Contribution to The Other Canon Conference on Production Capitalism vs. Financial Capitalism Oslo, September 3-4, 1998. Our economy is evolving into something different from what most people imagine it to be. The emerging system bears little relation to what academic textbooks describe, to say nothing of what politicians are promising. Today’s problems also are different from those which Marxists and other critics have long denounced. True, the class war has been put back in business since the collapse of Soviet Communism. But industrial capital as well as labor has come under attack in an internecine war of finance capital against industrial capital, and even against the power of governments to retain control over national economies. Was Marx too optimistic? In the face of this new form of economic warfare, capitalism’s foundations are proving to be ...
Michael Hudson
On finance, real estate and the powers of neoliberalism