Fictions of Financialization, by Nick Bernards

Reviewed by Peter Gratton

Nick Bernards, Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation & 21st Century Capitalism (London, Pluto Press, 2025), 260 pp.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Senate Budget Committee issued a bipartisan study on the effects of private equity’s deep incursion into the American healthcare market.^[1] The report reads less like a tedious budget document than as a horror novel in its depiction of the grim realities of not just the privatisation but the financialization of healthcare in much of the country. Just some details at just some of the facilities mentioned give you a quick sense of the wider portrait: a nurse practitioner at the private equity-owned Ottumwa Regional Health Center (OHRC) in Iowa sexually assaulted at least nine incapacitated female patients, while staff concerns about his behaviour went unaddressed because of concerns over managerial costs. At Manchester Memorial Hospital in Connecticut, an ‘immediate jeopardy’— the most severe level of noncompliance in healthcare regulations—was identified in 2018 for failing to provide adequate quality of care to a high-risk pregnant patient, resulting in her death. Both Rockville General Hospital and Waterbury Hospital in Connecticut were cited multiple times for failing to maintain safe physical environments, including one ‘immediate jeopardy,’ at Waterbury.^[2] At Crozer-Chester Medical Center (CCMC) in Pennsylvania, serious violations included failing to properly disinfect endoscopes prior to reuse and exposing patients to serious infections due to inadequate staff training and oversight. CCMC was also cited for the medical staff’s failure to respond in a timely manner to patients in distress, and in the last year alone, it’s had multiple fires and floods.

The employees at each of these places reported their concerns in surveys and official reports gathered by the Senate Committee: An ORHC nurse wrote, ‘This facility is dirty and it is embarrassing to try and explain to patients and their family when you find something unclean’. Elsewhere, an employee reported being ‘forced to utilise outdated/end of life equipment due to no $ to replace what is needed’. Another noted, ‘We are very low paid employees regardless of our time with the organisation. We are expected to do a lot of work for a little pay and work not in the scope of our job description or credentials so we have a lot of turn over…. We have college educations and are paid less than department store employees’. These aren’t workers under the yoke of threadbare operations. Each of these hospitals—previously solvent or profitable—was managed or owned by private equity groups, such as Leonard Green & Partners (LGP; $75 billion in holdings), that have extracted hundreds of millions from health care facilities in the last decade.

More often than not, this is how class politics plays out in America, less through layoffs and labour strife than through the language of mark-to-market valuations and annualised rates of return as communities are stripped of vital services, workers toil under horrific conditions and vast sums are extracted by cosseted managers whose expertise in financial engineering is matched by an eagerness to cash in before moving on to the next play in whatever sector might provide it. This rise of private equity in health care is only one way that the long process of financialization in the U.S. is fundamentally changing critical parts of our common world, the subject of Nick Bernards’ Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation & 21st Century Capitalism.

Fictions of Financialization is a book that critiques both the exploitative nature of finance and the dominant ‘financialization narrative’ in contemporary political economy. The book argues that while finance has undoubtedly grown in prominence since the 1970s, explaining this through stories of finance capital’s expansionary drive obscures more than it reveals about contemporary capitalism. Before examining this overarching narrative and Bernards’ critique of it, it’s worth outlining his argument and focusing on his central claims about labour and the production of value.

Bernards begins with an intellectual genealogy of financialization, showing how it emerged from 1980s concerns over ‘casino capitalism’ in the work of figures like Giovanni Arrighi, especially in The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times.^[3] He demonstrates that despite their varied applications, most uses of ‘financialization’ share three core premises: that it represents a discrete post-1970s periodisation, that capital has shifted orientation from ‘real’ to ‘financial’ activities, and that finance exhibits inherently expansionary tendencies seeking new terrains for speculation.

The book’s theoretical core develops an alternative ‘process view’ of finance capital, drawn from Marx’s notes on money and credit and David Harvey. Rather than treating finance as a separate power bloc—that is, either separable as a ‘class’ of power (e.g., wealthy financiers) or a separate type of value production—Bernards argues that financial relations are integral to capitalism’s basic circuit of value realisation, emerging from and amplifying the temporal and spatial contradictions inherent in capital accumulation. For Bernards, financialization isn’t new since all capital is fundamentally speculative, making finance intrinsic rather than external to capitalist productions of value.

