Though at opposite ends of a spectrum, both the Wall Street financier and the sub-prime borrower are subjects and objects of an economic idiom at once beyond their control and driven by their actions. Both are trapped, though one in a more gilded cage. In short, both have seen their own social reproduction become dependent on the capacity to which they, in their unique and specific ways, reproduce financialized capitalism. While corporatized media outlets have been quick to castigate sub-prime borrowers for “living beyond their means” and for taking advantage of the system, they hold very little power. And, while some media outlets have blamed financiers for the 2008 crash, it is clear that a much more profound and problematic system of social and economic relations is at play than can be accounted for merely by recourse to narratives of individual greed or corruption.

A similar argument is made by Giorgio Agamben (1998) in his consideration of what he calls “bare life.” For Agamben, modern political systems and imaginaries are underscored by the capacity to strip individuals and groups of all social belonging and value and reduce them to a purely biological existence. Not only is this spectre of raw humanity a threat (“do what we say or else you too will be denuded”), it is also an image and a reality that reaffirm our (those of us fortunate enough not to be reduced to bare life) sense of worth and belonging to our imagined political community. Agamben (2005) traces the way modern political systems have always incorporated zones of exclusion, special laws, spaces or forms of status that maintain bare life within the body politic: refugee camps, emergency laws, apartheid, differential forms of citizenship, or simply abject poverty (see also Tyler 2013). These internalized exclusions reify and justify the idea of the state as a legitimate political community, and allow those who are held to “belong” to reaffirm their own value by contrast. Bare life is the subject of a nauseated disgust and abjection. We fail to sympathize with the beggar, the refugee or the excluded “other” because to do so would call into question our own fabricated sense of value. In other words, modern political systems, in order to justify their own legitimacy as providers of security and peace, by necessity create spectacles of utter precariousness, what Agamben (1998) calls Homo Sacer, “sacred” figures who are afforded no protections from the slings and arrows of the world and the predations of their fellow human beings. The figure of bare life, then, helps us justify our sense of security and belonging, but it also reveals a deeper, unsettling truth: it is all a social construction; at base, we are all reducible to bare life; and, to an even deeper extent, our sense of security and belonging is predicated on the abjection of others. Thus, the abject precarious figure becomes an object of spite and hatred, a cruel and necessary reminder of universality that demands we constantly do the work of justifying why “we” are not “them.”

Aside from postmodern malaise, what might such an approach offer to our considerations of precariousness and financialization? Its most important lesson is that precariousness is the norm, not the exception. Our current precarious moment, one dominated by market and financial forces and manifesting itself as a violent form of hyper-neoliberal austerity (which is producing ever more and deeper economic precariousness), is only one particularly pernicious manifestation of an underlying ontological condition. It is worse than many such manifestations precisely because it is so successful in privatizing precariousness through the logic of individualism and competition. We come to blame ourselves, rather than the system, for our precariousness, in part because, unlike some rigid caste-based system or a slave society, we are (most of us) legally and technically free to escape precariousness (though, ironically, to escape by embracing precarity, by leveraging ourselves into prosperity). It is a system that works by promising that we can, each of us, alone, escape our existential condition of precariousness by getting rich, by obeying the system’s axiomatic dictates and playing our role. The constant barrage of images and tales of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, of celebrities and of others who have “made it” do not exist (as they did in a previous era) to show us the right social order and the natural superiority of certain sorts of people. Rather, these ubiquitous dream images promise each of us a life without precariousness or, more accurately (if we return to the cinematic depictions of the Wall Street predator) a life where precariousness is mastered and leveraged.

Drawing on Foucault’s notion of the biopolitics of neoliberalism, Maurizzio Lazzarato (2012, 89–114) has sought to define finance less as a breed of economic action and more as a weapon of power which, through the production of debt, exhorts economic actors (both individuals and whole nation-states) into a form of subjectivation aimed at market integration, towards what Foucault dubbed an entrepreneurialism of the self (2008, 226). From this perspective, the biopolitics of financialization is not merely repressive and oppressive; it creates a situation in which all forms of agency are encouraged to articulate themselves in financialized form, and where financial “freedom” and power are held to be the fullest expression of liberty and acumen (see also Mitropoulos 2012). Indeed, for Lazzarato, debt and finance are two sides of the same coin, one whose inscription might read “securitize or else”: embrace your inner financier, distil the ethereal future into a saleable present-day commodity, or suffer the consequences.

