ABSTRACT
Late capitalism shows signs of protracted stagnation together with the rising dominance of financial activities. Profits largely channelled through the realm of finance apparently accumulate for the “functionless capitalists” who do not undertake the pains of production. In this context, finance has often been seen as a parasite, superimposed upon the productive sphere and assumes a “fictitious” feature of creating profit without being mediated by the act of production. This chapter using a Marxian analyses primarily argues that assuming finance and productive capital as self-conscious independent subjects, undermines the crucial fact that they are part of an integrated circuit of industrial capital and demand and supply of loanable funds in the form of interest-bearing capital is something intrinsic to the capitalist process of circulation. Moreover, capital has an inherent tendency towards assuming a dematerialized value, stripped of all concreteness while deriving a share of produced surplus as something independent from the murky process of exploitation. This chapter, however, highlights the fact of interdependence among apparently disparate processes such as value capture in the global circuit of capital, rising inequality and declining share of wages, rising demand for assets claiming a share in future streams of income and the dominance of finance. The chapter argues that finance and productive capital mutually constitute each other, and financialized capitalism actually mystifies the exploitative process and imposes the requirements of profit reified as objective performance indicators necessary for economic governance.
