Financialization, Labour Market Flexibility, Global Crisis and New Imperialism – A Marxist Perspective

The author remains grateful to the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Hommes for its supports – intellectual and otherwise, for working on this paper at Paris as DEA under the Indo-French Exchange Programme of the Institute. In this regard, the author particularly wants to gratefully acknowledge the support and comments of Max Jean Zins, Pierre Salama, Jaques Sapir, Jean-Luc Racine and Rada Ivekovic. Also, the author remains grateful to Sunanda Sen, Anjan Chakrabarti and Anup Dhar for their intellectual assistance in shaping the ideas contained in this paper. The author remains solely responsible for all the errors and omissions.

Financialization refers to the over-arching presence of the interest of global finance in every sphere of economic life – be it real or financial. Neo-liberalism, globalisation and financialization are three distinct yet mutually inter-related processes which at the present time are furthering the cause of global capitalism world over. The labour ultimately remains the risk-bearing factor in all these processes, which is obvious in terms of flexible labour regime. There is, on the one hand, de-regulation of finance and on the other, re-regulation of labour (through labour flexibility); and to our understanding global finance and its circuits of operation cannot be sustained without this flexible labour regime which ensures more and more transfer of surplus in the direction of finance. Global crisis is inherent in these processes of neoliberal globalisation and financialization through which present day global capitalism wants to thrive. So, an alternative needs to be sought in a pro-labour regime which would negate both financialization and neo-liberal globalization.