Activity

Of course, we should never tire of pointing out that, even in the supposed “Golden Age,” the middle class was largely aspirational and a completely rigged game. Individualized consumer lifestyles depended on the neocolonial exploitation of the Third World, huge racialized underclasses (with virtual…

[...] Because capitalism is fundamentally based on contradictions, financial crises, in a way, regulate the inherent systemic crisis by limiting its effects to the particular sphere of finance. In the aftermath of such crises, capital has the opportunity redraw or renegotiate the lines of regulatio…

Second, finance allows long-term profiteering by offering capitalists credit, to pursue projects that may take years to come to profitable fruition. For instance, while ultimately extremely profitable, the construction of a mine, or the development of new communication or industrial technologies, t…

[...] Cognitive capitalism, then, is characterized by the expansion and proliferation of capital’s technologies and techniques for capturing living labour beyond the factory (Dyer-Witheford 1999; Vercellone 2007). As Marazzi (2008) illustrates, the financial sector itself is foundational to the dev…

At one level, creativity’s move from the margin to the centre of capitalist ideology is linked to the financialization of the system. Financialization is driven, ultimately, by a speculative ethos with a voracious appetite for the production of newness (see Marazzi 2008, 64–68). To demonstrate thei…