At the level of the common sense, it seems to be no problem to talk about finance and industry, like they were objects easily to distinguish. However, the definition of the concepts of industrial capital and financial capital is no easy task . . <sub>.</sub> 70
But if this is true, then it is difficult to see how the recurrent crises of the last four decades-financial and industrial-could simply be blamed on finance. A coherent explanation of the crises has to look at the system as a whole, and the way in which its different components react on each other. This is what Marx tried to do in a long, if rambling and unfinished, discussion of credit and finance in Volume Three of Capital. It is also what Hilferding attempted to do with the earlier chapters dealing with these questions in Finance Capital. These insights need to be developed to take account of the extraordinary development of finance, of financial institutions and of financial crises in the late 20th and early 21st century.
Ideology and explanation
Any great crisis does not just have economic consequences. It turns capitalist against capitalist as each tries to offload the cost of the crisis on others, just as it creates deep bitterness among the mass of the population. The crisis that began in 2007 fitted this pattern, and putting the blame on the banks was an escape route for all those who had argued so vigorously that neoliberalism and capitalist globalisation promised humanity a glorious future. So Gordon "the end of boom and bust" Brown argued that this was "a completely different sort of crisis" to those of the "previous 60 years", since it was a "global financial crisis caused by irresponsible lending practices, laxity in them and problems of regulation" .7<sup>1</sup> In this way, the reality of 1 80 years of periodic crises was shoved aside, in a desperate attempt to continue to extol the virtues of capitalism.
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The New Age of Global Instability