For decades, many people on the left have decried the finance sector as the main culprit for the toxic effects of capitalism. Financialization is commonly invoked to explain everything from growing inequality to the housing crises and the destruction of the environment. Only by confronting finance, as the story goes, can there be hope for a more sustainable economy. In this new intervention, Nick Bernards makes the case against the dominance of this story. Arguing that the concept of financialization tends to be ill-understood and overworked, Bernards shows how we risk glossing over the true nature of capitalism when focusing on the mythical powers of finance. The moralistic distinction between harmful ‘financial’ and more honest ‘real’ economies leads to an impasse if we want to understand better how exploitation truly manifests. Rather than indulging in the harmful fantasy that confronting the financial elite will fix the economy, Bernards provides an alternative approach. Starting from the premise that risk and speculation are core to the operation of all capital and not just the hallmark of a perverted financial sector, this Marxist reading of the interconnection between capitalism’s uneven exploitation of labor and nature and financial capital lays the groundwork for a much-needed view of the real powers of finance.
