Finance capital dominates by capturing the imagination that emancipation would otherwise free
Evidence
Human imagination is here crucial because it creates the blueprints for the cells, which workers then go on to erect. Through this extraordinary capacity to “raise the structure” of their products before actually producing them, workers also locate themselves in a broader social matrix, and in doing so they “realise a purpose.” But Marx does not link this powerful framing of the imagination with the conditions of alienating uncertainty (from which imagination emerges), nor does he juxtapose it with the speculative specters haunting the modern polity. As Haiven (2011) has noted, capital’s role can be seen precisely as encroaching on the generative work of this potentially emancipatory imagination by “offering its material manifestations (money, commodities, institutional hierarchies) as the means through which social relations are imagined and negotiated” (103). A close reading of Capital would support this view. Speculative finance exacerbates capital’s dominance over the imagination by increasing its power precisely through curtailing workers’ capacity to produce social value. To paraphrase Marx, the architects of finance possess a more dominant and pernicious imagination than those enmeshed in the labor process. … We find in these words a poignant reading of the darkness cast over capitalism’s dwellers, marred by an unresolved tension that is innate to the proletarian condition. They are doomed to be enslaved not only by capital itself but by its specter: a speculative imagination binding them to a sovereignty that is purely “illusory.” — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 142
Categorization
- XREF: Parallels the Frankfurt School reading that domination operates through the imagination and culture, not just the economy. — connects to: Financialized power struggles are won by those with greater imaginative capacity — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 102