Financialization challenges some established ways of thinking within Marxist categories. We explore the way in which financialization is not simply shifting the balance of power between classes and generating economic volatility, but also re-constituting our understanding of class (as a formal economic category) and class relations. In particular, we examine how financialization is re-constituting labor as a form of capital, and giving capital a fluidity which serves to intensify competition. JEL classification: B51, G32

The growing production and sale of intangible commodities and services, along with their enabling intangible assets is one of the key historical developments of our epoch. Yet many current analyses of production and trade remain rooted in industrial modes of organisation. This paper builds an analysis of intangible assets that engages with the emergent Global Wealth Chains (GWCs) concept. The rise of intangible assets and other forms of abstract capital has been significant, but has occurred in ways that have confounded extant measures and regulatory concepts of accumulation and wealth. The expanded spatial and jurisdictional deployment of these forms of capital by multinational corporations in GWCs has been central to widespread recognition of a growing disjuncture between the locations of value creation and the spatial and jurisdictional appropriation of wealth. The unbundling of attributes of activity and value from corporations and nation-states has also been facilitated by innovations in finance and jurisdictional forms, coalescing notably in the rise of Offshore Financial Centres (OFCs). The offshore world has a history of pioneering new forms of economic and financial organisation, and changing political and regulatory spaces and temporalities. A large and growing proportion of the world's intangible capital now resides in or passes through OFCs. This article explores the longer-term implications of accumulation of internationalised capital in intangible and abstract forms, and the prominent role of finance and offshore finance in giving mobility and fluidity to these forms of capital. The analysis suggests that limited regulatory traction on the labour, environmental and fiscal activities occurring in Global Value Chains (GVCs) is not simply due to a lack of political will, but also a function of conceptual and regulatory ambiguity in the face of historic transformations in accumulation. While the GVC approach has helped us to better follow increasingly fragmented and fluid networks of commodity production, and distribution, there is also a need to better follow the global double life of internationalised abstract and intangible wealth, and the parallel way state forms are being reorganised in response to those transformations.

The period since the global financial crisis has seen financial derivatives not only grow quantitatively in financial markets but also expand socially as a calculative logic, giving increasing precision to the concept of capital and hence class relations. The logic of derivatives involves deconstructing 'things' into a spectrum of tradable risks. The article identifies the ways in which this logic is spreading into an increasing range of social, economic and political policy domains. It posits how, through the logic of derivatives, a range of sociological issues can be seen and re-thought through the eyes of financial calculus.

The term ‘financialization’ has acquired significant popularity. This paper evaluates some of the leading applications and identifies the need to link the process of financialization to capitalist class relations. The link we focus on is the way in which financial derivatives impose global competitive calculation on capital, with direct implications for the disciplining of labour. This class dimension becomes the basis of a progressive, transformational politics that focuses not on growing financial fragility in capital markets, but on the ways in which financialization is socializing both accumulation and daily life.

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