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Is there life after debt? Revolution in the age of financial capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Ole Bjerg
Ole Bjerg*
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
*
Corresponding author: Ole Bjerg, Copenhagen Business School, Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark. Email: ob.mpp@cbs.dk
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Abstract

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What happens to classic Marxist notions of revolution, exploitation and class struggle under the premise that we live in the age of financial rather than industrial capitalism? In this essay I argue that the logic of finance is the main structuring principle of the circulation of value, capital, and money today. Accordingly, we should no longer just think of class struggle in terms of workers and capitalists but also in terms of debtors and creditors. In financial capitalism class is determined by one's position relative to the production of money. This also means that a contemporary idea of revolution is a matter of radical change in the way that money comes into being.

Keywords

Capitalismexploitationdebtmoneyfinancialisationrevolution
Type
Essay
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 1 , Issue 1: Hard cash , 2015 , pp. 81 - 89
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2015 The Author(s)

References

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