In the world of lucha libre a class war rages. Técnicos battle rudos, head-butting and scissor-kicking for the common man against capital and the state. In the battles of global political economy Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin are master técnicos. Their new book, The Making of Global Capitalism: the Political Economy of American Empire, examines how “the American state developed the interest and capacity to superintend the making of global capitalism.” Global Capitalism is burly and, like the great El Santo, difficult to pin down, so in what follows I will focus on only one aspect of the book: Panitch and Gindin’s analysis of financialization.

What is financialization? Scholars broadly agree that financialization is the increasing dominance of financial actors, institutions, markets, and motives in the economy. By this definition, Wall Street’s tidy 2008 bailout, American CEOs’ curious habit of dumping money into share buybacks rather than job-creating investment, Treasury’s delight in running roughshod over Congress, and the growing dependence of working people on the stock market and credit are all examples of financialization. But from here it gets a bit dodgy. People don’t agree about what caused the rise of finance, or how financialization has shaped the economy over the past three decades, or what the continuing dominance of finance means for the future of capitalism. Gindin and Panitch have answers to these questions.

To make things interesting, I’ll toss Panitch and Gindin’s theory of financialization into the ring with Giovanni Arrighi’s theory of financialization. Arrighi, a master técnico in his own right, spent his life thinking about capital and why it does the things it does. He was particularly interested in Marx’s general formula of capital and how its logical derivations could help us understand the development of global capitalism and the (dis)empowerment of nations vis-à-vis other nations. A lucha between Gindin/Panitch and Arrighi is a bit risky — it might just leave us sweaty and tired. But with luck it could also provide some insight into the moment in which we live, and how we can beat the rudos.