It should be noted that even from this point of view, financialization is not simply the product of a change in the power struggle between management and stockholders. Above all it also results from an endogenous change in the logic of valorization of large industrial groups. All this occurs as if the movement of autonomization of labor cooperation corresponded to a parallel movement of autonomization of capital in the abstract and eminently flexible and mobile form of money-capital.
In addition, this tendency goes hand in hand with a distortion of the traditional functions attributed by economic science to financial markets. According to mainstream economics, financial markets are assumed being able to assure the best risk management (!) and an optimal allocation of capital. Moreover, contrary to the theory according to which stock markets finance firms, what we have observed all over these years of the development of a speculative bubble is that firms have fueled with liquidity (dividends, interests, etc.) and stock-market surplus-values their stockholders, often with negative returns.21
Moreover, such dynamic is associated with a stagnation of productive investment in Europe and, in particular, in France. We are dealing with the reason why some economists have spoken of _a model of profit without capital accumulation_.
In short, the driving role of profit in the development of the productive forces and thus in the struggle against scarcity also appears heavily compromised. This evolution participates in the more general tendency of capital to transform profit into a rentier mechanism of drawing surplus-value from a position of exteriority in respect to production and/or founded on the creation of an artificial resource rarefaction.
However, at this stage of our reflection and before embarking on a more detailed analysis of different forms of rent, the following question arises: what is the new role of rent, not only at the level of the sphere of distribution, but also in the expropriation of the common and the regulation of the capital-labor relation in cognitive capitalism? To answer this question, a crucial political and theoretical point needs to be made. That is, there is a contradiction, if not actual antagonism, between the logic of cognitive capitalism, on one hand and the dynamics of collective creation and emancipation that lie at the origin of the development of an economy founded on the crucial role and spread of knowledge, on the other.
"The Crisis of the Law of Value and the Becoming-Rent of Profit," by Carlo Vercellone, in Crisis in the Global Economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles, and New Political Scenarios, ed. Andrea Fumagalli and Sandro Mezzadra