by Marina Vishmidt This is a sequence of reflections on affirmation and negation, on identification and severance: determinate negation as strategic affirmation, the identification of concrete universals and severance from a defunct relation. These lines will be explored with reference to the current situation of the waged and unwaged working class, most proximately in Britain, as “debt” becomes the ideological white noise and the practical horizon of all social and political imagination. Household indebtedness is confused with the state deficit in the spontaneous ideology of the Conservative austerity agenda, as what remains of the crisis-riddled economy is sacrificed to the “debt” – as poor people to loan sharks, so Britain to the bond investors. The nationalist narrative of “we’re all in this together” eliminates any space for discussion as to who might bear greater responsibility for the crisis, and who should be paying for it. The announced cuts make it all too clear – it’s the bloated public sector and welfare payments which are responsible, and those that have the least shall have even that taken away, as the Biblical parable goes. Yet a fatalistic consensus prevails for now, transfixed by a menace beyond dispute: the “debt.” Debt has taken on an unprecedented social centrality, almost eclipsing the labour theory of value as both the principle of capital accumulation and the principle behind the structural role of labour in social relations organized through the value-form. The social logic of speculation is also at work [sic] in the premise of human and social capital which, as Jason Read argues, has reformulated every human activity as an investment in a future of potential access to greater social wealth. The notion of “human capital” also serves to eradicate any antagonism between those who own the means of production and those who only have their labour to sell, since both are understood to be investors seeking to maximize a return, which is only natural.1 Debt has of course also been the prime driver of accumulation for the past couple of decades, from deficit spending in the public sector contingent on a finance boom driven by the opulent trade in CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations) and other fancifully quantified risk instruments, to the characteristic business of financialization – profiting from the hugely expanded consumption of credit products that its own effect of suppressing wages had created a demand for. In debt-financed accumulation, value was no longer at issue, but wealth; and as workers did not produce wealth, but were a liability on the balance sheet, the only way they could reimburse the wealth creators, the entrepreneurs, was by going into heavily commodified debt. And consumer debt, it need hardly be added, was the force that inflated the asset values that crashed so impressively two years ago, along with the demand it was able to sustain. It is in this scenario that we must look at what the shift from worker to debtor as the definitive social identity for most people today augurs for political re-composition in a time when unemployment and welfare cuts will leave them with marginal resources to either pay debts or meet more immediate needs. And, as has been plentifully evident around the world, austerity budgets trigger counter-attacks on the terrain of reproduction at once, as in Greece and Spain. This is because “social spending” is the first reduction demanded by the agencies of fiscal discipline, and public services become the stakes of survival when low-paid or nonexistent jobs become the norm, a condition exacerbated by cuts. In times of crisis, when the ratio of waged to unwaged starts to tilt negatively, reproduction becomes the political battleground, if only through sheer force of numbers of people who can’t get access to a wage, as well as the important category of the “working poor” who have to rely on benefits. The very existence of the “working poor” is the clearest demonstration, if required, that it is capital and not the indebted worker who is the parasite on the state, as the state allows employers to pay minuscule wages which it then agrees to supplement. The feasibility of targeting social services with the moralistic rhetoric of personal responsibility – like the received idea of a “dependency culture” – relies absolutely on a common sense which blacks out the systemic forces which are genuinely dependent, if not addicted to, the existence of a super-exploited, unemployed, illegalized and desperate “workforce.” It has to ignore the structural necessity of a low-waged and unwaged reserve army which enables capital (including state and semi-private entities) to suppress wages, since the state ultimately meets the costs of reproduction in fear of worse consequences. It is in this sense that all “welfare,” regardless of its levels of generosity or parsimony, regardless of whom it identifies as “deserving” or “scrounging,” is corporate welfare, since its function is ameliorative to the operations of the market, rather than redistributive. Needless to say, “welfare reform,” like austerity, fails on its own economistic terms. The factors of decreasing demand and the cost of policing welfare by outsourcing it to for-profit organizations that have an incentive to cut the welfare rolls ends up being far more expensive than the portion of state expenditure welfare comprised in the first place. But if private contractors are happy, and the tabloids are appeased, than markets are surely working overtime in the public interest. No matter how obvious these contradictions seem to be, and how long they’ve been