Finance and "financialisation"
The great crisis that erupted in 2007 led those who had rejoiced at the wonders of capitalism during the great delusion to try to pin the blame on something other than capitalism as such. The easiest way to do this was to see the "the banks" and "finance" as detached from the rest of the capitalist system. French president Nicolas Sarkozy went to a G7 meeting in January 2008 declaring that "something seems out of control" with the financial system and calling for increased controls over it. 41 All accounts of the Davos World Economic Forum in 2009 told of the deep unpopularity of the banks with the representatives of multinationals and governments: "The audience cheered in one debate when Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, said it was time to punish bankers by forcing them to hand back bonuses" .42
Such arguments led to a simple conclusion: the way to prevent future financial crises was greater regulation of finance. Such was the response of many mainstream economists-former monetarists and moderate Keynesians alike, with repeated discussions in the pages of the Financial Times over the degree of regulation that was possible and necessary. This was also the response of some analysts on the reformist left. Robert Wade of the LSE could provide riveting accounts of the absurdities of finances that led to the crisis and then conclude that greater controls could stop them.43 Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson in their book The Gods that Failed blamed "the gods of finance", called for increased regulation and a breaking up of the gigantic financial institutions, and then saw some hope in a meeting of G7 policy makers early in 2008 that contemplated "measures to rein in the turbo charged financial interests" . 44
Rather further to the left the rise of finance had already led to the re-emergence of the old notions of Hobson, Hilferding and Kautsky of "finance" or "finance capital" as having distinct interests from productive capital. The French campaigning organisation ATAC had started life in the late 1990s committed to opposition to financial speculation, not to capitalism as such.45 Its central demand was for a "Tobin tax" on movement of financial funds across national borders. This, it was claimed, would counter financial crises. Such "finance is to blame" arguments found a resonance among many radical Marxists. Dumenil and Levy wrote of "neoliberalism" as "the ideological expression of the reasserted power of finance" which "dictates its forms and contents in the new stage of internationalisation.46 James Crotty's tone was very similar, arguing that "financial interests have become much more economically and politically powerful, and . . . these trends have been coterminous with a deterioration in real economic performance" .47 Francois Chesnais wrote of "a globalised regime of financially dominated accumulation" ,48 in which "the movement of money capital has become a fully autonomous force vis-a-vis industrial capital", forcing it either to accept a "deep interpenetration with money capital, or to submit itself to its exigencies" .49 He took up the expression of Mable, Barre and Boyer, according to which "bad capitalism" had been able to chase out "good" .-1° Chesnais as a revolutionary socialist did not himself regard the old form of capitalism as "good" (hence his putting the word between quote marks). But he did argue that finance was to blame for the "mediocre or poor dynamic of investment . . . "1<sup>1</sup> A similar emphasis on finance having interests strongly opposed to those of productive capital was to be found in Peter Gowan's The Global Gamble, a very useful account of US capitalism's attempt to maintain global hegemony. He argued that "some of the sharpest conflicts within capitalist societies have occurred . . . between the financial sector and the rest of society".52
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