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A review by heidi_
Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas
4.0
"Confronting financialization includes reasserting the importance of public housing, health, education, pensions, and consumption more generally. It entails the re-imposition of a public spirit across these fields and the ascendancy of the notion of a public right to access basic goods and services...[it] cannot be confronted without re-establishing the ideological primacy of the collective over the individual, and of the public over the private."
Lapavitsas details the pernicious mechanisms by which the financial industry exploits all parties ripe for extraction. He situates his Marxist analysis within a historical overview of the rise of financialization, with special attention paid to the late 2000s crises in the U.S. and Europe. The classic neoliberal-era cocktail of deregulation, liberalization and privitazation has set the stage for rising inequality, devastatingly high personal debt burdens, and broad instability.
"The rise of finance and the penetration of economic life by financial practices have exacerbated the inherent propensity of capitalist accumulation toward instability and crisis."
Here, the author explains how crises are part and parcel of financialized capitalism, which affects micro personal incomes up through macro international capital flows. This framework is rationalized under free market ideology and buttressed by a sharp reduction in the provision of basic social services. We are left with a web of deeply embedded problems which the public ownership model proposed in the final pages seeks to correct.
Admittedly, this took me a while to get through after first getting stuck in the vocab-rich background chapters. With only a handful of economics classes under my belt and none in finance, much of the details went over my head. The content of this book is not widely accessible. That said, the author cannot be faulted for my lack of subject knowledge, and those with experience in related fields would be able to grasp the entirety of his arguments. But if you're like me, feel free to just focus on part three.
Lapavitsas details the pernicious mechanisms by which the financial industry exploits all parties ripe for extraction. He situates his Marxist analysis within a historical overview of the rise of financialization, with special attention paid to the late 2000s crises in the U.S. and Europe. The classic neoliberal-era cocktail of deregulation, liberalization and privitazation has set the stage for rising inequality, devastatingly high personal debt burdens, and broad instability.
"The rise of finance and the penetration of economic life by financial practices have exacerbated the inherent propensity of capitalist accumulation toward instability and crisis."
Here, the author explains how crises are part and parcel of financialized capitalism, which affects micro personal incomes up through macro international capital flows. This framework is rationalized under free market ideology and buttressed by a sharp reduction in the provision of basic social services. We are left with a web of deeply embedded problems which the public ownership model proposed in the final pages seeks to correct.
Admittedly, this took me a while to get through after first getting stuck in the vocab-rich background chapters. With only a handful of economics classes under my belt and none in finance, much of the details went over my head. The content of this book is not widely accessible. That said, the author cannot be faulted for my lack of subject knowledge, and those with experience in related fields would be able to grasp the entirety of his arguments. But if you're like me, feel free to just focus on part three.