A critical reading of the concepts of globalization of capital and accumulation regime with financial predominance

Abstract

Globalization is a well known and less rigorous concept and requires, of course, a critical analysis. One of the most published critical approaches was developed by the French author François Chesnais, who proposes an alternative concept: “mondialization” of capital. Chesnais’s concepts and theory on world capitalism since the last two decades of the last century, are explicitly founded in the theory of Karl Marx. That is why, in this text, the ideas of Chesnais are discussed on the basis of the Marxian theory of capitalism.
Chesnais concludes that world capitalism after 1980 is dominated and explained by the action of capitalists in the financial sphere, including all aspects of productive sphere. He delivers a rather unilateral and formal explanation of world capitalism, where financial
capitalists are the only responsible for all, playing only a negative role, completely opposed to what Marx carefully developed in The Capital.