From Marxist Political Economy to Financialization or Is It the Other Way About?

Financialization and Militarization: An Empirical Investigation

“…1 For example, Krippner defines it as "a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production" (Krippner 2005: 174; see also Krippner 2011) whereas, for Epstein, it is "[the] increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies" (Epstein 2005: 3). For Fine, financialization is the intensive and extensive accumulation of fictitious capital (or interest-bearing capital) in the accumulation of capital (Fine 2009(Fine , 2010.…”

“…He argues that explaining the rise of finance "as some external force impinging on the economy" or "as a response to accumulation problems in the non-financial parts of the economy" fails to present the complex and contradictory role of the financial sector (Orhangazi 2016: 249). Among Marxist thought, while Ben Fine (2009Fine ( , 2010Fine ( , 2021 and the Monthly Review school used the term along with neoliberalism and globalization within the Marxist analytical framework, Lapavitsas and Bryan referred to financialization as a Note that Smith (1977) challenged Baran and Sweezy's underconsumptionist explanation of high military spending in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. He showed that military expenditure reduces economic growth because it crowds out investment, and therefore productivity.…”

“…Demir (2009b) is the only study that tests this hypothesis, examining the effect of financial investments and rate of return on fixed investment and capital accumulation in Mexico and Turkey. According to Fine, the relationship between financialization and neoliberalism has been direct and integral, where the former becomes the short definition of the latter (Fine 2009(Fine , 2010. In this setting, monopoly-finance capital has responded to the fall in profitability by expanding its coverage toward new areas, such as insurance and pension systems, by means of the predator state, 5 both in the United States and across the world (Galbraith 2008;Foster and McChesney 2012).…”