[...] 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.