SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Many have criticized Marxism for the tight notion of value, including those within the Marxist tradition itself, primarily because value is seen as an inadequate concept for explaining price formation. As it were, the myriad of factors that affect price then become contributors to value in their own right, reducing it to some sort of select theory of supply and demand. In its focus on the governance of social and economic reproduction, Ben Fine’s definition of financialization connects to both the second and third approaches. With J. Froud et al., it addresses finance’s strategic influence over the operations of all types of capital. The temporality of financialization can be located in terms of the troika Brett raises of episodes, trends or recurring cycles. For the cycles, the work of Arrighi is a key. Ben is of course right that there is nothing straightforward about rethinking value and value theory in the light of financialization.