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 virtually no access to debt or credit) (Winant 2001) and the systematic exploitation of women’s reproductive labour in the home and the market (Federici 2012). It also depended on a deep cultural conservatism enforced by homophobic terrorism (Kinsman and Gentile 2009) and what we now understand to be completely unsustainable ecological practices, including the mass exploitation of fossil fuels, the proliferation of toxic chemicals and plastics, and the mass production of commodities and their subsequent waste (Foster, Clark and York 2010). While capital may have been able to buy off a section of the working class (particularly those whom it valued in white-collar, managerial and professional positions) (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 2013), there was (and is) no way to extend this prosperity to even a fraction of the world’s population, though this promise was (and is) among the key legitimations of global capitalism [...]

For our purposes, it should be noted that the entire sub-prime market was based on offering NINJA borrowers a chance for privatized upward class mobility through the lure of home ownership. One way of reading this situation is to suggest that low-income workers accepted the loans as a form of resistance to their material conditions. Indeed, many did so because, even if their homes were foreclosed, things could not get much worse: they already, after all, had virtually no assets to lose. Sub-prime loans depended to a large extent on the myth of the universality of the middle class and the idea of financialized independence; sub-prime mortgages offered borrowers what seemed to be a key to economic security, health, education and a fair share of social wealth (Aronowitz 2003; Haiven and Khasnabish 2014, 112–117). This, especially for the largely racialized urban populations that were the prime target of this form of extortion, might be read as a form of resistance to a neoliberal culture of utter abandonment and the vaporization of social security and public space (see Giroux 2012). It also relied on the tragic optimism of the American Dream that informed borrowers that brighter days were always on the horizon for those who work hard and take individualistic control of their lives. It was within this individualistic frame that taking out an extortionate mortgage with a rapidly escalating interest rate could be justified as a form of resistance for the economically marginalized (that is, when the terms of the mortgage were even disclosed by the mortgage sales representative, which was routinely not the case – Taibbi 2010). We are beholden to recognize the savvy motivations that animated people’s engagement with sub-prime finance and not fall prey to the right-wing castigation of our “financial illiteracy” or the canard that people “used their houses as ATMs” for the purchase of “big-screen TVs” and the like.

Obviously, the strategies of financialized “resistance” through finance outlined here, and to which we can today add micro-finance schemes as well, were and are Pyrrhic, if not utterly disastrous. And they stretch the definition of “resistance” almost to the breaking point, given that IMF/WB loans, sub-prime mortgages, consumer credit and the like were actively advertised and encouraged by the powers-that-be. But, as Aihwa Ong (2006) and others have recently pointed out, we do a disservice to people’s agency and intelligence when we imagine neoliberalism is merely imposed from above. It is, in fact, activated from below, enacted and performed by social actors as they contend with and respond to material conditions.

[...] all financial crises are, elementally, crises of liquidity: the fluid convertibility of one form of capital into another [...] In the most recent crisis, derivatives and other securities based on the sub-prime market ceased overnight to be convertible into ready cash or other assets because no one would buy them: they were no longer credible claims to realworld value. Indeed, fearing they would cause a crash if they revealed the scope of the problem, commentators and pundits insisted on calling it a “liquidity crisis” until the gravity of the economic crisis became unavoidable.

But I have suggested in Chapter 2 that we need to think of liquidity more broadly: liquidity names the success of capital in converting social values into economic value, the pliability of social life to the dictates of capitalist accumulation. For this reason, liquidity is correlated with resistance within the system: low resistance means high liquidity. For instance, a sweatshop in an export-processing zone is (at least ideally) a highly liquid social institution because it maximizes exploitation and minimizes resistance. Money invested in production can enjoy easy convertibility into a t-shirt or a circuit board thanks to lax laws, violence, surveillance and the ever-present threat of capital relocation – resistance is held to a minimum. It is also easily liquidated: a corporation can choose to employ a different sub-contractor and shift production elsewhere without losing a great deal of invested capital. Similarly, the highly regulated and supervised space of Walmart is a highly liquid space for capital: the t-shirt or electronic commodity is almost certain to transform back into capital (money) with very little impedance, thanks to the grooming of the shopping atmosphere, private security and surveillance, and consumer cultural norms (see Chapter 3). This somewhat reductionist example serves to demonstrate that liquidity is more than just the celerity of financial transactions: it indexes the saturation of capital into social life and the relations of production, and measures (the absence of) resistance. It refers to the ease with which the fundamental capitalist formula of accumulation, M-C-M' , can advance – in this formula, resistance is the viscosity of the hyphens.

Rather, what would a (cultural) politics look like that approached the desires that feed financialization? What sorts of new constituencies and collaborations would need to form to fulfill those desires otherwise? And how could writing and research about financialization not merely point to the “big lie” of the system, but show that such a system cannot fulfil those values it promises? How could we reveal that, behind the necromancy of financialization, there resides an incredible, creative constituent power, a species being, one that is, today, rudely conscripted to the reproduction of its own exploitation? How could such work not merely bemoan the absence of a revolutionary financialized subject, but call that subject into being? If financialization represents a new set of relationships between what we once imagined to be the distinct fields of culture and economics, and if financialization and the politics germane to it are, to some extent, the product of the imagination, then scholars thereof can no longer imagine themselves as detached outsiders.