Financialization won by subordinating collective interests to speculative private capital after Bretton Woods
Evidence
During these final decades of the long twentieth century, the ultimate victory of financialization lay in furnishing an ideological dominance “of the individual over the collective, and of private profit over public interests” (Lapavitsas 2013, 793). Or as LiPuma and Lee (2004, 23) put it, a dominance of “a huge, not production-directed, and continually expanding pool of mobile, nomadic, and opportunistic capital that resides in the hands of private hedge funds, leading investment banks, … and the financial divisions of major corporations.” At the same time, as we have already seen, with the breakdown of Bretton Woods uncertainty became an even more salient feature of finance capitalism, initially in the form of interest-rate instability and subsequently across broader social and political life. … As argued by Wendy Brown (2015, 79), a key proponent of this view, “economic values have not simply supersaturated the political or become predominant over the political. Rather, a neoliberal iteration of the homo oeconomicus is extinguishing the agent, the idiom, and the domains through which democracy … materializes.” — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 72
Categorization
- DEFINE: Establishes the ‘neoliberal subject’/homo oeconomicus framing that the book’s homo speculans thesis will critique.
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s assessment of how Komporozos-Athanasiou positions himself against Wendy Brown’s homo oeconomicus critique — the counterfactual received target. — connects to: Vietnam and Great Society spending cost America its trade surplus and killed Bretton Woods — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 172; Bretton Woods restrained bank-driven financial speculation until its dismantling. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 180; Financialization establishes ideological dominance of individual profit over collective interests — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 109 (+17 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Vietnam and Great Society spending cost America its trade surplus and killed Bretton Woods — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 172; Bretton Woods restrained bank-driven financial speculation until its dismantling. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 180; Financialization establishes ideological dominance of individual profit over collective interests — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 109 (+17 more)
Broader Connections
- Speculative communities originated in late-nineteenth-century futures markets, not the post-Bretton Woods era.
#complicates(0.79) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 110