Time, Communication and Financial Crisis

Abstract

Thus far, I have provided a time-epistemic framework for analysing the material formation of global capitalism. My account of this formation traced the unfolding of contemporary history, during the 1990s and early 2000s, without anticipating, retrospectively, the eventual arrival of the 2008 global financial crisis. The intention was to explicate the salient features of global capitalism as it was taking shape, in contrast to what had gone before. Before 2008, it became evident that the hegemony of global capitalism emanated from the transnationality of corporations, ruling class formation and state structures. Their very existence depended upon the digital convergence of the mass media and information-communication technologies as encapsulated by the internet. This was the nervous system of global capitalism, and it drove the growth of global finance and the financialization of capitalist profit. The world-historic significance of these developments was largely obscured by the ideological constructions, manifestations and mediations of realtime. World history, as critically understood from a coeval standpoint, was subsumed within global capitalism’s pervasive aura of detemporalized immediacy. Yet, the reproducibility of global capitalism was, from the outset, threatened by fundamental conflicts. As the three preceding chapters have shown, financial speculation and the financialization of capitalist enterprises profoundly affected the realization of capital and patterns of worker exploitation as well as the cohesion of nation states and national economies.