[...] The deregulation of financial services really followed structural transformations within the world capitalist economy. As capital went global, particularly in the form of the multinational corporation, it encouraged the growth of lending institutions which could operate outside of national boundaries, in the so-called offshore banking system. Particularly through the Eurodollar market, in which banks could deal in dollars in unregulated spaces, like the Caymans, we got a financial system that was responding to a much more internationalized production system. As a result, regulated financial markets like the U.S. and the UK were losing a lot of business to these offshore banks. Sooner or later they pressed to have liberalization and deregulation so they could get into some of these financial operations from which they had been excluded.

What I’m tracing for you here is a process by which first comes the great global reorganization of manufacturing industries through the multinational corporation, then come forms of financing that fit that new world economy, and then comes the deregulation in the major centers. To reregulate you have to imagine that somehow you could wind it all back and that you could have capitalist economies that were predominantly national again—not based on multinational production and the financial arrangements that go with it. So I think the problem for the people that emphasize deregulation is that they are really unable to account for these structural changes—not just policy changes by some evil characters in government. Of course, I do think they are quite evil characters in government, but they were responding to structural changes. If that’s true, then no attempt to reregulate could possibly work in a new world of globalized production and finance.

When I speak of neoliberalism, I’m talking about a package of policies—if you were going to date it, the transformations begin in China in 1978, and accompany the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979, and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. in 1980—where, under the banner of rolling back socialism and the welfare state and letting markets reign supreme again, they cut back social service spending dramatically. They privatized state-run utilities, industries, and so on. And they attacked the power of unions. In the British case the battle over the coalmines was crucial in terms of rolling back the unions and driving down the wage levels that workers in the North can command.

That’s the first side of the neoliberal agenda. The second is the attempt to impose enormous hardship on the Global South—to use the debt crisis, which comes to a head with the recession on 1980–82, to go in and essentially rewrite the rules of the game in the Global South through structural adjustment programs orchestrated by the International Monetary Fund and to some degree the World Bank. Where they literally go and say, “You have $450 million in debt that you could never possibly pay with your little economy; well, guess what? You can have new loans that will allow you to make your payments, we’ll lend you the money, but you’re going to have to do all the things that I’ve just described and worse. You have to lay off 20 percent of all public employees. You must get rid of any subsidies for fuel and food for the poor. You must massively privatize, you must open up your financial industries, so that Western banks can come in and essentially gobble them up.”

That offensive against labor in the North and against the peoples of the Global South generally did lay the basis for a new wave of capitalist expansion. They boosted profits by cannibalizing the South on one hand and by driving down wages in the North on the other. And then they began to relocate production facilities to low-wage zones of the South.

[...] When we talk about financialization, all we’re really talking about is that the provision of a larger share of all goods and services involve financial transactions—more of education, healthcare, housing is provided through the market and through credit markets in particular—and that more of the profits made from the production of goods and services are staying in the hands of the financial sector. In fact the financial sector’s share of profits rose from about 10 percent of profits some thirty years ago to 40 percent in the last few years. So what financialization really means is that financial transactions are becoming more and more prominent in everyday life and they are becoming more and more lucrative, more and more profitable.

You simply couldn't have global production with out the role that finance plays just in this respect, and I'm not even getting into the role that finance plays in terms of venture capital, which was very important in terms of the development of information and technology revolution we just lived through; or the role it plays in terms of facilitating investment. You could do the same for the kind of role that finance plays in terms of making indebted consumers into viable consumers. [....] you can go even further to look at the role that finance plays via channeling workers' savings into pension funds and the role those pension funds play in investing in stock markets, investing in derivatives, and so on, which has to be traced through how that links to production.

[...] You're creating a global capitalism within which the American state and American capital have structural power.

The structural power comes from the fact that that the U.S. is still the dominant country in terms of technology. It's increasingly playing a crucial role in terms of what I raised before--business services, accounting, legal, consulting, engineering, and of course finance. There's more concentration of American power in finance than there is in other sectors. So it's very important not to see imperialism as being only about territorial intervention. And it's very important to understand that this kind of empire grows through actually spreading production, in a sense sharing production globally in a particular way.

UH: It’s to the benefit of the employers of service workers. What’s happened is that the service industries have become more and more Taylorized, in order to maximize the productivity of service workers. The time they spend on eachtask has to be minimized. The tasks become more and more routinized, more and more speeded up. You can talk to anybody who works in a call center and they’ll tell you what the pressure is to keep the length of the calls down, to deal with as many calls a possible, to meet performance targets, et cetera. Now the way that that is done, the time that is saved hasn’t just disappeared into nowhere. It’s been transferred onto the consumer, so paid time has been turned into unpaid time.

The same thing has happened in supermarkets. In the early years of the twentieth century lots and lots of people worked in retailing and they stood behind counters and literally waited on people. They stood there with their aprons on doing nothing until a customer came along and when a customer came along, they said, “What do you want, Madam?” and then bagged up the vegetables, weighed them, did all the labor and handed them out and it was actually physically delivered by a kid on a bike. In my childhood in Britain in the 1950s you’d be sent down to the greengrocers with an order, and then later that afternoon a boy would come along on a bike and deliver it all.

Now all that labor of delivering and all that waiting time and all that time spent bagging up the vegetables and so on have been transferred to the consumer. And also a lot of the cost of transport and storage that used to be born by the industry is transferred to the customer. And this they call increasing productivity—it’s pressurizing and Taylorizing the work of the paid workers, squeezing as much labor out of them as possible. But it’s also transferring all the squeezed-out labor onto all of us as consumers.

And it’s not just that it’s the amount of work has been increased, but it’s also the quality of that work has changed as well. So the kind of autonomy that people used to have in terms of how they structure their consumer experiences has increasingly been ironed out because of the Taylorization of service workers.