Debtors can weaponize their own investee status to fight financialization from within

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, 485

Categorization

• SEED: The Standing Rock case — investee activism using CSR structures to damage creditor reputations and halt financing — is an article-worthy concrete example of finance-based resistance.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s reading on trust/reputation systems and institutional economics — damaging creditor reputation as a political lever parallels reputation-based enforcement mechanisms studied elsewhere. — connects to: Debtors can weaponize their investee status against creditors by attacking tainted reputations — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 314; Resistance to financialization requires embracing rather than rejecting one’s status as investee — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 314; Financialized politics shifts struggle onto finance’s own turf among active debtor and investor subjects — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 486

Broader Connections

• Debtors can weaponize their investee status against creditors by attacking tainted reputations #expands (0.90) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 314
• Resistance to financialization requires embracing rather than rejecting one’s status as investee #corroborates (0.85) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 314
• Financialized politics shifts struggle onto finance’s own turf among active debtor and investor subjects #expands (0.80) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 486