[p2p-research] must read analysis of financial crisis

[Michel Bauwens]

http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/9-4/9-4bria.pdf

the whole review goes in chapter by chapter detail

general excerpt only:


*Book: Marazzi, C. (2010) The Violence of Financial Capitalism, trans. K.
Lebedeva. New York: Semiotext(e). Intervention Series 2*


[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Violence_of_Financial_Capitalism?title=Violence_of_Financial_Capitalism&action=edit&section=1>
] 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).


..

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)




-- 
Work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University - Think thank:
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20100424/5826739e/attachment.html>