Bernards then applies this framework across three empirical domains. His analysis of finance and production challenges narratives of productive stagnation, instead tracing how financial expansion has been co-constituted with the radical geographical and organisational restructuring of global capitalism since the 1970s—including the rise of China, the development of global production networks, and new forms of managerial control (his rereading of the supposed ‘shareholder supremacy’ movement in the 1980s alone makes the book worth reading). He also examines recent work on finance and ecology to critique ‘financialization of nature’ arguments, showing through cases like California water futures how finance has always been integral to capitalism’s production of nature rather than only recently colonising an external natural realm. The ‘securitisation’ of nature, in this sense, wouldn’t be new, either. Finally, his analysis of finance and the state reframes the contemporary turn to privatisation in development policy not as evidence of finance capital’s direct power, but as reflecting capitalist states’ increasingly limited options for addressing accelerating social and ecological contradictions.

Throughout, Bernards argues that the financialization narrative, despite its critical intentions, leads toward politically limiting conclusions by suggesting that confronting finance capital directly offers a route toward transformation. The central argument of Bernards’ book is compelling: rather than treating finance as a parasitic force that has colonised an otherwise healthy, productive economy, we should understand financial processes as integral to capitalism’s basic operations.

Bernards marshals evidence from both the recent economic history and Marx, particularly the second volume of Capital, to show that capitalism and financialization have always been coextensive.^[4] For Bernards, this poses grave problems for a widely held ‘financialization narrative’ that has formed since the early 1980s, alongside the supposed financialization it describes. I have doubts about Bernards’ central thesis, pressed as it is into the service of valiantly trying to redescribe the present in terms of categories found here and there in Marx’s oeuvre. While that kind of puppeteering is common enough in Continental philosophy, where anything that can be said is often made to come out of the mouth of some master, it’s more remarkable because Bernards otherwise offers among the best critical accounts of financialization in some time. This is no small achievement in a field where scholars typically master either the philosophical and theoretical frameworks or the intricacies of contemporary finance, but rarely both. Indeed, in a period when critical works on financial capitalism appear almost weekly, Bernards’s is the best in a whole string of them, many of which are tedious in just the way Bernards’ Fictions of Financialization would suggest—either theoretically rigorous but empirically thin, or rich in financial detail but philosophically superficial. He is careful in sundering the fictions of financialization (a paraphrase from Marx about financial capital) from the fictions of the narrative of financialization (the supposed story of capitalism over the last 40 years or so). He also greatly helps us to understand whether we can still make sense of capitalism using traditional analytical categories, or whether the transformations of recent decades require us to fundamentally rethink how we understand value, exploitation, and economic power in the 21st century. However, while I wouldn’t go as far as his opponents in the book, I think clearly much has changed, and I worry his need to return to Marx at each turn means he has to underplay those tectonic shifts, something that becomes as analytically problematic as politically inert.

The Financialization Narrative

The financialization narrative, as Bernards rightly depicts it, is both moralising and simplifying, and its appeal lies in how it limits criticism of capitalism to finance without touching capitalism’s exploitative core. Strip away the numbers and references to opaque derivatives, and the story becomes a familiar moral tale:

Once upon a time, before Thatcher and Reagan, capitalism was honest work—companies made things, banks lent money to help them make more things, and everyone knew the difference between building wealth and gambling with it. But sometime around the 1970s, finance, which had been the faithful servant of production, started to become its master. Instead of just making cars or computers, companies found it was often more remunerative to make money from money itself (the classic definition of usury)—Jack Welch’s General Electric is usually given as a prime example. Instead of investing in factories and workers, they bought back their own stock. Instead of saving for retirement through solid pensions, ordinary people were forced to gamble their futures in the casino of Wall Street. Markets that once helped fund production became parasitic, what was once stable became speculative, and what was once communal became individualised. We’ve lost our way, and the path back requires restraining finance and returning to the honest work of making things.

This narrative is seductive because it lets its teller side with the good guys—productive workers, responsible savers, companies that actually make things—against the villains: financial speculators, short-term profit maximisers, and rent-seeking financiers. It’s a story of corruption and fall from grace, complete with a golden age (mid-20th-century manufacturing), a moment of corruption (1980s deregulation), a near-death experience (2008 financial crisis), and an implicit promise of redemption if we can just return to ‘real’ capitalism.

