Oil and Financialization: Another Relation

Abstract

ABSTRACT The conception of financialization and the impacts of the oil market will be presented in this work from an alternative perspective. Financialization will not be analyzed as a dominance of finance over industry, as if these two sides of the productive process were dissociated. Financialization will be understood as a moment of expansion of a mechanism of domination, reaching not only the state-form and enterprise, but also the own constitution of the social being as an “individual capitalist,” being part of the process of constitution of form-value. Oil, from production to the market, cannot be seen only in a reduced view of its high incomes. Oil must be understood as a social relationship. Oil from the 1980s onwards became one of the central elements of support for the US dollar, therefore, of support for the international monetary system. In addition to this new social role of sustaining the international currency that oil now has, this commodity also incorporates a determined form of social relation through its imposition as an energy source. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to show how both financialization and recent developments in the oil market are part of the actual constellation of the forms of capitalist social relations.