Financial Capital, Communication, and (Western) Geo-Hegemony

Financial capital can be metaphorically described as the sun never sets on the global empire and on its productive social body. In fact, it has recently acquired a pivotal and dominante role both in the process of production and accumulation of value, both in the social and geographical circuits of distribution of incomes. Furthermore, it contributes to pervasively shape social forces by selecting and addressing, fostering or imposing the forms, terms, ambits, modes, limits, and sectors of their engagement and development, not only in the economic sphere, but also in the political one. Thus, financial capital seems to have sequestered, subsumed, and hierarchically ordered "real" economy, institutional political ambits, and ultimately the social - as an all, and in details. The methodological strategy I choose for highlighting and verifying such trends, consists of the analysis of the reciprocal implication and relevance that finance and communication have matured in contemporary world. Such interconnection turns out to be crucial whether we conceive communication as the general social phenomenon par excellence in contemporary world. Source of all sort of value, it is the totally pervasive, and all-including activity/condition of societies and individuals, catching and "representing" the entire reality - more and more in a synchronic and diachronic sense. In particular, I will underline the way finance and communication are mutually evolving and interconnecting themselves not only in the Western countries, but also in the peripheries of the global economy, and across the "margins" of the global social body. I will refer to the expansive phenomenon of micro-credit, and consider its important linkage with transnational migration - like in the case of Ecuador - proposing the hypothesis that it nurtures the historical process of expansion and intensification of the capitalistic dominion. Finally, I will highlight some effective and potential implications such phenomena are generating from a political and geo-hegemonic point of view; and indicate how the concept and practices of the "new commons," developed by the anti-hegemonic movements worldwide, if pertinently applied both to finance and communication, could represent the strategic way out of the current system of global exploitation.