In many ways, this paradigm both reflects and goes well beyond the prognosis of Frankfurt Institute theorists like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1997). Writing in the lead-up to and the wake of the Second World War, these authors noted the way rationality, calculation, science and reason had been perverted into the means to circumscribe the possibilities of human liberation, both in the capitalist West and the (supposedly) Communist East. Financialization forces this insight to a new level. The financial system represents a phenomenal crucible of human rationality, creativity, imagination and collaboration (see Chapter 5). As we have seen, some of the most promising minds of a generation are groomed at elite universities to take up roles in the financial architecture; not only MBAs but also PhDs in fluid dynamics, theoretical physics and perhaps even literary and cultural criticism, who can aid their parent firms in developing hyper-complex models and machines to track and execute high-frequency financial exchanges on the sublimely complicated market (see Derman 2011). But, as with the systems and institutions that developed nuclear weapons, or the Nazis’ “final solution,” these are derivatives of Enlightenment cognition and epistemology that have been turned against human interests and have been used to entrench and exacerbate systemic inequality and a deeply profound insecurity. While, individually, all these manoeuvres calculate risk with almost unimaginable precision and technological acumen, they cannot and do not fathom that the sum of manoeuvres creates not only an extremely volatile financial market, but a horrifically volatile global economy. Largely, this volatility is “externalized” onto those who have little influence over the market. For instance, as speculative capital rushes into and out of cereal futures, basic soybean or banana growers pay the price (Russi 2013), and, as finance wreaks havoc with global currencies and government bonds, it is whole populations who must contend with this volatility.

Walmart’s integration into the world of finance is deeper than share prices; it represents a ubiquitous vector by which financialization, securitization and risk management are introduced and stitched into everyday life. For instance, the firm operates one of the world’s most populous investment funds, managing the savings of over 1.2 million employees (Fitch 2010). Given that Walmart insists on addressing its employees as “associates” with whom it enters into temporary, mutually beneficial economic relationships, it does not provide pensions. However, it does offer its “associates” access to a 401(k) fund to which they are welcome to contribute (managed by the investment bank Merrill Lynch, now part of Bank of America). In this way Walmart participates in a trend towards the securitization of retirement savings that, as Robin Blackburn (2006) illustrates, works against employees’ long-term interests. While these funds may offer a competitive rate of return, they do so by investing in firms and securities that are not in workers’ long-term (or, for that matter, shortterm) interests. Along with mutual funds and other large institutional investors, these funds are partly responsible for the drive for higher corporate profits year after year, which in turn has compelled firms to cut jobs, attack unions, globalize production and seek to undermine or circumvent regulatory frameworks. It is not at all unlikely that a Walmart worker’s investment in the company-operated fund could have been used to finance (and might have accrued value from) their own exploitative sub-prime mortgage. What is key here is that, just as Walmart denies the inherent class antagonisms of its empire by insisting employees see themselves as free-agent “associates,” so, too, does it tether the economic well-being of these associates to the same market forces that ultimately drive Walmart’s exploitative practices. It is notable how this approach is cloaked in the discourse of freedom and security: employees are encouraged to “secure” their futures through individualized forms of economic “freedom” and rational “choice” (participation in the fund is, of course, optional).

Were Walmart a state-run monopoly, rather than a staggeringly successful capitalist enterprise, its actions would likely be seen, in sum, as totalitarian. It blends crass populism with incredible material power, a culture of highly torqued securitization with a quasi-theocratic ethos. The fact that Walmart elicits so little resistance cannot simply be reduced to false consciousness, cognitive dissonance or lack of education. Rather, Walmart helps produce the subjects germane to its rule, securitizing souls who find in Walmart a temporary ally in a world of systemic and perpetual insecuritization.

