How We Got Here: Post-Doctoral Division

The New Left Review will either excite or exhaust your brain. But if you want to see the rise of capitalism on a global scale through the eyes of an economist who speaks economese, this is your guy: Robin Blackburn. I'm not saying I understood the whole thing (I wonder if many outside the ivy-clad ivory towers could), but the whole issue of how corporations came to be the driving force in almost everything in the world, and how money became both the ends and the means to all things, is somewhere here between the lines.

The NLR summarizes the piece thusly: "The concept of alternative futures, banished from postmodernity's
eternal present, flourishes on the financial summits of the global
economy. Robin Blackburn argues against a neo-Luddite dismissal of the
new financial engineering techniques by the Left, while coolly
assessing the economic and social costs of their current configurations."

Uh-huh. I almost said that.

The gist is, once you see everything - people, the environment, cultures - as commodities, it all makes perfect sense. Of course, money doesn't have a soul.

Therefore, this begins to appear to be a genius corporate philosophy:

In the years 2001-03 about three million jobs were lost in the United
States. By the turn of the century Enron's managers had become famous
for a regime in which each employee knew that one tenth of the staff,
those who failed to reach trading targets, would be sacked each year,
no matter how good or bad the overall performance. Many of the most
powerful corporations today do their best to avoid having a workforce;
instead they out-source and sub-contract.

We've seen see how well that works.

Ultimately, the soveriegnty of financial institutions that make this entire "financialization" thing work, actually causes corporations and the system they have creates, self-destruct (see Enron, WorldCom, Delphi et al):

[F[inancial profits over the last
decade have mainly taken the form of the cancellation of promises made
to employees-exploitation over time-the erosion of small capital
holdings by large and unscrupulous money managers and the swallowing of
shoals of tiny fish by a shark-like financial services industry. Few of
the gains from the reallocation of capital through superior risk
assessment have been channelled to production. Financial profits have
instead prompted a surge in upscale real-estate prices and the turnover
of the luxury goods sector. The mass of employees and consumers have
sunk deeper into debt. Yawning domestic inequalities have been
compounded by escalating international imbalances, with an inflow of
foreign capital covering a deficit on the us
current account. With a sagging dollar, an oil price shock and rising
interest rates, American households-the consumers of first and last
resort-are likely to find the strain of carrying the world on their
shoulders ever more difficult. Financialization promotes such a skewed
distribution of income that it ends by undermining its own
credit-driven momentum.

Took the words right out of my mouth.

• 104 Globalization
• 201 Executive Compensation