around, it is worth pointing out time and time again that the fight we have on our hands is not one against market rationality, to be countered with a more “social” set of principles for the economy. There is no rationality, only the looting and cannibalism which set the terms of capitalist accumulation for now. As the likes of David Harvey have exhaustively shown in their work, but which is no less obvious from reading the newspapers, “economic rationality” is a red herring for authoritarian managerial regimes of state power. Neoliberalism is a state project, with state-financed programs of engineering competitiveness across the entirety of social life. Because it is first and last an ideological project, objective circumstances or results have very little standing in it. Thus there’s no relevance to exposing its murderous or hypocritical inequities; it can only be drained of legitimacy ideologically. The argument is easier to make, paradoxically, because the objective conditions themselves have been shaped by the ideology to the point where, as some propose, “the class relationship” is coming to an end and communism is for the first time possible without a prior, “programmatic” affirmation of the working class. Work is no longer available objectively nor desirable subjectively as a political identity, although this lack of content does not prevent the ruling class from continuing to wield it as a disciplinary cudgel.2 Although these ideas have been around since at least the 1970s, with the “Zerowork” strain of post-autonomist thinking, and all the variations of the “refusal of work” stance on the communist and anarchist ultra-left, their re-emergence now comes into the very different political landscape of three decades of neoliberal reaction, globalized capitalism and the destruction of organized labour, not to mention the de-industrialization of Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and Africa and the vast low-grade industrialization of parts of Asia and China. The “communist idea” now has to take into account that the refusal of work is not a political choice, but a prerogative exercised by a stage of capitalism that has much less need of surplus-value production since the discovery that debt is far more profitable. In the vision of “austerity,” everyone is potentially a parasite on the nation’s solvent body, looking to compound the nation’s interest rate in the global markets. So why not behave like one? What is the outcome of a process, underway for at least two decades in the UK, whereby the majority of the population is positioned as the actual or virtual waste of the system? What could be the (anti-)political subjectivity of human capital turned toxic asset? When finance is universally agreed to be the source of all value, the machine of accumulation is rent, not productive investment. The generation of wealth boils down to trade in the “fictitious capital,” along with rent-seeking and capitalization/enclosure of existing [public] assets. As the only way workers can contribute to that valorization is through debt, debt stands as the point of de-legitimation of the current logic of capital. A refusal of debt must take the place of refusal of work in a situation when work is being refused by capital anyway. Having said that, it is very ambiguous for now to what extent, if at all, such political implications have been drawn by the campaign groups, unions and grassroots party activists on the British left. It seems difficult to detect a real consideration of debt going on, besides the generic “we won’t pay for your crisis” standpoint; there is no disputing that someone does have to pay, and this by and large consists of making an economic case for one sector at the (implicit) expense of another. Nowhere is the stunted outlook of the mainstream British socialist left more conspicuous than in the “Right to Work” and “Green Jobs” campaigns that have been appearing on its fringes since the “crisis” hit. They seem to be missing something central about how capital operates nowadays (not to mention the simultaneously reactionary and idealist perspective of demanding “good jobs”): wealth is no longer created through productive investment, and workers don’t want jobs, they just want money. Why else would all the most visible instances of workplace militancy in the past couple of years, from factory occupations to “bossnappings” and threats to blow factories up, all center around better remuneration packages for job losses rather than the maintenance of jobs? Neither capital nor labour are interested in jobs: all anyone is interested in these days are assets. Capital has neither the inclination nor the resources to offer workers more exploitation right now, but there has to be recognition that exploitation remains the bedrock of the social contract, and it is achieved most efficiently without jobs in an economy premised on the capitalization of debt. Isn’t the “jobless recovery” appearing as the watchword in economic analysis today built on assumptions that consumption (or “consumer confidence”) can single-handedly drive a return to prosperity, that is, through another credit bubble? It is immaterial that the global economic crisis was triggered by the bursting of a systemic credit bubble; credit bubbles are the only conceivable avenue of a return to normality, much as disastrous neoliberal policies are only intensified in the aftermath of their resounding failure. It seems evident, from this perspective, that we can only produce wealth (not value) for capital now through our debt repayments. In that case, shouldn’t debt be the pre-eminent focus of resistance and revolt, rather