Violence of Financial Capitalism
Book: Marazzi, C. (2010) The Violence of Financial Capitalism, trans. K. Lebedeva. New York: Semiotext(e). Intervention Series 2
Review
Francesca Bria:
This global crisis is a new type of crisis, “it is the capitalist way of transferring to the economic order the social and potentially political dimension, the dimension of the resistances ripened during the phase leading up to the cycle” (85). It is the first systemic and global crisis of neo-liberal financial capitalism that began with the crisis of the Fordist model of accumulation and the consequent deregulation of the banking system during the 1970s.
These are some of the arguments of the latest book from the Italian economist Christian Marazzi, one of the main exponents of the Italian Autonomous Marxism coming from the tradition of Operaismo (Workerism). This concise but intense book is a brilliant analysis of what Marazzi calls “one of the greatest crisis of history”, and a “violent crisis of a violent finance”. Marazzi provides new lenses to look at the current economic crisis, propelling an increased consciousness of the problems accumulated trough years of the financialisation of the economy. He also suggests looking for new weapons and political strategies in order to overcome the current systemic social, political and economic disarray.
As we know from Braudel, crisis is normal to capitalism and is a part of the history of the capitalist market system. Financialisation is also not a new phenomenon. Furthermore, many of the ideas that constituted neo-liberalism have been around for more than 200 years. In the last 30 years, starting with the neo-liberal turn in the economy and the deregulation of markets, it is possible to count a financial and/or monetary crisis every two and a half years, showing the structural instability of the markets (see also Minsky, 1992). So what is new about this financial crisis and how to interpret it? The central thesis of Marazzi’s book is that the dualism between the real economy (real money for tangible production) and the financial economy (production of money by means of money) no longer exists. Financialisation now has taken over and it encompasses the whole business cycle; what is really at stake in Marazzi’s perspective is the very concept of capital accumulation.
This hypothesis presents some differences with other important views coming from the Marxist Left such as the advocates of World Systems Theory. Giovanni Arrighi proposes a brilliant analysis of today’s current socioeconomic crisis in a geohistorical perspective, claiming that “systemic cycles of accumulation” are constituted from phases of “financial expansion” that follow phases of “material expansion” (1996). In contrast, Marazzi emphasises the pervasive dynamics of finance today within a totally renewed capitalism that is characterized by the overlapping of the financial economy with the real one. This leads to the argument that it is impossible to distinguish between “material expansion” and “financial expansion”. This is, in the author’s perspective, a central issue in understanding the current mode of production and its relation to finance through a historical lens – what Marazzi and the Italian Post-Workerists call “cognitive capitalism” (see Marazzi, Negri, Vercellone, Virno and Fumagalli).
This dynamic relation shows that there has been a transformation of valorisation processes so that today the accumulation of surplus value has moved to the sphere of circulation, of exchange, and reproduction, putting the entire life of people to work. It is an “anthropogenetic model” that transforms living beings into fixed capital and extracts added value from the production of forms of life. This is a central contribution to the interpretation of this financial crisis, showing the limits of applying Keynesian solutions, first implemented after the 1929 crisis of a nascent Fordist capitalism, to the fragile and instable financial bio-capitalism of today. The book comprises five chapters, and a first version was already published in Italian in a book edited by Andrea Fumagalli and Sandro Mezzadra entitled Crisi delle’economia globale. Mercati finanziari, lotte sociali e nuovi scenari politici (Ombre Corte, Verona, 2009).
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To conclude, Marazzi’s sharp analysis represents a fundamental contribution for those who are seeking to understand the nature of this crisis and who are looking for new political tools and strategies to face this extremely complex political situation. His analysis clearly shows that this crisis can be used as an opportunity to pursue radical changes and to open new terrains of conflict and sites of struggles, and it is only through struggles that we can identify common perspectives outside and beyond the crisis. This is an invitation to further enquiries into the role of knowledge in the production systems and its relationship with transformations in the capital/labour relation and the collective self-management of common goods.
It is in this attempt at radical change that we have to position the claim for a guaranteed income, or a “rent” attached to social needs that would reverse private debts into social income. The struggle for a citizens’ income is a struggle generated by the growing awareness of the contradictions of financial capitalism between social needs and the enrichment of social relations on one side, and the private market logic of finance on the other, the contradiction between the right to social ownership of a common good and the private right of property. It’s within these transformations of contemporary capitalism that, according to Marazzi, social conflict can be articulated. It is in the ability to produce innovation of life forms and autonomous forms of valorisation that financial capitalism will be overcome. If we agree with Marazzi that the weapons for a project of reappropriation of the commons, are available today more than ever, it seems to me that the key question that need to be addressed is how to organise it." (http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/9-4/9-4bria.pdf)
More Information
Detailed chapter by chapter details at http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/9-4/9-4bria.pdf