Suchergebnisse

"Since the 1960s, scholars and other commentators have frequently announced the imminent decline of American financial power : excessive speculation and debt are believed to have undermined the long-term basis of a stable U.S.-led financial order. But the American financial system has repeatedly shown itself to be more resilient than such assessments suggest. This book argues that there is considerable coherence to American finance : far from being a house of cards, it is a proper edifice, built on institutional foundations with points of both strength and weakness. The book examines these foundations through a historical account of their construction : it shows how institutional transformations in the late nineteenth century created a distinctive infrastructure of financial relations and proceeds to trace the contradiction-ridden expansion of this system during the twentieth century as well as its institutional consolidation during the neoliberal era. It concludes with a discussion of the forces of instability that hit at the start of the twenty-first century"--

The interface of political economy with arts and literature has become dominated by a particular image: capital's Grinch-like theft of the future. Fredric Jameson (2004: 36) called it "the waning of the utopian idea" and Franco Berardi (2011: 18) referred to it as the "slow cancellation of the future". The image rests on the tendency to interpret neoliberalism through the specific lens of 'financialization' as a post-1970s phenomenon. According to this perspective, as the Fordist manufacturing economy went into decline during the 1970s, the liberalization of finance and the growth of debt created new sources of profits, albeit 'fictitious' rather than real ones (Arrighi, 1994). Such perspectives portray neoliberalism as a capitalism on steroids. As those drugs are losing their effectiveness, what initially appeared as an accelerating movement of unchecked market expansion is now increasingly exposed to the weight of its own contradictions. By such reasoning, neoliberal policies are now just trying to keep an economic system going that has fundamentally run out of steam. The constant creation of new asset bubbles to this end is fueling the ongoing concentration of wealth, and with each round of stimulus, more asset inflation is needed to produce a given increase in growth and employment. Neoliberalism, for all its claims to dynamism and innovation, has become a bailout society.

This rejoinder takes up some of the points that have been raised by the reviews of Capital and Time in this forum. It engages the question of how political economy should position itself vis-à-vis concerns about the dangers of essentialism and teleological explanation. It argues that a proper theorization of the logic of 'leverage' is key to the development of a political economy that appropriates the insights of post-foundational theory but is still able to account for the reality of power and inequality.

This rejoinder takes up some of the points that have been raised by the reviews
of Capital and Time in this forum. It engages the question of how political
economy should position itself vis-à-vis concerns about the dangers of
essentialism and teleological explanation. It argues that a proper theorization
of the logic of 'leverage' is key to the development of a political economy that
appropriates the insights of post-foundational theory but is still able to
account for the reality of power and inequality.

The 2007/2008 financial crisis was widely expected to usher in a shift toward a post-neoliberal regime that would be more actively concerned with system-level risk and impose restrictive regulations on financial institutions and markets. Such a shift, it is now widely recognized, has failed to materialize. Commentators have tended to point to the "capture" of policymaking processes by financial elites to account for the failure of reform. This argument represents the continuation of a problematic trend in critical perspectives on neoliberalism — namely, to rely on an instrumentalist understanding of institutional power and to view the survival of neoliberalism as dependent on external interventions. That line of critique, it is argued, is rather one-sided in downplaying the internal sources of cohesion that neoliberalism commands. Taking its cue from Foucault's comments on neoliberalism in his late lectures at the Collège de France and the methodological innovations that he introduced in that context, the article explores the logic of governance through risk and the specific way in which neoliberalism intervenes in this relationship. In this way, it moves beyond an understanding of neoliberalism that views it in terms of the neglect of system-level governance and offers an account of the distinctive modalities of neoliberal financial governance. The article suggests that we should not view developments since the crisis in purely negative terms (the failure of progressive reform), but consider the ways in which they represent a continuation of the distinctive rationality of neoliberal financial governance.

For some decades now, progressively minded social scientists have argued that markets are too important to leave to economists — indeed, entire new subfields have formed in response to this concern. But this engagement with economic life has often been somewhat half-hearted. Particularly telling in this respect is the fact that these new fields have organized themselves centrally around the rejection of 'economism' — the idea that markets have self-regulatory properties. Scholars in fields such as political economy and economic sociology have devoted a great deal of energy to normative critiques of the market, but they have displayed much less interest in rethinking the core categories and principles of economic life itself.What the books considered here have in common, and what sets them apart from established ways of thinking, is a willingness to tarry with the paradoxes of money.

Among progressively minded theorists and other commentators, the financial crisis of 200708 produced an instant consensus that the days of neoliberalism — which involved above all financial expansion and capital-friendly public policies — were over. As a consequence, the turn to austerity over the past years, which has been extraordinarily effective in making the world a worse place to live in, took that community completely by surprise. The unexpected rise of austerity suggests how right Slavoj Zizek (2008) was when, at the height of the crisis, he encouraged talking and thinking instead of jumping to conclusions and rushing to action.