The specifics of this transformation are well-documented. As Bernards notes, ‘Commentators in the business press, academia, and on the left in the latter parts of the 1980s shared a growing sense of an imbalance between “productive” and “speculative” economies, and that the financial casino running amok lay at the root of persistent stagnation and instability’ (4). These moralising claims unite strange bedfellows—from much of the left to Warren Buffett to far-right populists advocating a ‘manly’ return to manufacturing (2-5). However, this alliance fractures when examining financialization’s other dimensions. While financial sectors captured increasing shares of economic profits, middle America’s retirements were simultaneously handed over to Wall Street through 401(k)s and passive index funds—a shift advocated by manufacturing leaders happy to offload pension burdens onto individual workers. Meanwhile, financial capital expanded into previously non-commodified realms: credit cards proliferated and investment accounts tied ordinary welfare to market performance. Education, healthcare, and nature itself became tradeable assets via another part of this era’s changes: the vast rise in derivatives trading. During all this, financial assets climbed significantly as a percentage of overall GDP (see chart).

In the early 1980s, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange began offering options detached from underlying commodities like wheat and oil. For much of economic history, aptly named derivatives have existed as financial instruments tied to tangible goods—Aristotle, for example, depicts Thales making a killing with olive harvest options. The CME’s ‘innovation’ was to get regulatory approval to sell purely financial derivatives, spawning increasingly elaborate architectures of speculation: derivatives based on other derivatives, interest rates, or foreign exchange rates; credit default swaps betting on mortgage-backed securities; and synthetic CDOs referencing other CDOs rather than actual mortgages. By the 2000s, volatility derivatives allowed trading on market shifts themselves. Today’s ETFs package these together for retail investors to buy shares in just as they would for Walmart Inc. or Apple Inc., creating vast chains of financial abstraction bearing virtually no connexion to productive activity. Those wowed in recent years by the tech engineers making ever smaller computing instruments might wish to take a gander at the ‘ingenuity’ of financial engineers turning out ever more opaque and complicated financial products with increasing rapidity.

For reasons we’ll get into, Bernards argues that much of this isn’t really new to capitalism. But he could also have noted that the broad narrative isn’t novel either. Thorstein Veblen, for example, in his work on the leisure classes of the late 19^th century, counterposed ‘the collective interests of any modern community centre in industrial efficiency’ with a ‘pecuniary class’ of ‘parasitic’ shareholders appropriating money from productive classes.^[5] Veblen worried that the era’s financialization meant long-term investing was out while quick scores were in, and that ‘equity, fair dealing, and workmanlike integrity’ was increasingly to be avoided if it meant restraining profits.^[6] What’s more, he later argued it was likely that many in finance had ‘an interest in making the disturbances of the system large and frequent, since it is in the conjunctures of change that their gain emerges,’ that is, they were purposely triggering market volatility for profit, an often-heard commentary today and not far from the ubiquitous advice in April 2025 for retail investors to ‘buy the dip’.^[7]

The 2008 crisis seemed to provide the financial narrative’s moral climax, revealing finance’s dangers. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that in 2008, many Marxists cheered the crisis as the ‘end of “fictitious” capital and “artificial” assets.’^[8] Yet almost twenty years later, retail investors eagerly embrace new financial products, switching between Robinhood and sports betting apps with equal abandon, while institutional investors have funnelled money into crypto via bitcoin ETFs and shares in the S&P 500, which now includes Coinbase, a major crypto firm.^[9]

Marx’s Ghost in the Machine

If your economic theory depends on even a vague notion of the labour theory of value—still a reflexive lay view, it’s common to the classical political economy of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx—you might be sensing some real trouble at this point—in what way is the elevated price of bitcoin related to production of any sort? Bernards takes this on by arguing that financialization doesn’t impose itself on production from the outside but emerges from contradictions already present in capitalist social relations. He thus sets out to reject the nostalgia for pre-financialization manufacturing.

For readers of this journal, an analogy that might help would be Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence in Of Grammatology and other late 1960s works. There, Derrida demonstrates how various thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition consistently privilege speech over writing, treating writing as a secondary, parasitic supplement to an original, present meaning that speech supposedly delivers directly. Similarly, the orthodox Marxists and others Bernards critiques treat finance as a potentially parasitic force that must be grounded in ‘real’ production to preserve Marx’s labour theory of value. Both long for a non-mechanical, very live origin (the speaking or labouring subject).