than petitioning imaginary benefactors for imaginary jobs? Further, it needs to be restated time and again that any demand for jobs dovetails all too harmoniously with the government propaganda against the “workshy” who will be forced off welfare if they don’t come to the independent realization that “work sets you free,” as the current Work and Pensions secretary has been quoted as saying. This no doubt inadvertent refrain of the National Socialist slogan throws light on the “obscene” agenda of the “we’re all in it together” mantra providing the rather flimsy legitimation of the announced cuts. On this point at least, there is no departure from earlier historical periods where worsening economic conditions were used to build up a nationalist consensus that paved the way for fascism. If workers are now “human capital,” then the moment of negation of the social relations that have brought us here can start with affirmation: the affirmation of the sick and deteriorating nature of capital from the side of its “human” variant (what was once known as “variable capital”). As “human capital” is being maximized in or out of work, the terrain of reproduction (social services, health, housing) seems like the most direct arena in which this capital can become collectively dysfunctional, also a necessity in the era of intensified biopolitical surveillance and risk management which social services represent for “dependent” populations in the UK.3 The docility of the service “user,” isolated, managed and humiliated in the absence of an employment allowing her to exist without recourse to state benefits, is what needs to be questioned by the users, as well as by the service workers, at the point of “delivery” and in solidarity. It must be recognized that social benefits are actually a “social wage,” and consist not of charity from the state, but of the value extracted from formerly and currently employed workers, as well as that funnelled from them in taxes and VAT. The position of supplication has to be transformed into a position of “insolence,” of justified and collective appropriation. After all, if there are no more workers, then surely oughtn’t “human capital” assert its own series of claims, as capital has asserted its claims for the past 40 years to the exclusion of all others? The dialectic between affirmation and negation needs some clarification. Any practical critique entails both moments, though not a linearity or progressive vector between them. In any social movement, there needs to be an identification of a position (of exclusion, of injustice) in the contradiction, before the place of exclusion is negated by re-organizing the terms of justice or inclusion themselves on another basis. We can see this in the feminist and queer movements, where the structural role of the “woman” or “homosexual” must be accurately identified within the relations of capitalist patriarchy before gender and heteronormativity can be overturned. The same thing with the “classical” class struggle: the social affirmation of workers as a discrete class with interests incompatible with those of bosses and the organization this engenders is a precondition for the political imperative to negate wage-labour and capital. Mobilization around the “wrong” (Rancière) precedes, and persists through, the elimination of the conditions that produce that “wrong,” the conditions which orient the definitions of justice and at the same time, exclude certain kinds of people from making claims via those definitions (like the exclusion of women and many others from the scope of the French Revolution’s “Rights of Man” – which did not prevent the “Rights of Man” being seized by women, by Haitian slaves, as the programme of their fights for liberation.) Using another set of terms, we can look at the “void” or the “point of inconsistency” of the situation (Badiou) as that which is invisible from its point of view, but which is nonetheless primary for it; a moving contradiction. For Marx, it is the co-existence of perfect equality in the sale and exchange of labour power in capitalism with exploitation in production. This is glossed by the Malgré Tout Collective thus: “Structural injustice does not reflect a failure or a partial dysfunction of capitalism: on the one hand, it is perfectly consistent and it leaves no room for reproach; on the other hand, this injustice is what establishes or makes capitalism possible, it is its point of inconsistency, necessarily invisible to capitalism itself. Thus the free, just and rational rules of the market, the laws of supply and demand, have their origin in an injustice, an alienation and an absurdity that are unintelligible to the system, and which are, consequently, perfectly legal and consensual even in the eyes of a large number of workers and trade unionists. This is why the point is not so much that injustice sparks up rebellion, but rather that rebellion forces the inconsistency of the system: it’s in light of the revolutionary political project that the system reveals itself as unjust.”4 It may be that political action that is used to expose this point of inconsistency and to practically refute its terms may not even be recognizable as political action, because it is proposing a new set of identifications – not only of what constitutes injustice or a “wrong,” but of what it means to act politically, and the divisions it introduces are not the familiar ones, since it is no longer seeking to adjust concrete phenomena to an ideal structure, but to question the structure as such, and the subjectivities produced in it, which are at once singular and universal: “[the] position is