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In Locke's philosophy money is 'naturalised' and thus ostensibly removed from political contestation. Locke has been criticised for marginalising monetary politics, and thus downplaying the conventional character of money that could potentially allow for democratic monetary reform. Drawing on Marx's writings, this paper shows that money is indeed a social convention, but its inherent economic functioning restricts its susceptibility to political contestation. There are limits to the democratic reform of money in a capitalist economy that spring from money's own nature. Specifically, the politics of money is rooted in the tension between money as measure of value and money as unit of account. The state draws political power from setting the unit of account, but the measurement of value occurs spontaneously among commodity producers, thereby generating tension that curbs monetary politics. In contemporary conditions, this is typified by central banks having the freedom to manage the unit of account but subject to heavy economic constraints rooted in value measurement. In this light, democratic monetary reform requires restricting the spontaneous measurement of value, thus intervening at the heart of the capitalist economy. For money to be democratic it needs to have a much narrower range of economic functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current crisis is one outcome of the financialisation of contemporary capitalism. It arose in the USA because of the enormous expansion of mortgage-lending, including to the poorest layers of the working class. It became general because of the trading of debt by financial institutions. Th ese phenomena are integral to financialisation. During the last three decades, large enterprises have turned to open markets to obtain finance, forcing banks to seek alternative sources of profit. One avenue has been provision of financial services to individual workers. Th is trend has been facilitated by the retreat of public provision from housing, pensions, education, and so on. A further avenue has been to adopt investment-banking practices in open financial markets. Th e extraction of financial profi ts directly out of personal income constitutes financial expropriation. Combined with investment-banking, it has catalysed the current gigantic crisis. More broadly, financialisation has sustained the emergence of new layers of rentiers, defined primarily through their relation to the financial system rather than ownership of loanable capital. Finally, financialisation has posed important questions regarding finance-capital and imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Costas Lapavitsas charts the growth of the 'unstable, unequal and slow-growing' system of financialised capitalism that has taken root in mature economies over the past 40 years, and outlines initial steps to disentangling businesses, services, workers and households from its grasp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the Royal Society of Arts event on "How to Change the Post-Crash Economy." The panelists at the event included Ben Chew, Economics Editor of The Independent; economics professor Costas Lapavitsas; and Paul Mason, Culture and Digital Editor of Channel 4 News. They discussed financialisation of contemporary mature capitalism, and increasing involvement of households in the activities of the financial system.

Financialization is a systemic transformation of capitalism that has occurred during the last four decades. This paper shows that the concept of financialization originates in Marxist theory, though its meaning remains unclear. It then proposes a theory of financialization as rooted in the altered behaviour of the fundamental agents of capitalist accumulation, including non-financial corporations, banks and workers. Finance has reshaped the activities of all three, also resulting in new forms of profit. It follows that opposing financialization is a complex process that involves creating public financial institutions but also re-establishing public provision for workers across a broad range of activities. Financialization cannot be reversed without re-establishing the command of the social and collective over the private and individual for the modern era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financialisation remains an unclear term in social science. We deploy a Marxist framework to establish that financialisation represents a structural transformation of advanced capitalist economies with three characteristic tendencies: non-financial enterprises have acquired capacity to engage in financial activities independently; banks have turned to mediating transactions in open markets as well as lending to households; and households have been drawn into the formal financial system. Nonetheless, despite common underlying tendencies, both the form and the content taken by financialisation vary according to institutional, historical and political conditions in each country. We use data from the USA, the UK, Japan, Germany and France to establish both the underlying tendencies and the specific forms of financialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current crisis is one outcome of the financialisation of contemporary capitalism. It arose in the USA because of the enormous expansion of mortgage-lending, including to the poorest layers of the working class. It became general because of the trading of debt by financial institutions. These phenomena are integral to financialisation. During the last three decades, large enterprises have turned to open markets to obtain finance, forcing banks to seek alternative sources of profit. One avenue has been provision of financial services to individual workers. This trend has been facilitated by the retreat of public provision from housing, pensions, education, and so on. A further avenue has been to adopt investment-banking practices in open financial markets. The extraction of financial profits directly out of personal income constitutes financial expropriation. Combined with investment-banking, it has catalysed the current gigantic crisis. More broadly, financialisation has sustained the emergence of new layers of rentiers, defined primarily through their relation to the financial system rather than ownership of loanable capital. Finally, financialisation has posed important questions regarding finance-capital and imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new interpretation (NI) offers a particular understanding of important problems in value theory, especially the value of money and labor power and the structure and dynamics of capitalist accumulation. The NI is to be welcomed for raising these issues but not for the way in which it has dealt with them. Above all, the NI falsely assumes that value is directly and immediately represented by money. The authors propose alternatives that emphasize the processes (mediations) through which value is expressed as price. They draw on an alternative methodology and understanding of money, the value of labor power, and production and circulation of capital in the context of accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monetary theory based on commodity money possesses sound foundations for analysis of capitalist monetary phenomena. "Valueless" forms of money (fiat and credit) have their roots in the nature and functions of commodity money. The evolution of the form of money is explained by the adequacy of each particular form for the functions which money is called to perform in capitalist exchange. Performing these functions encourages the development of money's form, leading to the emergence of several types of non-commodity ("valueless") money. This paper considers especially the adequacy of commodity, fiat, and credit money as means of exchange; adequacy is fully specified by examining determination of the exchange value of these forms of money. The process of determination is different for each: spontaneous hoarding for the first, arbitrary specification of quantity for the second, credit advance and repayment for the third. In this context, it is shown that the intrinsic value of commodity money can play an anchoring role for money's exchange value. The quantity theory of money has explanatory power with regard to the exchange value of fiat money and, under certain conditions, of credit money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews Robert Brenner's 'The Economics of Global Turbulence', New Left Review, May/June, 1998. Several decisive weaknesses of Brenner's contribution are identified. First, Brenner's theoretical treatment of capitalist competition and accumulation is in the spirit of Adam Smith and mainstream economics rather than Marx. Second, Brenner ignores the significance of credit for capitalist crisis. Third, he leaves entirely out of account the internationalisation of production and finance, phenomena which constitute the most salient feature of the contemporary global economy. Fourth, in short, Brenner's approach is not at all value-theoretic, a weakness that can also be found in some of his earlier historical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses various issues related to the transition and crisis in the Japanese financial system. The Japanese financial system has been in prolonged crisis throughout the 1990s. There is no single reason for these phenomena. Financial crises typically are complex events that express a variety of underlying contradictions and antagonisms of capitalist production and exchange. Important explanatory elements of the emergence of the Japanese financial "bubble" and of the especial difficulties of post-"bubble" restructuring, are to be found in the very process of financial deregulation attempted throughout the 1980s. This process arose spontaneously and it was not imposed from abroad. Still, deregulation began to influence the character of the Japanese financial system changing it from a bank-based, state-controlled structure aiming at the financing of industrial investment to a market-based, less-state-controlled structure characterized by the competitive profit maximization of financial institutions. In other words, from being a paradigmatic model of 'late developer' long-term industrial lending, the Japanese system began to move toward the market-based short-term lending Anglo-Saxon model.

A preface for the March 1999 issue of the journal "Capital & Class" is presented.