the spirit of advancing this project. First, financialization as cyclical process must be disentangled from financialized capitalism as secular stage. Second, it is argued that the emergence of financialized capitalism as a new stage within mature capitalism is linked with the central role played by finance in the internationalization of the circuit of production.