not ‘negotiable,’ or cannot be answered from the normality of the situation, because it implies its destruction. In this way, political action ceases to be a partial claim, so as to become a singularity: something unforeseeable by the situation because it questions its very foundations. At this point it’s no longer a matter of a class, but of an unclassifiable or anomalous political subject. This subject does not exist outside the situation. It’s a subject that arises from, but is not linked to, the situation because the situation does not foresee it. At the same time, this singularity is universal from the very moment it introduces a rupture that concerns all the inhabitants of the situation (bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, intellectuals, artists, proletarians, etc.), who now have to decide whether or not to commit to the struggle that questions not only the situation they inhabit, but also what they in themselves are.”5 This subtractive moment (strikes, refusals to be monitored, refusals to enter into “workfare” programs, sharing information and resources between claimants rather than between claimants and the state, or even mass and organized “benefit fraud”) can become a constitutive moment in reclaiming the social legitimacy which seems to be the exclusive property of markets for now, provided it can move from a dismissible, “partial” activity to a “universal” one which re-organizes the majority perception of general interest – a perception that is more often than not, more often unconsciously than overtly, on the side of the markets rather than other people (or, rather, refuses the distinction between them). When the legitimacy of the state is grounded in its responsibility to markets – as the true generators of wealth – rather than to the public, who are deemed to just consume this wealth, it has to be workers who break down this apparent reality through their new primary role as indebted consumers, or sources of unproductive wealth accumulation, at the same time as through their role as unproductive workers,6 waged or unwaged, commodity-producing or relationship-managing. An itinerary of the politics of reproduction, leading up to a more precise exposition of what shape the “politics of debt” could assume, is the goal of this text. First, we will revisit the history of the politics of reproduction through the Welfare Rights Movement, Italian Autonomist feminism, the Wages for Housework campaign and “self-reduction” in 1970s Italy, the Claimants’ Unions of the 1980s and the Unemployed Workers unions and initiatives in present-day Britain. In Part Two [included below], we will explore the thesis that the claim of unproductive labour to unproductive capital must be asserted as part of the decomposition of the wage-labour-capital relation discussed by the “communisation” current (Theorie Communiste and Endnotes), which entails the impossibility of asserting a work-based political identity (“only revindicative struggles”), either subjectively (no-one identifies with their jobs) or objectively (workers’ power is broken by law and by globalized re-structuring) and which, as we have already seen, needs to be asserted through the point of inconsistency of the situation – for the politics of debt, we can provisionally name it as “uncapitalized life,” just as “free human activity” came to name human praxis beyond wage labour when wage labour was decisive, both to relations of production and struggles for emancipation. The class relation Marx describes below may be in its historical eclipse: “Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.” (Capital, vol. 1) But the class relation between creditor and debtor flourishes in that vacuum, so long as capitalism in its core lineaments is still with us and so long as most of the populace has to survive within its laws and mediate this survival through the value-form. Again, Marx ensures it doesn’t escape us that, “When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal, every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction.” (p. 711) To the historical (and still current) figures of the housewife and the benefits claimant, we add the figure of the debtor, and try to trace a politics of debt on the ground of the politics of reproduction. What happens to the concept of the “social wage” after the wage? To move chronologically, and to take a starting point which in some ways will appear arbitrary – certainly to historians of the working-class, community and women’s movements – the Welfare Rights Movement coming onto the scene in the 1960s in the United States stands as an interesting case, as it shared activists, demands and campaign tactics with the Civil Rights Movement and the second-wave feminist movement, as well as the more radical community-based and nationalist-influenced factions of the movement like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords.7 The Welfare Rights Movement was composed of the single mothers who were the main constituency of U.S. social services of the time. They were among the first, both in the Civil Rights and the women’s liberation movements, to position their struggle squarely on the terrain of social reproduction. They grounded what came to be known as “the personal is political” in the systemic inequities that organized their lives. They were also the first to name and analyze the structural contradiction that drove their demands on the state – the contribution of unpaid domestic labour to the efficiency of the capitalist economy – and were the first to associate their reproductive function with an economic position. They suggested that this reproductive