"There is nothing worth retaining from financialisation..." And finally - anticlimax. Not the dictatorship of the proletariat, not the common ruin of the contending classes, but guess what: more "policies". _____
Financialisation and State Capture (Originally called "What can we say about the crisis of 2007/2009?") "Financialisation is an epochal transformation of capitalism" Part VI Financialisation Must Be Reversed! Costas Lapavitsas, Theory and Struggle, Marx Memorial Library, 2014 Part VI Financialisation has to be reversed Financialisation is a historical transformation that has deep roots and requires a systemic and deep confrontation to be dealt with. Let's think about it for a minute. Socialists typically say capitalism develops the forces of production, revolutionises material and social life, but it does so in a problematic, exploitative, oppressive and crisis-ridden way. Therefore, what we need to do is retain what is progressive, retain the technical and other advances and do away with the social relations of capitalism that create the social problems, the conflicts and so on. Can we think of financialisation in this way? The answer is no. Financialisation doesn't represent a significant social benefit to humanity. What exactly is the gain from the expansion and the explosive growth of finance, from financial markets being able to set financial prices across the globe in a fraction of a second? So what? Let's take a few seconds more. Let's take hours. Let's take days. Why should we be mobilising incredible resources, highly trained physics graduates to deal with computers that deploy advanced programmes to allow people to trade derivatives across the globe constantly? Why? Let's never do it. The net benefit to humanity from financialisation, seen generally, appears to be negligible. The first thing that has to be said about financialisation, then, is that it has to be reversed. The growth of finance has to be reversed. Humanity gains very little from this incredible explosion of financial capabilities, institutions, mechanisms and markets. Reversal of financialisation is the order of the day, not take financialisation as given and trying to do something with it. There's nothing, or very little that we can do with it. It's in this context that we should be thinking of policies to confront financialisation, and then the meaning will become clear. How, then, do we reverse a historical transformation that is so deeply rooted? It isn't simply a matter of regulation, nor simply a matter of policy. First, we have to start with the industrial and commercial enterprises and stop their involvement in finance in the first place. Stop them from financialising. How to do that? Well, one way is to adopt a strategy of public investment, together with policies that limit the financial activities of enterprises and changes, including the way in which they organise their internal affairs. That's where we have to start, if we are going to confront financialisation in a structural way. Then what? Well, then we need to do something about banks. Private banks operate in the way which I have explained and create crises; they have basically failed and have relied on the state to rescue them. So how do you we deal with them? We need public ownership and public control over banks. To me it is obvious. Not only nationalisation, because nationalisation by itself doesn't mean anything very much. The capitalist state can nationalise banks; RBS is nationalised after a fashion. We need public ownership and public control over banks. We need a new spirit of public service and new mechanisms to run these institutions in a public way detaching them from what they have doing the last few decades. And what about households? There I think that things become even more complex. If we are going to remove financialisation from the sphere of households, then we need to reintroduce public provision in housing, in health, in education. For that we need to insist that public are better than private methods. And under no circumstances should private finance be mediating provision to households, because private finance is not equipped to do so. When it is put in those terms, it is clear that confronting financialisation required innovative, communal and associational policies of household provision to come into play. These policies to confront and reverse financialisation would obviously reject austerity and wage restraint, which is the way in which the state has dealt with the current crisis. And they would be accompanied by measures of profound income and wealth redistribution. It is clear, then, that reversing financialisation requires steps that are inherently anti-capitalist and open up fresh avenues towards socialism. This is the kind of socialism that we need for the 21st century, the kind of socialism that meets the needs of the current era, and begins to speak to people in the here and now about what the world ought to be like. I think that this is the task we have in front of us and the sooner we begin to develop these ideas, the better for all of us. From: http://www.marxlibrary.org.uk/theory-struggle/item/175-what-can-we-say-about -the-crisis-of-2007-2009 To read a facsimile of the original, on line, complete with all the graphs, go to: https://issuu.com/marxmemoriallibrary/docs/14junefinal_1_/2?e=16494710/14316 995 -- -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. 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