Working people embraced finance as resistance to capital since World War II

Evidence

My suggestion here is that we entertain a thought experiment that would see us imagine the most recent round of financialization as based, in part, in the resistance of working people to capital. It is not a very promising form of resistance, at least in terms of contributing to a brighter future. Since the Second World War, people and constituencies have embraced finance in multiple ways as a means to gain a tragic and ironic agency over the material conditions of their lives, as imposed by capital. … As Brett Benjamin (2007, 55–88) illustrates, revolutionary figures of the third world resistance engaged with transnational finance as a form of resistance to formal colonialism, as a strategy towards autonomous national agency (see also Haiven 2013a; Khagram 2004). While this might have been a tragic and ironic miscalculation, we should not discount this defining moment of post-war global political economy: finance here appeared as a means to break free of colonial relations, or at least renegotiate them on different terms – at least, in the absence of duly deserved reparations from colonizing countries, and in the absence of indigenous forms of modernized manufacturing, scientific and technological infrastructure and expertise. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 514

Categorization

• XREF: A key causal mechanism for how finance colonized everyday life: people adopted finance as a strategy of agency. Bridges directly to deWaard’s cultural argument and to IMF/WB lending discussed in earlier chapters. — connects to: Wage-earners are both workers and capital owners under financialization — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 102; Workers’ wartime indispensability empowered postwar demands to transform the economic system — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 174; Financialization may erode the postwar capital-labor social pact — Greta R. Krippner, The Financialization of the American…, 142 (+4 more)
• SEED: An angle: ‘finance as tragic resistance’ — how ordinary people’s drive for agency underwrote their own financial subsumption; the irony of anti-colonial loans becoming debt traps.

Broader Connections

• Wage-earners are both workers and capital owners under financialization #expands (0.85) — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 102
• Capital precedes and shapes resistance rather than resistance driving capital #contradicts (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 923
• Financialization may erode the postwar capital-labor social pact #complicates (0.80) — Greta R. Krippner, The Financialization of the American…, 142
• The same creative power drives both financial capitalism and resistance to it #corroborates (0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 112
• Workers’ wartime indispensability empowered postwar demands to transform the economic system #qualifies (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 174