labour be recognized and valued in the same way as paid labour in the workplace, and also turned this into a political practice, claiming a voice and a subject position from the sidelines of marginality and impoverishment: as women, as single mothers, as African-American in many cases, and as social welfare claimants. They claimed a “social wage” as against the patriarchal “family wage” paid to the male worker as the head of the family, the social responsibility of capital for the “externalities” of commodified but unwaged social being – looking after children and the elderly, for example. Dignity and autonomy from harassment, surveillance and corrupt bureaucracy were also emblematic to their struggle. As traced earlier in the dialectic of affirmation and negation, the Welfare Rights Movement affirmed a “wrong” in order to negate the social conditions and the social identifications – patriarchy, capitalism and racism – that made that wrong possible, indeed unquestionable, and rendered them its natural targets. Yet it can be argued that overall, like the mainstream of the Civil Rights and women’s movements (which came a bit later), the ultimate horizon of the movement for most of its members, in praxis and analysis, was that of improving their position within the current state of affairs rather than seriously challenging it, which would have had its tactical as well as its political reasons. The institutionalization of the movement in the National Welfare Rights Organization (1966–1972) lent it negotiating power at a higher level, but the reactionary social climate of the Nixon era, as well as internal splits (over expanding the movement to include the working poor vs. redefining welfare as a feminist issue) ended up destroying the organization. U.S. Government counter-insurgency activities no doubt also played a role, given the overlap of welfare rights activists with Black Panthers and other radical (as well as moderate – the CIA drew no such distinctions amongst its internally colonized) community action groups. In the early 1970s, the currents of Marxist feminism in Italy associated with the Worker’s Power and Autonomia analyses started to put forward the idea that reproduction also constituted a “hidden abode,” as Marx spoke of production in its contrast with the sunlit equality of exchange. They proposed that since unpaid work conducted primarily by women in the home produces, the same as factory workers, the commodity of labour-power, which is then sold on the market for a wage, that they could as well form the “vanguard” of working-class organization and work refusal. Until that point, women at home were (indirectly) producing surplus value. The desired consequences of this redefinition of women’s work was that unwaged workers would be acknowledged as subjects of working-class politics, and that “women’s issues” could be more broadly addressed as “class issues” and understood as antagonistic to capitalist interests in the same way as the issues of waged workers. Another reason was to actualize reproduction – childcare, health care, prostitution, power relations in the home and community – as a properly political site of contestation, rather than continuing to abide by the “revolutionary logic that established hierarchies of revolutionary subjects patterned on the hierarchies of the capitalist organization of work.”8 Finally, some elements of this position, though not all, came to the conclusion that if housework produced a commodity, maybe even value, i.e., it fulfilled the minimal conditions of capitalist work in general, then it should be paid for by capital like any other work “directly,” “at its value,” rather than through the miserly margins of welfare payments or the “family wage.” Alongside the number of conceptual, political and practical problems addressed by this analysis, there were a similar number of problems with the analysis itself. On the conceptual side, it could be claimed that no labour in capitalism is ever paid for “at its value,” or else surplus-value extraction would not be the first law of capitalist work. The second objection would follow from this, that for Marx, “being a productive worker is a misfortune,” and that the identification of domestic labour with productive work only made it politically meaningful in the “workerist” context, fixated as it was by the productive/unproductive labour distinction and which saw the factory worker as hegemonic, rather than providing a weapon against the relations of production in its own right. On the political side, as was swiftly pointed out, linking the emancipation of female houseworkers to the wage both reinforced the centrality of the state or “total social capital” to the reproduction of workers and families, and trapped women in the home rather than renegotiating gender roles and radically moving the structure of the family in a more collective and egalitarian direction. Additionally, it faced the paradox of the “transitional demand” that asks to reform capitalist relations in a way which would make them no longer capitalist; a paradox equally confronting the idea of the “basic income” today. Finally, the practical problem of evaluating housework in the same terms as waged work would revolve around problems of measure and withdrawal of labour: “[…] how exactly a wage could be calculated, given the lack of instruments for the measurement of the work day? How could housework ‘strike’ overcome the necessary aspects of community support for struggle in other sectors of the class composition?”9 Wages for Housework could further be discussed as a tension between the prescriptive and descriptive: how does