Reviewing the journal: James Petras & Henry Veltmeyer (2019): For Whom the Bell Tolls? Capital, Labor and the Global Financial Crisis, International Critical Thought, DOI: 10.1080/21598282.2019.1584845.

Crisis for some elite level of society has been seen as the new moving-forwards strategies to expand capital from its center of capitalist system to the land of peripheries. The way the capital is expanded, or the way the assets are in some senses more sustainable to produce than tradable, will always be depended to which the capital accumulation is needed. Like the global financial crisis that was happened in the 2008-2009, the so-called private bankers or old practitioners of capitalism imposed the US’ policies to induce financial bailout—where the IMF estimate only needed $1 trillion, but in fact it is well over $3 trillion—to turning back capital and restructuring its system of crisis. While rightly at the national level of officials, the doctrine “Too Big To Fail” has came as novelty of the nation’s social necessary consensus upon which the continuity of the state economy is crucial to rescue. Hence we should honestly see yet define that the process of expanding profit comes together with the needs to control the politics of the common people, where the commons’ are centered in peripheries as labor and primarily as the active consumers. Herewith the most fictitious story of the peripheries’ “global” imagination is driven at the same time to legitimize the position of the wealthiest class.

This journal has several unique and brilliant arguments. First, the public articulation on how the global financial crisis works which mostly articulated by the voice of advocates has wrong basic assumptions. The crisis in which the Euro-zone is the epicenter of the crisis is more or less a result of the so-called unequal development. As the writers have stated that,”…the General Motors celebrated the greatest profit ever by surpassing the previous record from $6.7 billion in the 1997 to $7.6 billion in the 2011.” This means the system of crisis at the same time brings the redistribution of the wealth only for the multinational corporations rather than supporting for an equal development. In addition, the writers have also underlined the trend of the increasing extractive corporations especially in the periphery nations where the natural resources is the most profound wealth.

Secondly, what’s new under this horizon is that the crisis of capital doesn’t seem to recover only its super structure—the running of the capital—but also pretend to evaluate the more favorably exploitation of the workers. In this way, both writers argue there tendencies for the capitalist class to cut off the wages of the labor and reorienting their business. In taking up on this direction, the capitalist class prefer to invest the bailout from the public funds in the sector of financialization business (like as banking and debiting) of investment, instead of investing in manufacture sectors. The story of the worker’s exploitation has been pouring the tragedy of the States, in example in the cases of Greece, Portugal and Spain. This fact is not yet relevant for the State such as Germany—the greatest export during the crisis—which has the higher salaries for their workers.

This article to which I get the clearest explanation of the system of crisis has left me some curiously thoughtfully question; 1). Who owns the vacant homes—for any kind of the State’s assets—in the post-crisis periods? In some senses, the relation of the State in owning the assets portray the most explanable fact in accordance with the needs for the State to create the new market system, 2). Into the more serious problematic question, how does the Euro-and-US’ finance market control the system of financialization in the South countries?