On the one hand, the financial sector is incredibly creative. Some of the finest and most refined minds of each successive generation are cherry-picked from elite universities hedge-funds, investment banks and their institutional periphery to dream up ever more rapid, cunning and diabolical ways to make money out of money. The development of new derivative financial products, new avenues of inter-market arbitrage, new revenue streams to capitalize, new technologies of high-frequency trading and new ways of reading, visualizing and interpreting the market have seduced not only the graduates of elite business programs, but also PhDs in fluid dynamics, astrophysics, cellular biology and computer engineering. To be sure, the vast majority of what goes on in the financial sector is deeply uncreative (endless number-crunching and paper-pushing, scrupulous research on economic sectors and investments, meticulous computer programming, hectic digital trading and ruthless power-brokering). Taken as a whole, however, the financial sector is a staggering reactor of human creativity, a playground of the mind where the unfathomable pressure of intense competition creates a remorseless ecosystem of constrained innovation, which, no less strange than the uncanny depths of the ocean, is populated with monsters at the very limits of the imagination

Still, for all that intelligence and innovation, the sector mostly produces immaterial financial assets or metaphoric wealth – in other words, practically nothing of tangible or lasting value. From one angle, in fact, it destroys value: liquidating public assets by privatizing services, foreclosing on homes and businesses, and imposing austerity measures that funnel social wealth upwards to an apparently lawless global oligarchy. Financial forces also superintend a global economic system that is characterized by a massively unfair global division of creative labour, where creative opportunities are reserved for a fraction of the world’s population (mostly in Northern cities). The remainder spend longer days and shorter lives in fields, factories and kitchens, with little opportunity to practise creativity and even less to have it recognized or valued. Most of the wealth “created” by the financial sector is, in a sense, derivative – it derives its value as a reflection or means of representing real-world labour and wealth. Finance, at least at first blush, appears to be a glitzy simulacrum of value that nonetheless disciplines and (dis)orients the economic and social world. In this sense, finance is, a form of class war, which synthesizes, aggregates and puts to work the creativity of the financial “industry” in the interests of perpetuating and, indeed, more deeply entrenching reigning inequalities and forms of exploitation.

it was precisely the emptiness of the term “creative” that drew the umbrage of several critics

[...] Claustrophobic cultural norms and parochial markets were to be swept away by the free movement of capital around the world, as were inefficient and unfair labour practices and corrupt governments. This rhetoric reached a fevered pitch during the dot.com boom at the turn of the millennium, when our old friend Bill Gates was among those CEOs leading the choir in praise of a borderless digital economy that would sweep away lumbering corporate dinosaurs, open up bold new markets and allow the spirit of the creative entrepreneur latent in each individual to shine through (Gates 1995; 1999). Indeed, so much opportunity was said to abound that individuals who failed to seize it had only themselves to blame, an impression which lent itself to the drive to privatize and to cut social services lest they inhibit such creative zeal. Even meagre forms of economic redistribution, it was feared, would create dependent individuals unwilling to embrace the risks and rewards of the new economy. The appearance of “creativity” as the partner of “destruction” here is no accident, or, more accurately, it is no accident that Schumpeter’s initially pessimistic and academic term became a crucial element in the reproduction of financialization. In much the same way as discourses of innovation, progress, science and ingenuity were applied to the technological development of nuclear bombs, the slippery language of creativity offers an unaccountable rhetoric that both excuses and facilitates financial speculation’s destructive practices towards the reproduction of the ruling paradigm. By linking the vicissitudes of the deregulated free market to the idea of creativity, which is held to be the dynamic and unique element of the human spirit, financialized capitalism’s drives and effects are disguised as the natural and inevitable articulations of human nature itself, rather than as historically contingent and entirely avoidable.

At one level, creativity’s move from the margin to the centre of capitalist ideology is linked to the financialization of the system. Financialization is driven, ultimately, by a speculative ethos with a voracious appetite for the production of newness (see Marazzi 2008, 64–68). To demonstrate their quality to investors, firms need to prove not merely profitability but also innovation, a capacity to stay ahead of the curve, to constantly revolutionize their means of production (and distribution, and sales). Financialization, then, drives and is driven by an economy pathologically addicted to the performance of creativity. Creativity’s particular woolliness as a concept is here an asset: it is precisely because it is not fully quantifiable (in part because it is a nebulous term, in part because it is always relative to someone else’s lack) that it can operate as a disciplinary idiom, one that polices economic actors who could always be just a little more creative, and may not be creative enough. In a world where capital insists on measuring and quantifying almost every social process (de Angelis 2007) there is a particular economic and cultural utility to be found in ideas and ideals like creativity precisely to the extent they refuse or elude such conscription: they hold open a horizon or a promise in whose name all manner of otherwise dubious, short-sighted or irrational actions might be justified. Creativity, unburdened from any requirement to prove its purpose or measure its success, becomes a cruel aspiration whose absence can be cited as the justification for the restructuring of an enterprise, a government program or an individual’s career or economic outlook.

[...] Cognitive capitalism, then, is characterized by the expansion and proliferation of capital’s technologies and techniques for capturing living labour beyond the factory (Dyer-Witheford 1999; Vercellone 2007). As Marazzi (2008) illustrates, the financial sector itself is foundational to the development, sustainability and measurement of these new technologies. Drawing on the example of the dot.com bubble of the early 2000s, he argues that finance offers liquid capital to a whole variety of attempts to marketize and commodify the creative energies of workers and consumers. While perhaps only 1% of firms succeed (paying for the other 99% that end in failure), finance effectively widens and pluralizes capitalism’s social factory. For other Autonomist thinkers, including Federici (2005; 2012) and De Angelis (2007), this represents less a new paradigm and more the continuation and intensification of capitalism’s historic trajectory to enclose the commons. They borrow the concept from Marx’s writings on the origins of capitalism in the “primitive accumulation” of common lands, and then they extend it to illuminate the ways that common spaces of autonomy, solidarity and social experimentation are successively incorporated into and subsumed within capitalism’s overarching paradigm (see also Caffentzis 2013; The Midnight Notes Collective 1990).