Rupturing the dialectic. The struggle against work in financialization era

Lecture by Harry Cleaver

Financialization of the economy since the 1970s is not a process resulting from the autonomous logic of economic expansion. Harry Cleaver argues that it was the answer by capitalism to the growing strength of workers’ protests. Policies imposed by the financiers (belt-tightening, privatization of public services and social security systems, precarization of labour) trigger new forms of resistance of the workforce. Movements such as indignados, Occupy, or new parties such as Podemos and Syriza, in a different way and to a different degree represent opposition to work in the era of financial capital. Are they capable of developing an effective strategy of resistance to the complex of financial authorities and the state supporting it?