Finance transforms creative talent into a weapon of class war that entrenches inequality

Evidence

Still, for all that intelligence and innovation, the sector mostly produces immaterial financial assets or metaphoric wealth – in other words, practically nothing of tangible or lasting value. From one angle, in fact, it destroys value: liquidating public assets by privatizing services, foreclosing on homes and businesses, and imposing austerity measures that funnel social wealth upwards to an apparently lawless global oligarchy. Financial forces also superintend a global economic system that is characterized by a massively unfair global division of creative labour, where creative opportunities are reserved for a fraction of the world’s population (mostly in Northern cities). The remainder spend longer days and shorter lives in fields, factories and kitchens, with little opportunity to practise creativity and even less to have it recognized or valued. Most of the wealth “created” by the financial sector is, in a sense, derivative – it derives its value as a reflection or means of representing real-world labour and wealth. Finance, at least at first blush, appears to be a glitzy simulacrum of value that nonetheless disciplines and (dis)orients the economic and social world. In this sense, finance is, a form of class war, which synthesizes, aggregates and puts to work the creativity of the financial “industry” in the interests of perpetuating and, indeed, more deeply entrenching reigning inequalities and forms of exploitation. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 409

Categorization

• XREF: Directly the mechanism deWaard’s cultural argument extends: finance’s derivative ‘value’ colonizes and redirects creativity. Complements prior note on the global division of creative labor. — connects to: The same creative power drives both financial capitalism and resistance to it — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 112; Financial constraints reduce creative production’s capacity for critique and diversity. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media: How Wall Street…, 23; Financial practice expresses class and acts as a control mechanism — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 20 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• The same creative power drives both financial capitalism and resistance to it #corroborates (0.85) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 112
• Financial practice expresses class and acts as a control mechanism #corroborates (0.80) — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 20
• Finance both transforms culture and depends on that cultural transformation #expands (0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 31
• Speculative finance dominates by co-opting the generative worker imagination. #corroborates (0.78) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 142
• Financial constraints reduce creative production’s capacity for critique and diversity. #qualifies (0.75) — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 23
• Finance is socially and politically generative, not merely economically exploitative #complicates (0.72) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 22
• Inequality dimensions reflect one institutional shift toward financialization #expands (0.70) — Ken-Hou Lin & Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Financialization and U.S. Income…, 25