by
Max Haiven
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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 [...]
not exactly new but it's nice to have a summary of the problems with the Keynesian golden ages
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.
i like this reading. relevant to tech's spread throughout culture? uber isn't just imposed on people, but the larger cultural backdrop caused them to be receptive to it (a limited form of agency)
[...] 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.
ahhh i love this!!! marx's 11th thesis :)
But don’t mistake me for adding to the chorus who feign surprise at the rise of what they dismiss as “anger” or “resentment” or “populism.” By revenge I mean not only a passing sentiment but a logic of retribution, what Francis Bacon called a “wild justice,” a ruptural claiming of unpayable debts. My goal is deeper than describing the political mood of our moment. I want to explore the notion that capitalism itself is a revenge economy: a system that appears to be taking needless, warrantless, and ultimately self-defeating (but, none the less, profitable for some) vengeance on the world. Revenge capitalism breeds revenge politics among the populations that reel from its impacts and lash back, though usually, tragically, at the wrong targets. I think it is long overdue for us to imagine what it would mean to avenge what it has done to us and to the planet. The line between revenge and avenging is subtle, both linguistically and conceptually. But whereas revenge fantasies fixate on retribution in the coin in which the original injury was dealt, and thereby risk perpetuating that economy, an avenging imaginary dreams of the abolition of the systemic source of that injury and the creation of new economies of peace and justice.
[...] In the shadow of the vindictive borders, beloved bodies drown or waste away to assuage the fear and protect the comforts of the privileged. The world is saturated with heart-wracking injustices that, even more grotesquely, are not even framed as injustices in the worldview of the powerful, just a regrettable necessity or a hiccup of progress.
Liberal and neoliberal philosophers have insisted that capitalist democracy is the climax of human political achievement, the culmination of centuries of human social evolution that has seen the knights of reason and the law banish the dragon of revenge to the borderlands, but revenge is with us still. Indeed, a kind of vengeance is at the core of capitalism, though a revenge largely executed without any single human intending it, operating through the everyday and allegedly inevitable banalities of the economy.
[...] revenge is a useful adjective to attach to capitalism because it helps explain the seemingly irrational, certainly bloodcurdling violence of that system, which reduces so many of us to utter worthlessness and disposability. Calling up the term revenge also helps us better understand this system’s foundations in the cruelties of empire, colonialism and the racial ordering of humanity. These cruelties that continue to this day as humans are, completely unnecessarily, warehoused in prisons, left to die in slums, worked to death in mines, abandoned to the border, or denied the care they require. This vengeance emerges as capitalism responds, directly and indirectly, to constant resistance to its rule. This resistance is, ultimately, the source of the contradictions and crises that drive its innovations and its excesses.
Capitalism, like all systems of power, is reproduced not simply through brute force (though that is certainly part of it) but also through a whole contradictory moral order where its violences and inequalities are normalized, and in which those who refuse or rebel are framed as bestial, stupid, and doomed. It is within liberal capitalism’s dominant moral economy that we have come to even understand revenge. It may well be an eternal human drama, but our interpretation of that drama, our notion of what revenge is, is a discursive formation shaped by the moral order of the historically unique system in which we are steeped and to whose reproduction we are compelled to contribute. How we imagine revenge is shaped by a system of revenge. Thus capitalism appears, in its preferred cosmology, as not only the natural expression of basic and inexorable human impulses to compete, accumulate, and barter, but as the triumph of order, peace and plenty.24 Capitalism has (in a sense) benefited from the (justified) timeless opprobrium for revenge, framed only as an individual drive, to mask its own systematically vengeful nature and to castigate its enemies as heinously, nihilistically vengeful.
Why add another adjective to preface to capitalism? Such a description should be taken alongside, rather than as a competitor, for recent analyses of gore capitalism, racial capitalism, carceral capitalism, surveillance capitalism, cognitive capitalism, narcocapitalism, empire, biocapitalism, financialized capitalism and neoliberal capitalism. This cruel god has many faces. Revenge capitalism is a way to reflect on both an inherent tendency within and a specific period of capitalism.