Financialization functions as a disciplinary mechanism to exploit labor and displace capitalist contradictions

Evidence

In making this argument, I am not seeking to contradict but, rather, to complicate analyzes of financialization that see it as a weapon marshalled by the capitalist ruling class (or a faction thereof) against workers of the world. I understand finance as a disciplinary mechanism of capitalist power, one whose primary purpose is to mobilize debt (of individuals, of firms, of governments) as a means to better extort and exploit labour, generate and circulate surplus value, and shape the reproduction of social and economic life. Financialization represents a crucial element of capitalist reproduction, a means by which several of the system’s inherent contradictions can be displaced (see Chapter 6). — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 58

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the book’s operative definition of financialization as debt mobilization for labor exploitation — central to the reader’s finance-colonizes-culture thesis.
• XREF: connects to: Entrepreneurial labor shifts financial risk onto individual workers — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 143; Capitalism may resolve its internal contradictions by making them tolerable rather than ending them — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 161; Financialization acts as unaccountable global economic planning with profit as its only goal — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 33 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Financialization is integral to capitalism, not a product of deregulatory excess #expands (0.82) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 34
• Financialization extracts profit for investors while creating precarity for workers #expands (0.80) — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 172
• Financialization drives the rise of precarious labor and dissolves social bonds #corroborates (0.78) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 141
• Financialization means accumulation through financial channels rather than production #expands (0.75) — Greta R. Krippner, The Financialization of the American…, 11
• Solutions to financialization require abolishing capitalism, not just re-regulating finance #expands (0.75) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 34