In fact, Derrida’s later Specters of Marx will extend his deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence by suggesting an analogical relation to Marx’s considerations of labour vs. social value and use value vs. exchange value, aiming to show his substantialized or non-relational notions of labour or use value are untenable without their relations to their supposed others (the social value of labour or exchange value, respectively) in a manner akin in Of Grammatology to speaking and writing.^[10] Samuel Chambers argues that Derrida failed to read Marx directly on such notions—it’s true that no one comes away from Specters wowed by Derrida’s minute readings of the footnotes of Capital—in which case he would have seen, in a manner consonant with what Bernards argues in Fictions of Financialization, that, for Marx, labour isn’t an origin, it isn’t some x beyond the system of values in which it arises. Instead, in much the way Bernards will argue, Marx is making ‘radical, historicist claims about the unique and absolutely perverse nature of labour within a capitalist social formation’.^[11] In this way, it’s not Marx who has a substantialized labour theory of value—it’s capitalism.

Perhaps, but however much we try to complicate Marx on this point—with some tweaks in Fictions of Financialization, he will unsurprisingly turn out to have much the same view of contemporary finance as Bernards does—a rather less complex view is found in Capital, especially the third volume, when it comes to caching out where this all eventually takes us, namely the relationship between finance and production.

Referring to terms that together stand in for financial capital during that period, Marx argued that ‘both usury and commerce exploit the various modes of production’ and ‘do not create [production], but attack it from the outside’.^[12] In volume I of Capital, Marx had famously said that capital ‘is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’.^[13] He comes back to the metaphor in volume 3 when discussing usury capital:

It does not alter the mode of production, but attaches itself to it as a parasite and makes it miserable. It sucks its blood, kills its nerve, and compels reproduction to proceed under even more disheartening conditions….[It] impoverishes this mode of production, paralyzes the productive forces instead of developing them.^[14]

The conclusion to draw from any reference to blood-sucking vampires is hard to miss, but Bernards argues we need to read Marx beyond such passages. In the first volume of Capital, he argues, finance is discussed as ‘always already’ integral to capitalist production—finance is needed to get a massive factory built, for example—as in Marx’s formula in chapter four of volume 1 of Capital of capitalism as reducible to M-C-M’. In addition to complicating a simplified version of Marx on finance, Bernards also argues that Marx isn’t an adherent of a naïve labour theory of value (the substantialized notion mentioned above) available in Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who posited that the pricing of commodities is determined in some manner by the amount of socially necessary labour time required to produce them, making human labour the ultimate source and measure of economic value. But part of the blame for Derrida and others reading Marx like this is that it’s long been the orthodox Marxist reading, Bernards suggests. That reading centres on Marx’s discussion of surplus value in the first volume of Capital and treats value as something that ‘can only be “created” through wage work in production organised along very narrowly defined capitalist lines’ (53). This approach, he rightly argues, creates significant problems when applied to finance capital, leading to mechanical distinctions between ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ activities.

Bernards cites Costas Lapavitsas’ influential work as emblematic of this substantialized Marx. Lapavitsas relies on the term ‘expropriation’ for financial profits, rather than the ‘exploitation’ of capitalist production, to describe financial activities, arguing that financial expropriation ‘is an additional source of profit that originates in the sphere of circulation,’ while ‘exploitation’ occurs ‘in production and remains the cornerstone of contemporary capitalist economies’ (53). This distinction, Bernards contends, is ‘much too clean a dividing line between the exploitation of labour in the workplace and through debt, and between productive and financial activity on the part of capital’.

For Bernards, Lapavitsas’ work helps to reveal a fundamental flaw in the orthodox approach:

The main stumbling block here… is to do with the assumption that value is a tangible quantum with a specific origin—or in other words, the assumption that value is a thing that must be ‘created’ at a specific point in the circuit of capital. (54)

Bernards’ critique of this would seem to protect him from any accusation of a mystification of some labouring origin, some point of ‘creation’ that all future value is tethered to. We’ll come back to this. For now, the point is that Bernard argues that this reification of value leads to what he calls ‘a curious kind of analogism’ where different scholars propose that ‘risk is to financial value as labour is to productive value,’ treating financial and productive values as parallel but separate processes. He finds a similar conclusion in Carolyn Hardin’s Capturing Finance, which suggests that ‘for finance, the principle that enacts abstract domination within society and is the condition of possibility of the capture of value is risk’ (57). In this way, many scholars have taken the notion of risk at the heart of much neoliberal discourse and then slotted it in as the substance-like source of speculative value in finance, akin to what labour is said to do in the productive industries. Bernards is right to be suspicious of this ‘curious’ substitution of risk for labour and the spurious parallelism that follows.

