Power struggles within capitalism are simultaneously struggles over imagining the future
Evidence
The legacy of the 2008 global financial crisis reverberates in contemporary life, reminding us that capitalism’s glass house is fragile and precarious and that the struggles for power within it are also struggles for imagining the future. The question of imagination, then, requires recentering in order to understand these volatile dynamics. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 106
Categorization
- SEED: Possible essay angle: contestation over the future as a distinct terrain of political power, beyond material distribution.
- XREF: connects to: Environmental injustice persists because corporate power is incorporeal and beyond imagination — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 475; Financialized power struggles are won by those with greater imaginative capacity — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 102; The 2008 crisis shows struggles for power are struggles over imagined futures — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 156 (+11 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Environmental injustice persists because corporate power is incorporeal and beyond imagination — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 475; Financialized power struggles are won by those with greater imaginative capacity — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 102; The 2008 crisis shows struggles for power are struggles over imagined futures — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 156 (+11 more)
Broader Connections
- Finance capitalism’s power struggles are fundamentally contests over speculative imagination
#expands(0.95) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 148 - Speculative technologies train a present-focused disbelief in capitalism’s future promises
#complicates(0.75) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 36 - Capitalism’s temporal and material conditions shape societies’ shared imagined futures
#complicates(0.72) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 158