“I found a very, very interesting mass of literature back on the sixteenth and seventeenth century, which economic historians have created, which is about what they called the fiscal military state. And it’s about the way in which debt, state debt in particular, and militarization kind of went together. And that’s how the wars were fought, and all rest of it: and what a crucial role this played in the dynamics and origins of capitalism, one that has been largely left unexamined. And out of this came this idea that, well, actually capitalism requires something that I called ‘a state-finance nexus,’ which is a sort of, some sort of configuration of state and capitalist power, which, working together, can actually orchestrate what needs to be orchestrated in terms of this relationship between debt accumulation and accumulation of wealth. It has some way to do that. And if you look historically, you find this begins to become apparent, particularly in British history, the formation at this debt-finance nexus.”
David Harvey, “The End of Capitalism”
STEVEN WEXLER 