There are historically contingent forms of capitalist organization molded by secular tendencies in the system together with the struggle among social and class forces. The oscillating role that finance has played at different places and in different moments in the history of world capitalism is a reflection of this historical movement. The rise to hegemony of transnational finance capital is a major historical development of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Financial markets concentrate wealth; they appropriate value from other circuits that have, in turn, appropriated it from labor. With the deregulation and liberalization of financial markets worldwide in the 1980s and 1990s and the introduction of CIT, national financial systems have merged into an increasingly integrated global financial system - a monstrous global complex that allows for hitherto unknown concentrations of social power, including the ability to dictate to states and to other circuits of accumulation. The officers, directors, and owners of financial corporations (banks, insurance companies, securities firms, etc.) are usually at the center of interlocking directorates in the corporate economy. However, the concept of finance capital does not refer exclusively to individuals or institutions in the financial sector; it refers to the preponderant weight of the financial sector in relation to the capitalist economy overall. In this sense, transnational finance capital is at the center of the global capitalist economy and is the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale. Marazzi observes how the entire (global) economy has become financialized: The process of financialization that led to the crisis we are living in now is distinct from all other phases of financialization historically recorded in the twentieth century .. .. Financial crises . . . based on a contradictory relationship between real and financial economies, [is] a relationship that today is no longer expressed in the same terms. The financial economy today is pervasive, that is, it spreads across the entire economic cycle, co-existing with it, so to speak, from start to finish. Figuratively speaking, finance is present even when you go shopping at the supermarket and use your credit card. The automobile industry, to give only one example, functions entirely upon credit mechanisms (installments, leasing, etc.), so that the problems of a General Motors have just as much to do with the production of cars as, if not above all, with the weakness of GMAC, its branch specializing in consumer credit, indispensable for selling their products to consumers. This means that we are in a historic period in which finance is cosubstantial with the very production of goods and services.
Colonialization of the Globe through Militarized Accumulation
