Capital Realization, Financialization and Time Conflict

Abstract

In Part I, global capitalism was portrayed as an epochal construct which was forged by a constellation of economic, political and technological forces. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the world became dominated by transnational corporations, global finance and information-communication technologies (ICTs) as the rudiments of a transnational capitalist class, and a transnational state emerged. Consequently, new global patterns of class exploitation, elite insularity, immiseration and social exclusion took shape. The nature and magnitude of this epochal shift were obscured by concurrent manifestations and mediations of real-time. The digital fusion of finance and technology, televisual representations of real-time, vectors of political and military communication, and the real-time reflexivity of unfolding global events, combined with the ubiquity of global branding, were constitutive of a detemporalized, a-historical global present, notwithstanding the counter-mediations and representations of global activist groups. This critical overview implies, somewhat misleadingly, that global capitalism arose as a hegemonically organized, reified entity. In this part, I will argue from the converse perspective. The whole arrangement was riven by a cluster of fundamental time conflicts centred around financialization, worker exploitation, and the political economies of national/transnational governance.