Debating Financial Accumulation in the Context of Transforming Central Form of Capital: Securitization and Intangible Capital

Financialization or the concept preferred in this study as financial accumulation has become a hotly-debated issue in the process of the 2008 GFC and after. Although the issue has been discussed from so many angles, the approaches to the phenomenon of finance as the sphere of enhancing speculative activities premised on the traditional categorical distinctions such as production and circulation or finance and industry have mostly kept dominating the analyses. This study aims to scrutinize financial accumulation with putting forward the inherent gap between the traditional categories built by those theories or approaches and the dynamics of capital accumulation they are trying to describe. In the context of transforming central form of capital, finance is analyzed as a result of conflicting historical process as the expression of capital in more abstract forms and as the process that transforms concrete level of social relations, and in this sense as the product of developing new forms of arbitrage. Accordingly, the frameworks associated with the central capital form of the previous period that have examined its crisis and directions are mostly insufficient to comprehend the crisis dynamics and working of the contemporary financial accumulation. In this regard, this study investigates the dynamics of securitization and intangible capital that give capital liquidity in the light of identifying the fundamental transformation from the centrality of the Joint Stock Company or Giant Corporation of the long 20th century to the centrality of derivative form. The ultimate aim of the study is to develop a framework that analyzes the actual working of accumulation and its new frontiers and explores the elements of political struggle against the current form of capital.