Bernards also critically engages with recent attempts to move beyond orthodox Marxism, particularly those influenced by Moishe Postone’s value-form theory. While far more friendly to Postone’s insights about the abstract and alienating character of capitalist social relations, Bernards argues that many applications of this approach to finance have gone too far in the direction of abandoning labour as a ‘source’ of value altogether. Indeed, Hardin had argued for revising Postone’s oft-repeated dictum that under capitalism ‘one must labour to survive’ to read ‘one must invest to survive,’ positioning risk rather than labour as the primary mechanism of contemporary exploitation.

This would have the effect, then, of taking our attention away from what Bernards’ repeatedly describes as a ‘compulsion’ to labour, itself a curious phrasing that is likely aiming to capture what Geoff Mann describes in his influential essay, ‘Value after Lehman’: ‘Capitalism is worthy of critique not, principally, because labour does not get enough of the value “produced”; capitalism is worthy of critique because, in it, labour is condemned to the production of value’.^[15] For Mann, the ‘ultimate goal of a Marxist and/or critical-political practice is not ultimately a fairer distribution of value to its “producers”—although this is an important task – but the abolition, destruction, overcoming of the category of value itself’.^[16] (What then would be left? Only use value, according to Postone’s account.^[17])

Mann comes closest to where Benards will take us, arguing, in a quote the latter repeats, that ‘value must be understood as “a form of social wealth constituted by a spatially and temporally generalising social relation of equivalence and substitutability under, and specific to, capitalism’ (56). While Bernards finds this relational understanding useful, he objects to Mann’s conclusion that ‘abstract labour remains a crucial manifestation of this relation, but our current condition demonstrates that value itself is not beholden to labour’ (56).

Against both orthodox and post-Marxist approaches, Bernards develops an alternative grounded in what he calls the ‘dynamic interplay of abstract and concrete labour’ (50). Drawing on Dianne Elson’s critique of ‘misplaced concreteness’ in orthodox Marxist value theory, he argues that value under capitalism should be understood not as embodied labour time but as ‘an objectification…of a certain aspect of that labour-time, its aspect of being simply an expenditure of human labour power in general, i.e. abstract labour’ (65). This leads to a crucial reframing:

Value, then, is indeed usefully read as an abstract form of domination. But critically, in this sense it is a compulsion towards ‘socially necessary’ forms of labour that can only ever be unevenly, partially, and temporarily fulfilled…. Value is expressed as an anarchic and competitive compulsion to valorize, to realize in the concrete ‘socially necessary’ costs and rates of productivity per unit of labour across the whole circuit of capital.

The implications of this approach are significant for understanding finance. As Bernards reads Marx, risk is always already part of capitalist production and is not something extrinsic added by finance or ‘fictitious capital’. That’s because, for Marx, any labourer is unable to predict the exact value within the market of what is produced. Here’s Bernards’ reasoning from here:

If risk is always already fully present in capitalist value, particularly under conditions of expanded reproduction, if the ‘speculative’ operations of financial capital are reflective of the inherently speculative nature of capital in general, then finance capital itself can’t be understood as a bloc of capital somehow separate, detached or ‘divorced’ from ‘productive’ capital or any ‘real’ economy. (67)

This allows Bernards to navigate between two dubious positions. On one hand, he avoids the trap of treating finance as simply an autonomous ‘power bloc’ that has captured the political system—a view that reduces complex capitalist dynamics to crude theories about financial elites pulling strings. On the other hand, he rejects the neoliberal fantasy of ‘democratising finance’ that suggests financial markets can somehow be reformed to serve everyone’s interests.

Instead, Bernards argues that finance is integral to capitalism’s basic operations. Financial relations don’t represent some parasitic overlay on an otherwise healthy ‘real economy,’ nor can they be easily democratised while leaving underlying structures of exploitation intact. Since all capitalist production involves speculation about future value realisation, finance is not an external force but rather a necessary manifestation of capitalism’s inherent contradictions. This means that meaningful change requires confronting the entire circuit of capitalist accumulation, not just reining in or reforming its financial components.

