[...] it's not that production has disappeared, but the geography of financialised capitalism is very different from the geography of those previous capitalisms. A huge amount of manufacturing is now located in the global South, in the so-called BRICS.
Those parts of the world used to be the hunting grounds for exactly the sort of extractivism and expropriation that you're describing. They were just places to be looted for dependent coerced labour, for land, for mineral wealth. So the form that capitalism took there was not premised so much on the exploitation of free labour power as on the expropriation of unfree, independent populations, who lacked a state to protect them.
I would describe financialised capitalism today as scrambling what used to be a sharper distinction between exploitation and expropriation. It used to be that expropriation was over there, and that was something that you did to people of colour, basically. Exploitation of the free worker, who receives the socially necessary costs of his, and maybe even his family's, own reproduction, that's whites, those are Europeans, that's over here.
These two worlds are completely scrambled now. There is plenty of exploitation over there and there's plenty of expropriation over here, and even the colour line that used to divide these things is mixed up, as workers in the global North, supposedly free workers, are often not paid the full socially necessary costs of their reproduction. They are forced to go into debt in order to meet their present day living costs.
So we have student debt, we have pay day loans we have credit cards, we have mortgages, microcredit. That's not even talking about sovereign debt, which is part of that scrambling. You can be exploited and expropriated at the same time, and most of us actually are. That strikes me as historically new. It's not that production disappears, but it's done by others.
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