Michael Hudson argues that a new form of financial capitalism has displaced the industrial capitalism of Marx’s day. Unlike earlier capitalists, whose pursuit of lower costs led to improvements in the organization of production, the typical wealth owner today is a passive rentier who, like a feudal landlord, merely claims the surplus from existing production processes. Some form of this vision of financialization is widely held, but, I argue, misleading. It exaggerates the differences between historical and present-day capitalism, and misses the ways in which “finance” and “industry” form complementary parts of a single process.
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