Austerity calls for sacrifice to the economy as an unreturned offering.
Evidence
In the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, for example, 700 billion taxpayer dollars and over five million homeowners were fed to banks “too big to fail.” Thus we are returned to the religious valence of sacrifice. In shared sacrifice for economic restoration, we sacrifice “to,” rather than “for,” and make an offering to a supreme power on which we are radically dependent, but that owes us nothing. We are called to offer life to propitiate and regenerate its life-giving capacities … but without any guarantee that the benefits of this sacrifice will redound to us. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 426
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: This is evidence that real-life austerity practices the sacrificial logic of Dido/Ibn Fadlan — giving life to a power that owes nothing.
- SHARE: The 700 billion / five million homeowners numbers pressed against ‘too big to fail’ is a striking stat pairing for anyone focused on the 2008 crisis.
- XREF: connects to: Austerity rhetoric demanded whole nations work, live, and save harder.; Austerity transforms neoliberal rationality from freedom toward sacrifice. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 135; Austerity-era sacrifice drops the trickle-down promise that sacrifice would benefit the poor — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 419 (+4 more)
Broader Connections
- Austerity frames national crisis as requiring patriotic individual sacrifice in frugality and labor
#corroborates(0.90) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 803 - A tiny economy’s crisis was weaponized as a metaphor for austerity
#complicates(0.75) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 202 - The present-focused economy of volatility has displaced deferred-gratification sacrifice.
#complicates(0.75) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 77