Finance functions to obscure capitalism’s raw dependence on precarious life

Evidence

I conclude this chapter by suggesting that finance might well be understood as an elaborate way in which capitalism can obscure the raw and primal reality of what Judith Butler (2006) calls “precarious life.” — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 46

Categorization

• QUESTION: How exactly does finance obscure precarious life — through abstraction, distance, risk commutation? Worth chasing in Chapter 2.
• XREF: Ties to the reader’s core theme that financialization colonizes culture and everyday imagination — Butler’s precarious life as the obscured substrate. — connects to: Capitalism calibrates incentives to make workers risk death for subsistence — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 194; The financier embodies an ideal of leveraged precariousness imposed on all workers — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 187; Finance is monetized quantification of future uncertainty exploiting shared existential precariousness — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 554 (+5 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 46

Broader Connections

• Finance is monetized quantification of future uncertainty exploiting shared existential precariousness #expands (0.88) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 554
• Everyday financialized actors co-produce precarity alongside macro institutions #expands (0.75) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 214
• Finance capitalism’s power struggles are fundamentally contests over speculative imagination #complicates (0.72) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 148
• Financialization lets capital extract value from social life without destroying its creative source ecosystems #complicates (0.72) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 572