M-M Dreams

Rather than seeing financial and productive activities as separate spheres, he argues that ‘the terrains of labour and of risk remain intimately entangled’. For example, for the vast majority of people, he observes, ‘investments remain intimately linked to their employment—whether directly part of their remuneration through pensions, or slightly more indirectly through the investment of savings’.

More fundamentally, Bernards insists that relations of indebtedness and speculation should be understood not as alternatives to labour exploitation but as particular forms through which the compulsion to sell labour power operates: ‘Both the compulsion to save for retirement (which often now takes the form of “investment”) and the frequency of indebtedness are given in the commodification of labour power’ (58). In this way, he hopes to have refuted ‘one of the great problems with “financialization” narratives’, namely that they tell us ‘that labour and production as such no longer matter very much, or that finance capital has “detached” itself from them and now accumulates in a recursive and self-referential process’ (51).

We can clarify the latter in terms used by Marx in Capital. Whereas economies connected to use value move from commodity to money to commodities, capitalism, Marx argued, is founded on a circuit from money to commodities to (more) money (M-C-M‘)—money is advanced to purchase labour power and means of production, which then produces commodities that are sold for a profit. This circuit requires the ‘detour’ through production, where surplus value is extracted from workers. Marx argued capitalist depictions of wealth simply building on itself (what would be M-M’) was ‘the capital mystification in its most flagrant form’ since it denies its conditions of possibility in nature and labour.

Capitalists have always dreamed of an even more remunerative, frictionless economics of speculation of the unmediated production of M-M‘. These fantasies of production without reference to nature or labour are clearly behind the executive push for installing AI in workplaces today. Dario Amodei, the co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude family of AI models, has suggested a billion-dollar company ‘staffed by a single employee could emerge in 2026—all because of AI’, as Inc. put it.^[18] No word on just who will purchase so many goods and services from such firms should they become a trend, but one also sees the fantasy of frictionless M-M’ value creation in the all-pervasive grift economy and the gamblification of everyday life in the U.S. In the grift society, the dream of M-M’ has been ‘democratised.’^[19]

What Is To Be Done?

In his concluding chapter, Bernards argues against two common approaches to addressing the problems of contemporary finance capitalism: ‘de-financialization’ and ‘democratising finance’. He contends that both approaches, while well-intentioned, ultimately lead to political dead ends because they misunderstand the fundamental nature of finance’s role in capitalism.

Regarding de-financialization, Bernards critiques the idea that reining in finance capital or rebalancing ‘productive’ and ‘financial’ capital offers a solution to our current crises. Drawing on Marx’s critique of petty bourgeois socialism in 19th-century France, he argues that since finance capital is intrinsic to capitalist value relations, any meaningful confrontation with finance necessarily leads to confronting capitalism itself. The problem isn’t that we need to get rid of finance to save productive capitalism—rather, finance is inherently part of the exploitative and destructive nature of capitalist production. He suggests that framing the struggle in terms of confronting financialization may inadvertently lead to the same forms of reformism Marxists have always criticised.

On democratising finance, Bernards acknowledges more serious proposals that go beyond simply expanding access to financial products (which he dismisses as having an impoverished conception of democracy). He engages with arguments for public control of banks and collective democratic control over investment functions. However, he argues that even these approaches tend to focus too narrowly on finance as a discrete sphere that can be reformed independently of broader capitalist relations. He’s particularly sceptical of claims that experiences of indebtedness or financial risk-taking might serve as the primary basis for new forms of class politics, arguing that these remain fundamentally intertwined with workplace exploitation and the broader commodification of survival needs.

Instead of these finance-focused approaches, Bernards advocates striking ‘at the common root’ of both financial and productive exploitation: ‘the subjection of survival needs to processes of commodification’ (206). He argues that the real issue is the ‘mute compulsion’ of capital that forces people to sell their labour power and subject themselves to various forms of exploitation to access basic necessities. From this perspective, more democratic control over money and finance should be considered only insofar as they contribute to weakening these broader compulsions.

As such, despite all his complications, Bernards falls into the same trap as the metaphysicians of Derrida’s account of writing. Just as they must trace all meaning back to some originary presence, Bernards insists that financial profits ultimately derive from labour exploitation somewhere in the ‘global circuit of capital’, however attenuated those connections may be. The result ends in something more like moral positioning than economic or political analysis—a privileging of one moment in the circuit without clear justification.

