Problematizing Capitalism in the Era of Globalization and Financialization

Abstract

Processes euphemized as globalization and financialization offer the most significant economic transmutations shaking advanced capitalist economies during the final decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Globalization entails the disintegration of full-scale industrial production centered economies carrying ramifications for both the mass commodified labor forces capital maintained in the post-WWII period in its heartlands and the activities of erstwhile production centered corporations themselves which morph into “brands” that no longer make anything. Financialization involves the transformations of capitalist finance which produces a financial and historical regression to antediluvian practices most associated with ancient usury that expropriate wealth rather than intermediate in its generation and augmentation. Financialization and globalization interpenetrate to the detriment of humanity.