[...] While Walmart offers itself (to employees, to consumers, to investors) as a shining example of security, it is, ironically, both benefiting from and driving a global paradigm whose ultimate effects are increased insecurity and precariousness. And it is here that we might look to the overarching cultural politics of Walmart’s idiom, a circuit within which capital is accumulated by externalizing insecurities and, conversely, security itself (or its simulacrum) is commodified. Recent and ongoing efforts to tame or scold Walmart for its hypocrisy or excesses will not and cannot answer the deeper, more paradigmatic question the firm’s success poses. Efforts to improve its working conditions or environmental behaviour, or to pass bylaws prohibiting its growth, will meet with only limited success. Should they be able to overcome the firm, its allies and the powerful lobbyists it employs (Lichtblau 2012), they can only hope to constrain the firm’s adaptability to fluctuating market signals, allowing another more efficient and voracious retailer, more adept at securitization, to come to the fore. Without the overturning of the paradigm of securitization as a whole, a paradigm that stretches from Bentonville to Wall Street to the Pentagon, Walmart will continue to be symptomatic of deeper problems, and efforts to save society from it merely palliative.

As such, Walmart offers an instructive case for cultural critics. To the extent that the ongoing financial crisis is both deeply rooted in and productive of a culture of insecurity, the politics of securitization are likely only to intensify through the emerging “age of austerity.” Certainly, right-wing and neoliberal forces have long leveraged the everyday material insecurities of capitalism into the political capital necessary to pursue increased military budgets, new policing and surveillance techniques, and increased corporate “freedoms” (Haiven 2014, 28–73). What the case of Walmart can teach us is that, in the financialized economy, the line between ideology and material relations is thinner than ever. In an age when we are all instructed to minimize risk and maximize the opportunities for future profitability, when securitization has become (among) the key cultural imperatives of capitalism, we cannot simply dismiss consumers’ “partnerships” with Walmart as the result of false consciousness or ideological confusion. Walmart offers itself as an ally of the sorts of consuming/investing securitized subjects it helps create. This is why efforts that limit themselves to revealing Walmart’s (many) evils will have only limited success. In order to confront and overcome securitizing capitalism, cultural critics and their allies will need to offer a vision of a plausible future that provides those things that securitization falsely promises.

Such an examination draws us into some of the central debates and tensions within the field of cultural studies, a field that has always wagered its explanatory power and political promise on the interpretation of the tensions between structure and agency and, in particular, the dynamic relationship of the broad economic structures of capitalism and the possibilities of thinking, dreaming and acting outside, within or against those systems. It is no exaggeration that, whatever we might say about the nature of its influence over our lives, the global economy is by far the most universal, powerful and interwoven system of power on the planet. People everywhere live and die by their pocketbooks. Local modes of oppression and exploitation, from racism to sexism to ablism to homo- phobia, tend to express themselves most universally in the form of economic privilege or privation and the division of labour. And this is all overseen or superintended by a global financial system that coordinates the global flows of financial wealth and disciplines the global economy. And, while a great deal of attention has been paid to the scourge of neoliberalism, one worries that this term tends to appear (like globalization, and perhaps financialization) as a short-hand for whatever seems worst at the moment. Little importance tends to be placed on a more elaborate consideration of the machinations of the global capitalist economy, of which neoliberalism is an important phase, but by no means the first or the worst.

So, increasingly, under financialized capitalism, which has seen the bleed of financial logics into the fabric of daily life, we are guided to act in the world on the basis of economic imperatives. Our social cooperation with other people is based increasingly on the mediation of money, in the sense that more and more aspects of our lives become “services” and more and more of our material culture becomes commodities [...] That said, as De Angelis (2007, 34–35) takes pains to make clear, the vast majority of relationships and activities that matter to most people are, by and large, based on non-economic values like friendship, family, solidarity, cooperation and equality. In this sense, all points of life are a struggle between, on the one hand, the relentless threat of commodification and, on the other, the semi-autonomous negotiation of values based on the necessities and contingencies of social reproduction. This is not to suggest that there is a set of universally “good” values, which we need only discover and live by, and they are eternally counterposed against “bad” capitalist values. It is to say that capital represents a unilateral value logic that seeks to confine and redirect the negotiation of social values more broadly towards its own ends. Put otherwise, capitalism can and should also be seen as a system that functions to reorient the reproduction of social life towards its own reproduction by coopting, conscripting and reshaping the way values are imagined and practiced, under the banner of commodification, monetization, quantitative measurement and exploitative discipline.