ABSTRACT
Many of the surface characteristics of postmodern culture stem from the increased functionality of finance capital in various parts of the world. In facilitating productive capital's mobility, and in organizing a new spatial division of labor, financial capital has globally transformed the meaning of place. Centralization in the financial markets and economic domination in the commodity markets—what Weber defined as the power of property and property relations—reduce marketability in these latter domains of economic activity. Financial capital "presupposes the existence of a class of wagelabourers on a social scale" and "reproduces to an ever increasing extent the class of wage-labourers, into whom it transfers its vast majority of direct producers". As Karl Marx would have anticipated, the "sheer power" of money continues to compress time and space in the service of capital accumulation. The new and highly speculative financial markets also developed new "fast" instruments, such as "derivatives," by which money often appeared to give birth to itself.
