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Financialization, then, drives and benefits from both precariousness and is presented as its purported antidote. On the one hand, hypercompetitive financial markets, hell-bent on ever-higher returns, have a tremendous disciplinary power [...] Meanwhile, market pressures to privatize, deregulate and…

The age of austerity dawned as a moment of neoliberalism without apology. Citing only the voracious demands of the market as the highest government obligation, a grim unanimity emerged among world leaders that put the famous “Washington Consensus” to shame: social spending would be dramatically sla…

[...] while finance might be a modality of social fiction which functions by telling a performative story about the world, it is a story that is, essentially, almost nonsense: a frenetic jumble of metaphors built on metaphors that never resolve into a coherent or linear narrative. Wealth is generat…

[...] we can understand “fictitious capital” writ large as the way capital spins a crucial social fiction about the nature of the world. Like all fictions, this is not merely a harmless story. It has incredible power. Financialization represents the dawning supremacy of fictitious capital over all …

[...] Drawing on Marx’s crisis theory, which (basically) holds that capitalism is based on fundamental contradictions which can never be resolved, only elevated to a higher level of abstraction and violence, Luxemburg sought to show how the inherent limits of capital manifest themselves in destruct…