Financialisation means that money invades everywhere. That speculative capital is hegemonic. The banks no longer lend for productive investments or for people to buy what they need or to do research. No, the banks thrive on the buying and selling of papers. When they announce, with all their zeros, at the end of each day, how much each stock market has moved, no goods have been produced, nor has a job been generated.

Finance capital was born to support agriculture, to advance capital to be redeemed after the harvest. Today this capital has become a hegemonic sector in the economies, an end in itself.

When the former cycle of capitalism ended, the triumphalist diagnosis said that the economy had ceased to grow because there were too many obstacles, too many regulations. We had to do away with them so that, according to Ronald Reagan, the economy would begin to grow and everyone would profit again.

The regulations were cancelled -- the central programme of neoliberalism -- but there was no return to growth. Because, as Marx said, capital is not made to produce but to accumulate. Without limits, capital was transferred, in gigantic quantities, to the financial sector, which is where it gains the most, pays the least taxes and has total liquidity.  There is no division between productive and speculative capitalists. Every large economic group has a bank or a centre of investment, from which they gain more than in their original activities.

Freed from limits, capital was concentrated in its financial expression, as speculative capital, which only sells and buys papers, and lives on indebtedness -- of countries, businesses, and persons. One that feeds on debts, and feeds debts.

When the present crisis began in the centre of capitalism, Obama said that we had to save the banks, otherwise their roofs would cave in on all of our heads. The banks were saved, they are doing well, God be thanked; those that finally went broke were the countries.

In a world thus dominated by money, there is no room for politics, as a space for people’s decision-making on the destiny of society. They can speak up, but if they speak for a different logic to that of the banks, they live in frustration because the networks of power leave no space for another logic that is not that of financial speculation.

Policy-making is thus countercurrent to contemporary capitalist logic, neoliberal logic, that seeks to impose the interests of financial capital. Whoever moves into this logic is devoured by it. Politics in practice is building alternatives that privilege social policies, rather than fiscal adjustments; that promote processes of regional integration and not free trade agreements; that recover the ability of States and governments to act and to make policy.

To act in this direction means to be condemned by international financial organisms, the big media and traditional parties. But it is the only way to rescue the right of people to choose their own destiny, as against the destiny defined by money and the banks.

31/08/2015

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop) 

- Emir Sader, Brazilian Sociologist and Political Scientist, is the Coordinator of the Laboratorio de Políticas Públicas, Universidad Estadual de Rio de Janeiro (Uerj).