La financiarisation de l'économie et la création de valeur

Over the past twenty five years, the connection between the production process and the monetary and financial process have been modified up to the point to give credit to the idea that the financial field has become totally autonomous from the production field. The thematic of the « creation of value for the shareholder » has become uppermost and the pressure towards its permanent increase is the reflection of a double change in the forces strife : between the wage earners and the capitalists because the increase of capital profitability occurs to the detriment of employment and wages, and also among the very capitalists because the monopolizing of the surplus of value entails a centralization movement of the capital through mergers and takeovers. This paper tries to disprove the traditonal vision according to which the capital is able to self-reproduce as well as a more recent vision that the beliefs are themselves creative of value having no reference to the productive system. In fact, behind the « creation of value for the shareholder », lurks the process of modification of the distribution of value created by the work force. In order to prove this, the concept of confiscated value holds a central position. Thus, it enables one to see that if the distinction between the productive capital and the financial capital still has some pertinence, one cannot infer that the latter would have been able to value itsef globally, independently from the former. (Full text in French)