Debtors can weaponize their investee status against creditors by attacking tainted reputations

Evidence

Philosopher Michel Feher (2018), whose work I have already discussed in previous chapters, has explicitly aimed to capture the potential for this more immanent politics of resistance to financialization. Feher’s approach, like Appadurai’s, goes further than traditional debt activism. He argues that, in order to make such potential materialize, debtors need to cynically embrace the role of investee bestowed on them by creditors, appropriating their own condition so that they can mobilize against it. To do so, they must find the right levers to pull—for instance, using their credit-seeking status as a vehicle for appreciating those assets that are most likely to subvert financialization. Such strategies may include investee activism aiming to exploit corporate social responsibility structures to damage creditor reputation and thus hinder corporate financing (such as the 2016 Standing Rock Reservation’s campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which successfully brought extraction pipelines to a standstill). Or they may take the form of contingent workers’ cooperative strategies in the gig economy, which invoke a modest ambition of advocating security through autonomy, rather than by pursuing a return to the postwar social-democratic contract. For Feher, while the demands of the Keynesian era’s unionized labor were full employment and social security, the task of today’s investees must be to imagine the future’s new appreciable, creditworthy projects. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 314

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Feher’s ‘investee’ concept — a subject-position the reader needs to distinguish from traditional debtor-as-victim politics.
• XREF: Standing Rock campaign as coordinated reputational damage mirrors the leverage tactics in the diamond-trade arbitration chapter (reputation fear as enforcement) — same mechanism, different domain. — connects to: Debtors can weaponize their own investee status to fight financialization from within — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 485
• SEED: Angle: ‘security through autonomy’ as the gig-economy answer to the postwar social contract — a credible modern labor-politics position, not mere nostalgia.