a critical position on the production of value help us overcome value? Proceeding through the moments of affirmation and negation again, the affirmation would go something like: we, too, produce value and are productive workers, so the workers’ movement has to take us into account and expand their concept of value to include unpaid or “social” labour. The negation could then be, if we produce value, then value is so broad as to fall apart; it immediately becomes a political rather than a technical category. This was in fact the position of Silvia Federici, among others, who cautions against the literal interpretation of the Wages for Housework programme, placing emphasis rather on its strategic horizons and its critical character, what she terms “Wages against Housework.” Rather than the productivist agenda of raising all to the same baseline of exploitation, the contribution of the Italian Autonomist feminist perspective was to push for a generalization of the refusal of work by expanding the category of what constituted work, and to ensure that the “hidden realm” of reproduction would never again be forgotten in the analysis of and action against capitalist exploitation. As Federici has recently noted on the legacy of Wages for Housework for today’s anti-systemic movements: “When we said that housework is actually work for capital, that although it is unpaid work it contributes to the accumulation of capital, we established something extremely important about the nature of capitalism as a system of production. We established that capitalism is built on an immense amount of unpaid labor, that it is not built exclusively or primarily on contractual relations; that the wage relation hides the unpaid, slave-like nature of so much of the work upon which capital accumulation is premised […] In other words, by recognizing that what we call “reproductive labor” is a terrain of accumulation and therefore a terrain of exploitation, we were able to also see reproduction as a terrain of struggle […].”10 Parenthetically, it should also be added that Italian Marxist feminism took on very disparate forms, although the one chronicled above has perhaps become the most renowned due to the originality and far-reaching impact of its analysis. There were also feminist elements of the armed factions that emerged in Italy towards the end of the 1970s, and their efforts did not transpire in the “hidden realm” alone – they targeted health clinics that refused to provide abortions to users of public healthcare for “reasons of conscience,” but were happy to do so for a steep fee, as well as sweatshops employing mainly young and immigrant women.11 The emphasis on reproduction as a political battlefield most consistently developed by the feminists could also be seen to be key to the prevalence of both organized and informal campaigns of “self-reduction” and “proletarian shopping” in 1970s Italy; groups of tenants would take unilateral and concerted action to lower their rent or utilities, or pay lower prices or nothing for public transport or for groceries (although clearly the workers in these sectors had to be co-operative to some extent for these tactics to succeed). The “social factory” of waged, unwaged and informal work did become increasingly central to Autonomist Marxism, as activists “followed the workers out of the factories,” who were leaving for reasons ranging from and between the broadly subjective (mass refusal) and broadly objective (mass unemployment). At the same time, there continued to be a caesura between feminism and class struggle, with divisions between socialist feminists, separatists, bourgeois and social democratic feminists and so forth complicating a situation where the subordination of women seemed so clearly to be attendant on capitalist class relations (and on religious customs) but seemed to flourish equally well in Left milieus among “comrades.” An articulation of the relations between patriarchy and capitalism (as well as the construction and exploitation of race)12 where sexism and racism are seen as both divisions in a global working-class and as relatively autonomous, as phenomena which are both overdetermined and contingent, continues to be one of the most vexed fault lines in Marxian praxis; a thinking-through of the relations between them which is adequate to the present moment of capitalist decomposition, in all its unevenness, is a project of staggering complexity and no less staggering urgency, even with the resources supplied by thirty or more years of Marxist and materialist feminism and queer theory, not to mention historical and actual praxis. However, the prescient appropriation by the Italian Autonomist feminists of the reproductive field for political action by its “native informants,” by those already defined by their lack of access to social visibility and economic power, can now be used to contextualize the organized struggles against welfare cutbacks that found a resurgence in Thatcher-era Britain and are making a gradual reappearance today. Reproduction as the social mediation of the value-form outside the workplace has clearly always been problematic, as the foregoing has illustrated. Yet it is in times when this particular mediation starts to eclipse the encounter with the value-form in the workplace for increasing numbers of people, i.e., in times of mass unemployment and capitalist restructuring, that the politicization of reproduction starts to have more general repercussions which are no longer limited to those temporarily falling into the category of the unwaged and who decide to organize for mutual aid and advice. From examination of the 