Speculation itself has become the primary terrain of power conflicts.

Evidence

History’s dialectic plays out between what is proximate and certain and what is undetermined and uncertain. Capitalism’s longevity and its ideological purchase owes much to the successful functioning of this dialectic, at least in theory and in the minds of those who endorse it. Yet our financialized times see the forces of these struggles intensifying, as speculation itself becomes the primary terrain of power conflicts. Those engaged in speculation are in that sense vying for power, with winners and losers decided by their capacity to deploy imaginative resources, in order to speculate with any hope of success about the future. The new divisions fan the flames of older ones between speculators and those who are speculated on. This shift originates in the growing unequal distribution of risk and debt dependencies in financialized society. As anthropologist Laura Bear (2020, 7) notes, “our ability to accumulate capital from speculation is unevenly distributed in relation to intersecting inequalities of class, race, ethnicity and gender.” — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 67

Categorization

• XREF: Bear’s uneven distribution of speculative capacity dovetails with the reader’s earlier reading on social capital and information asymmetries — speculation as an information/risk resource.