Rather than focusing primarily on confronting or democratising finance, he argues for building on existing struggles against the privatisation and commodification of essential services like water, housing, education, and healthcare, as well as broader movements for climate justice and reparations. His prescription is the ‘difficult work of building a self-aware and organised working class on a global scale’ (207)—suggesting that the path forward requires traditional class-based organising rather than finance-centred political strategies, even as financial relations remain an important component of contemporary exploitation that must be understood and contested within this broader framework.

Ultimately, I wish this all didn’t have more than a whiff of the nostalgia Bernards derides elsewhere. The problem becomes evident when he attempts to ground even the most abstract financial phenomena in traditional categories of labour and production. Consider his attempt to ground high-frequency trading in labour processes: ‘Finance is undergirded by a material and social infrastructure—by fixed capital in the form of brick and mortar buildings, communications equipment, and by various forms of labour’ (97). But a data centre could house AI or crypto or what have you—that it was built by someone is largely irrelevant to analyzing any of these. Once we get to phenomena like market volatility, where a single tweet can add or subtract billions in market capitalisation, or derivatives markets with notional values in the hundreds of trillions—many times larger than the global GDP they supposedly reference—why work to force labour into broader circuits of value realisation? Tracing lines back to the presence of labour is an archaeology of abstraction, not an economic or political analysis.

More fundamentally, Bernards’ framework struggles with the temporal dynamics of contemporary finance. Financial bubbles and crashes routinely create and destroy ‘value’ at speeds and scales that make explanations bringing in labour forced and analytically moot anyway. When pure arbitrage profits emerge from price discrepancies lasting microseconds, or when volatility trading generates returns from market instability itself, we’re witnessing phenomena that operate according to expectations and network effects rather than productive relations.

The question, then, isn’t whether finance can be completely divorced from production, but whether insisting on their ultimate unity illuminates or obscures the qualitative transformations of recent decades. Consider again those private equity-owned hospitals from the opening. When Leonard Green & Partners loads Ottumwa Regional Health Center with debt to pay dividends to investors, then cuts staff and delays equipment maintenance while nurses report working with ‘outdated/end of life equipment’, we’re witnessing something more complex than just labour exploitation within a unified circuit of capital. This is institutional predation that actively destroys use-values that communities depend on—the systematic dismantling of healthcare delivery according to financial timescales that operate independently of any productive logic.

The nurses watching patients suffer from inadequate care aren’t just experiencing intensified exploitation (though their quotes make clear they are); they’re confronting the subordination of healthcare to quarterly earnings cycles and private equity’s three-to-seven-year investment horizons. These temporal rhythms have become so disconnected from the provision of health care that they function as separate systems in practice, even if finance ultimately depends on labour somewhere in the global economy.

This points to broader transformations that Bernards’ production-centred analysis struggles to capture. The neoliberal transformation has fundamentally altered how people experience economic life in the metropoles—whether we wish it so or not. Where some in previous generations could reasonably expect their retirement security to flow from their labour through employer pensions, today’s workers—including those same hospital nurses—find their futures tied to the performance of financial markets through 401(k)s and other investment vehicles.

The result is that millions of ordinary people now harbour their own M-M’ fantasies, checking portfolio apps with the same frequency they once monitored their paychecks. When teachers and nurses feel compelled to day-trade cryptocurrency or chase meme stocks, we’re witnessing how the gamblification of everyday economic life has become a necessary survival strategy. This isn’t just false consciousness—it reflects genuine adaptation to material conditions where financial speculation has replaced stable employment as the path to security.

These changes create macroeconomic dynamics that can’t be understood purely through production-based analysis, and often in this work, Bernards is forced to downplay fundamental changes in how we experience our common world to do so. While wealth increasingly flows to asset holders rather than wage earners, the scale and velocity of contemporary financial markets create emergent properties that transcend their origins in productive relations.

