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ABSTRACT
The conception of financialization and the impacts of the oil market will be presented in this work from an alternative perspective. Financialization will not be analyzed as a dominance of finance over industry, as if these two sides of the productive process were dissociated. Financialization will be understood as a moment of expansion of a mechanism of domination, reaching not only the state-form and enterprise, but also the own constitution of the social being as an “individual capitalist,” being part of the process of constitution of form-value. Oil, from production to the market, cannot be seen only in a reduced view of its high incomes. Oil must be understood as a social relationship. Oil from the 1980s onwards became one of the central elements of support for the US dollar, therefore, of support for the international monetary system. In addition to this new social role of sustaining the international currency that oil now has, this commodity also incorporates a determined form of social relation through its imposition as an energy source. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to show how both financialization and recent developments in the oil market are part of the actual constellation of the forms of capitalist social relations.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The idea of the new capitalist forms beginning in the 1980s as a new capitalist form comprising the “social individual” can be seen in Boltanski and Chiapello (Citation2005) and Dardot and Laval (Citation2010, Citation2013),
the main innovation of neoliberal technology precisely consists in directly connecting the way to person “is governed from without” to the way that he governs himself from within. In the new world of the “developing society,” individuals must no longer regard themselves as workers, but enterprises that sell to serve in the market. (Dardot and Laval Citation2013, 379–380)
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Notes on contributors
Iderley Colombini
Iderley Colombini is a permanent professor at the Institute of Economics in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IE-UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. He conducts studies on critical theory, capitalist economic development, and the inter-relationship of economy and politics in a “new Marxist perspective.” His latest work is “Form and Essence of Precarization by Work: From Alienation to the Industrial Reserve Army at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” in Review of Radical Political Economics (2020).