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The crisis-development in this mode of production thus acquires a discrepancy between social needs and financial logic based on criteria of hyper-profitability: in developed countries, the assertion of an anthropogenic model of “production of man by man” where consumption is increasingly oriented towards social, health, educational and cultural sectors, clashes with the privatization of many sectors previously managed by public criteria; in developing countries, the expansion of valorization provokes processes of hyper-exploitation and the destruction of local economies and the environment. The demands of profitability imposed by financial capitalism on the entire society reinforce social regression under the pressure of a growth model that, in order to distribute wealth, voluntarily sacrifices social cohesion and the quality of life itself. Wage deflation, pathologization of labor with increases in health costs generated by work stress (up to 3% of the GDP), worsening social balances and the irreparable deterioration of the environment are the effects of financial logic and of company delocalizations typical of global financial capitalism.

The problem is that, analyzed from a distributive point of view (economistic in the last instance), the crisis-development of financial capitalism leads to a veritable dead-end. As much as it is thrown out the window, the cliché that finance is parasitic implicitly comes back through the front door. The impasse, more theoretical than practico-political, is before everyone’s eyes: the impossibility of elaborating strategies to overcome the crisis, the recourse to economic stimulus measures, on the one hand, presuppose the rescue of finance (of which we are really hostages), but, on the other hand, annul the very possibilities of economic revival.

Both the right and the left wish for an unlikely return to the real economy, veritable “re-industrializations” of the economy (preferably a little greener) in order to leave a finanzialized economy that is an accomplice to the destruction of income and employment. But no one worries anymore about describe the nature and functioning of the so-called “real economy.” And thus they wish for state aid to industrial sectors suffering from overproduction, aid that is then translated into job and wage deductions, which certainly do not help (on the contrary) to revive the economy as a whole.

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In industrial capitalism’s past, the working class could fight against a target that was precisely identified: the boss, the entrepreneur who owned material things like the factory and the products of his employee’s labor. Today, the boss has vanished. He is fragmented into billions of financial segments, disseminated into millions of financial agents scattered all around the world. The workers themselves are part of recombinant financial capital. They are expecting future revenues from their pension fund investments. They own stock options in the enterprise exploiting their labor. They are hooked up, like a fly in a spider web: if they move, they get strangled, but if they don’t move, the spider will suck their life from them. Society may rot, fall apart, agonize. It is not going to affect the political and economic stability of capitalism. What is called economic recovery is a new round of social devastation.

So the recession is over, capitalism is recovering. Nonetheless, unemployment is rising and misery is spreading. This means that financial capitalism is autonomous from society. Capitalism doesn’t need workers: it just needs cellular fractals of labor, underpaid, precarious, depersonalised. Fragments of impersonal nervous energy, recombined by the network. The crisis is going to push forward technological change and the substitution of human labor with machines. The employment rate is not going to rise in the future, and productivity will increase. A shrinking number of workers will be forced to work overtime to produce more and more.