Bringing subordinated financialisation down to earth: the political ecology of finance-dominated capitalism

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores how subordinated financialisation occurs through uneven environmental transformations on a global scale, thereby revealing a political ecology of finance-dominated capitalism. Rather than depicting financialisation as a detachment of profits and power from the ‘real’ economy, this paper argues that financial accumulation arises from co-dependent and hierarchical monetary, productive and environmental relations. In particular, we outline how Peripheral subordination is connected to the reorganisation of global value production (‘offshoring’) and the intensification and expansion of capital to new frontiers of resource extraction (‘commodity frontiers’). These patterns form a ‘financialisation-offshoring-commodity frontier’ nexus, a self-reinforcing institutional arrangement that guarantees new possibilities for capital accumulation within the Core of the world-system, while accentuating the Periphery’s vulnerability to financial instability, uneven development and ecological degradation. This suggests that addressing Core–Periphery structural imbalances and systemic ecological risks requires a major overhaul of the international monetary and financial system, in a way that may nevertheless limit capital accumulation and GDP growth in Core economies.