Financialization responds to worker and anti-colonial resistance by making capital more mobile

Evidence

First, finance exists in response to resistance. The financial sphere emerges as capitalists seek to collectively share risk and collaborate as a class, and they do so because they feel under threat. The most recent cycle of financialization, which dates roughly to the 1970s, was a direct capitalist response to the gains of labour in the global North in the post-war period (Bello 2013). Finance facilitated the globalization of manufacturing, foreign direct investment, and the building of industrial and intensive agricultural infrastructure in the Third World and the transportation of secondary and tertiary production to “off-shore” factories and sweatshops in order to undermine the collective power of Northern workers and avoid state regulation. Concomitantly, this expansion of finance was a response to anti-colonial struggles that had largely destroyed the older, more formal colonial relations in the wake of the Second World War. Neocolonialism was, of course, leveraged largely through the politics of debt, with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (IMF/WB) as key brokers, and “globalization” emerged as a capitalist response to the Keynesian mediation of Northern workers’ struggles. So finance is, in effect, a means by which capital responds to people’s resistance by rendering capital more fluid and mobile, thus Finance, Regulation and Cultural Politics 161 circumventing local forms of solidarity and struggle, or transforming these into rivalry and competition with other communities, societies and nations (Harvey 2006, 413-445; LiPuma and Lee 2004, 161-189). — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 501

Categorization

• XREF: This causal story—finance as capital’s mobility weapon against labor—is the mechanism groundwork deWaard’s cultural argument needs, and it echoes Harvey’s flexible accumulation thesis linking to the reader’s existing economics knowledge. — connects to: Capital precedes and shapes resistance rather than resistance driving capital — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 923; The colonial currency’s association with taxes drove local resistance to it — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 58; Capitalists collaborate through finance because they feel threatened by resistance — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 501 (+3 more)
• SEED: Possible angle: ‘Globalization as capital flight disguised as debt politics’ — the 1970s pivot as a direct response to organized labor power.

Broader Connections

• Capital precedes and shapes resistance rather than resistance driving capital #complicates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 923
• The colonial currency’s association with taxes drove local resistance to it #exemplifies (0.72) — Fanny Pigeaud_ Ndongo Samba Sylla, Africa’s Last Colonial Currency, 58