Activity

As of the 1980s, deregulation of U.S. financial markets had abolished the restrictions on the private production and marketization of money devised after the Great Depression. ‘Financialization’, as the process came to be known, seemed the last remaining way to restore growth and profitability to the economy of the overextended hegemon of global capitalism.

Markets, however, have an inherent tendency to expand beyond their original domain, the trading of material goods, to all other spheres of life, regardless of their suitability for commodification – or, in Marxian terms, for subsumption under the logic of capital accumulation

Low growth, in turn, reinforces inequality by intensifying distributional conflict, making concessions to the poor more costly for the rich, and making the rich insist more than before on strict observance of the ‘Matthew principle’ governing free markets

Disruption may be considered the neoliberal version of ‘creative destruction’: more ruthless, more out-of-the-blue, and less willing to take prisoners or accept delay in order to be ‘socially compatible’.

Structuralist critique of false institutions may therefore have to be complemented by a renewed culturalist critique of false consciousness