Abstract
With the publication of Digitalized Finance: Financial Capitalism and Information Revolution, Edemilson Paraná, a young Brazilian researcher in the fields of economic sociology and political economy, gives us a very relevant contribution to the debate concerning the capitalist restructuring underway since the last quarter of the 20th century.
The role played by the development of information and communication technologies in the aforementioned historical transition extends to all sectors of social production, including the transformation of the livelihoods of the broadest layers of the world population, and also in the organization of the international financial system, a fundamental element of capitalist regulation.
Paraná identifies three trends in the evolution of the financial system, namely the shortening of space-time flows, the consequent increase in the difficulty of regulating the system from the part of national powers, and the tout azimuth concentration of the sector. The association of these trends then forms the “cycle of operation of digitalized finance,” as the author calls it. The debates on this “cycle,” presented within the book, helps us to understand the dynamics of the relations between real production and fictitious accumulation. Although this process’ novelty in many aspects, it does not essentially change, as the book shows us, the immanent tendencies of capitalist development, theorized by Karl Marx.
The organization of the book follows the same lines of the original Brazilian edition (A Finança Digitizada: capitalismo financeiro e revolução informacional. Florianópolis: Insular, 2016). After a brief introduction (Chapter 1), in which the research problem is formulated and a few methodological considerations are made, the author presents, in Chapter 2, a historical-theoretical analysis to explain the situation of the capitalism at the beginning of the 21st century and that of the globalized finance.
Based on a review of the theories of financial capital, differentiating the concepts of interest-bearing capital and fictitious capital in Marx, Lenin, and Hilferding, Paraná focuses the historical analysis on authors such as François Chesnais, David Harvey, and others, assuming the definition of the first: financialization as the constitution of a “regime of accumulation with financial dominance.” Following this perspective, the author explains that the “relationship between industrial and financial capital” is no longer defined in terms of “mere alliance under the command of one of them,” as it would be in Hilferding, but of “a true subsumption of the industry to finance.”
From there it raises the question about the role of the development of computer-based technologies within this process, concluding, with Chesnais once again, that the global unification of financial markets is not essentially the work of a bunch of technologies, but of necessities, actions, and decisions of the relevant social/political actors, a conclusion perfectly under the Marxian perspective regarding the dialectic of productive forces and relations of production.
In the third chapter, after the presentation—based on authors such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, the Frankfurters, and Andrew Feenberg—of a perspective on the technique that considers it as “non-neutral and partially autonomous, ontologically anchored in its ‘social content’ and over-determined, ultimately, by economic practice,” the author presents the guidelines of a theory of the relationship between technological development and financialization. A key aspect of capitalist technological development lies, according to David Harvey’s Marxist perspective followed by Paraná, in the “compression of space-time flows in the spheres of production, circulation and, more broadly, in the dynamics of sociability as a whole,” which requires the development of artifacts that make it possible to break down physical and cognitive barriers to the valorization of capital. The cumulative nature of these movements results in an increasing acceleration of the productive and destructive processes of capital.
Finally, Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to the historical and structural analysis of digitized finance, in its specificities. The title of the first of these two chapters defines the essence of what digitalized finance is, following the previously proposed theoretical framework: “informatization at the service of financial dominance.” The first part of the chapter consists of a complex overflight on the situation of digitalized finance at the beginning of the 21st century, followed, in the second part, by the analysis of the consequences of digitalization on capital markets, to close, in the English version of the book, 2019, with a brief description of the most recent trends in the development of digitalized finance, which is added to the original work (Brazilian edition, of 2016).
It is not possible to present here, even in a summarized manner, those analysis of Paraná, or the excellent study of the exemplary Brazilian case, in Chapter 5, which is divided into a part on the technical-operational development of the capital market in the country and another more specifically related to the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) development on it. These two chapters together represent the central part of the author’s contribution to empirical knowledge of a fundamental aspect for the understanding of current capitalism and its tendencies, whose reading I strongly recommend.
Without losing the academic rigor presented throughout the book, the author presents, in those chapters, as in the previous ones, a clear and clarifying text on a complex reality, in an understandable and very pleasant way for the interested reader, especially those from the fields of sociology, political economy, and communication.