Analysing Finance and Production in the Contemporary Capitalist Era

Abstract

There has been a dramatic restructuring of the global economy as the dictates of neoliberalism have reconfigured the contemporary capitalist system of accumulation which has involved a seismic shift from industrial to finance capital. There have been a number of important contributions to theorising this shift and about the empirical relationships between the ‘financial’ and the ‘real’ at the levels of the nation-state and the firm. To a far lesser extent, the impact of financialisation upon production - at the level of industrial sectors, commodities, firms or global production networks - has been the subject of empirical research. Consequently, articulation of the abstract relations between finance and industrial capital, and the concrete forms that this takes in contemporary capitalist accumulation, are under-theorised. This paper posits an approach to bridge the gap between the abstract and concrete by presenting an analytical framework for empirical research to elucidate the different ways in which financialisation has restructured production and the ways in which finance and production in the contemporary era work together in reinforcement and/or contradiction.