None of this validates the neoliberal promise that everyone can become a capitalist. Rather, it suggests that finance has developed beyond its origins into something increasingly disconnected from production (how else to explain crypto values?), operating according to temporal rhythms and value logics that can actively undermine the social infrastructure and productive capacity they claim to depend on. Fascinatingly, Bernards’ argument rests on its own logic of efficiency: the most effective route to transformation is one that cuts through financial mystifications to focus directly on labour, not just in the economy but in workers’ lives. Don’t get distracted by derivatives and speculation, he suggests—organise workers around their shared exploitation in production. This theoretical efficiency mirrors the practical efficiency he admires in traditional class politics, where clear lines can be drawn between workers and capitalists without the messy complications introduced by financialised subjectivities:

From the perspective articulated here, then, more democratic control over money, reining in finance capital through regulation, or the development of public financial institutions, ought to be considered mainly insofar as they might contribute to weakening the multifaceted compulsions through which capitalist relations of exploitation operate. They cannot, however, be sufficient for those purposes. We are indeed confronted by a choice between socialism and barbarism, but there are no financial shortcuts to the former. We are left with the difficult work of building a self-aware and organized working class on a global scale. (207)

By insisting that finance must ultimately be understood through production, Bernards risks reproducing the same kind of reductionism that neoliberals employ when they claim all social problems can be solved through the efficiencies of market mechanisms. Just as market fundamentalists ignore the irreducible complexities of social life, Bernards’ labour fundamentalism may blind us to genuinely novel forms of domination that can’t be captured by returns to the origins (whether Marx or productivity), no matter how sophisticated their application.

Any politics adequate to this moment must reckon with these transformed realities rather than dismissing them as surface phenomena masking deeper structural truths. The challenge isn’t to convince people that their financial anxieties are really about labour exploitation, but to build solidarities that can address both the institutional predation exemplified by private equity healthcare and the realities of an unhealthy financialised daily life.

1. U.S. Senate Budget Committee. ‘Profits Over Patients: The Harmful Effects of Private Equity on the U.S. Healthcare System,’ https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/profits_over_patients_the_harmful_effects_of_private_equity_on_the_ushealthcaresystem1.pdf. January 2025. ↑

2. ‘Immediate jeopardy’ is a formal designation by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for situations where a healthcare facility’s noncompliance with regulations has caused or is likely to cause serious injury, harm, impairment, or death to patients. ↑

3. London, Verso, 1994. ↑

4. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 2 (London: Penguin, 1992), 496. ↑

5. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 150. ↑

6. A contemporaneous review of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class by Harvard economist John Cumming, also provided what we still hear today in counter-narrative of neoliberal apologists: The work, Cummings argued, was ‘unscientific,’ full of unaccountable moral judgements that were anathema to economics: ‘The moral philosopher may or may not [decide upon the purchase of this or that good, ‘conspicuous consumption’ or not], but the economist may not pass judgement.’ (John Cummings. ‘Theory of the Leisure Class,’ Journal of Political Economy, vol. 7.4 [1899], 425-455, 429, my emphasis). Cummings then defended more broadly the vast inequalities of what Mark Twain dubbed the ‘gilded age’: ‘Wealth is the product of industry, apportioned among the agents of its production as nearly as may be in proportion to the value of services by them severally executed’ (443). What’s more, the great wealth of the period is ‘evidence of economic efficiency and facility in apprehension and adoption of more productive exploitation of labour and environment.’ (441). The strict line that Veblen had drawn between a productive industrial class and a nonproductive business class was ‘a distinction which cannot be maintained in fact’ (444). ↑

7. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York: Scribner, 2016), 21. ↑

8. Geoff Mann, ‘Value after Lehman.’ Historical Materialism, vol. 18 (2010), 172–188, 173. ↑

9. Yahoo! Finance. ‘Crypto Joins the S&P 500. Here’s What the Critics Are Saying.’ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/crypto-joins-p-500-heres-110000162.html ↑

10. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York: Routledge, 2006), 155. ↑

11. Samuel A. Chambers, ‘From Restricted to General Political Economy: Derrida and Marx on Meaning and Value’, parrhesia 35 (2022), 93-118, 103. ↑

12. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1909), p. 716. ↑

13. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887). www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf ↑

14. Ibid., 699. ↑

15. Mann, ‘Value After Lehman,’ 175. ↑

16. Ibid. ↑

17. See Mann’s account in ‘Value After Lehman,’ 175-6. ↑

18. Ben Sherry, ‘Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Predicts the First Billion-Dollar Solopreneur by 2026’. Inc. (May 2025). https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-predicts-the-first-billion-dollar-solopreneur-by-2026/91193609 ↑

19. See my ‘The Grift Society’, Liberal Currents (May 2025). https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-grift-society/ ↑