ABSTRACT
Finance is less a ‘parasitic’ or ‘pathological’ development in an otherwise legitimate commodity society than a necessary consequence of and precondition for the sole logical purpose capital is capable of achieving, namely self-expansion without reason. As global economic integration advanced in the 1970s and state-democratic capitalism was threatened by ‘stagflation’, business leaders lobbied for an end to the class compromise of Fordism and a reassertion of the hegemony of the upper fraction of finance capital. Although capital is driven by a logic of maximal self-expansion without reason, it cannot multiply continuously without simultaneously reproducing social-institutional supports and necessary use-values. The expanding role of finance in capitalist accumulation regimes is dependent on a general growth in the supply of money and liquidity, a growth in opportunities for the international transfer of funds and growing public perception of the continual and immediate interchangeability of assets and money, expressed in terms of nominal growth.
