JWM

The term financialization is used all over the place, but it’s usually defined in a pretty circular way: financialization means “more finance,” more things controlled by finance.

Our way of thinking about it starts from the idea that the logic of the market doesn’t enforce itself — the logic of the market has to be enforced. And one way of looking at the role of finance is that it enforces the logic of the market and ensures that a whole range of decisions that could potentially be made in many different ways in fact end up being made according to the logic of commodities and of accumulation. Here we’ve been inspired by the economists Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, among others.

So, the most obvious case we highlight is the corporation. On one level, we think of the corporation as a typical organizational form of modern capitalism. But in another sense it’s simply a body of people with some sort of hierarchy and defined roles, engaged in some kind of productive process.

It’s not inherently engaged in producing commodities for profit. And if we go back to the prehistory of the corporation, the corporation was just a legally chartered body that carried out some kind of function. It got appropriated as an organizational form for capitalism specifically, but it didn’t start out as that.

The other side of the coin is that there’s a long tradition of thinkers, including Galbraith, Keynes, Veblen, and many others, who saw a natural, or at least possible, evolution of the corporation into the basis of some kind of planning or collective organization of production —that it could easily cease to be oriented toward the needs of profit maximization.

So if you think that type of evolution is possible, then you ask, why hasn’t it happened? I would argue that the answer is that somebody stopped it from happening — that there are people in society whose job it is to prevent that from happening. There are people and institutions whose job it is to ensure that corporations remain within capitalist logic, that they remain oriented towards production for sale and for profit. On some level, this is the fundamental role of shareholders and their advocates, and of institutions like private equity.

In some ways it’s even clearer when you look at finance in relation to states, because with states there’s no presumption that they should be guided by a logic of profitability or commodity production at all. So, the role of finance in enforcing a certain kind of policy on the state, a certain kind of logic, a certain kind of organization – whether it’s the bond market or whoever else we imagine here — is even more clear-cut.

To me, that’s a narrower, more specific, and maybe more fruitful way of thinking about financialization than just “there’s more finance.”