1980s groups, the practical consequences of this can be quite disparate. The interstitial and low-level nature of some claimants’ groups can suddenly acquire a degree of visibility for which in some cases the participants are not prepared, or materially cannot sustain. In some cases also, the organization can shuttle between being a campaign group with radical demands and a “service provider,” and can finally end up subcontracted as a service provider for the state – something which is only going to escalate with the present UK government’s ideological commitment to expanding the role of the voluntary sector in what were formerly areas of state provision: ‘The Big Society’. Such a dialectic between self-activity and support has so far not been able to translate into a broader mobilization which finds a commonality between the interests of the unemployed and the still-employed, even in the current destructive climate of the impending and gratuitous cuts. It has, in other words, not been able to redefine those sociological or factual categories as political ones. Yet such a commonality, in whatever terms it is set out, and whether it’s guided more by expediency than left communist analysis, is indispensable to the de-legitimation of the cuts and a defeat of the political project that is generating them. The Islington Action Group of the Unwaged (1980–86) along with other claimants’ action groups and benefit workers’ strikes of the 1980s and 1990s, and going into the present with the national and local branches of the Unemployed Workers Union, the Brighton Unemployed Centre, the Edinburgh Claimants Union and the London and Edinburgh CAPs (Coalitions Against Poverty), the Hackney Solidarity Group, Save Our Council Housing and Save Our Nurseries, comprise the most visible historical and present-day actors of the struggle on the terrain of reproduction in the UK. To different degrees, the perspective is about encouraging resistance and collective activity among the ever-more demonized “benefits scroungers” who are uniquely aware of the effects of the state deficit being resolved on their backs but only have the means to confront them in a largely individualized and piecemeal fashion, i.e., from a situation of defeat. It is also sometimes about the principled “refusal of work” position, viewing benefits as a direct appropriation of socially produced wealth otherwise removed from its producers; and then, fundamentally, it is about occupying the “welfare state commons” and all the contradictions of that position. Like the struggles in the universities or the battles against social housing privatization, it is less about upholding the entrenched model of public services than it is about refusing to concede what little remains of non-commodified public goods (although that struggle would seem to be lost in terms of higher education in England, where fees up to £10,000 for a full degree and rocketing student debt is now the norm; universities are still free in Scotland). This reactive, rear-guard orientation, though it might seem to be less descriptive of the 1980s – which had a more recent memory of working-class organization – than of the contemporary groups, confirms that the situation of defeat is fundamental to all the listed formations. Although the political conjuncture demands generalization of struggles, three decades of working-class decomposition, union-hostile laws and public quiescence are preventing this from happening at the moment. But this is not to overdetermine the future, even the immediate future. And couldn’t decomposition find its own specific power? Could we say that the labour of the negative still applies even when it is a question of the negation of labour? Note: Originally conceived in two instalments, the material referred to but not extensively discussed in this text will appear in an autonomous text for Reartikulacija in 2011. taken from:
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by Achim Szepanski The "financial deregulation" since the 1970s has paradoxically in themselves the capacity and increase the demand for regulation, regulatory instruments, and regulatory agencies. The strengthening of market mechanisms at all levels requires a number of public, sub-state, and especially private, companies and institutions whose duplication and dissemination take on the functions of power and government previously reserved for States. National institutions, transnational networks, and corporations, informal groups and organizations have built a diverse fabric of regulations, rules and power systems of varying density and breadth across the globe. Government functions Power technologies and strategies of financial capital interpenetrate and define a specific regulatory and at the same time unstable and crisis-prone financial regime, which can now claim global governance functions. Global governance is by no means the result of an unleashed liberalization of capital markets and the simultaneous downgrading of states to purely executive bodies, but inherent governmental and regulatory conditions of financial capital, with state and sub-sovereign institutions legally securing market-correlating market mechanisms, One can assume a dual governmental rationality here, that of financial capital in conjunction with state and transnational organizations and institutions, but the former dominates. This is indicated by a whole series of factors: take only the private creation of money through banks and the liquidity, management and derivative instruments with which all fields of the economic, social and political are traversed and partly occupied by financial capital. It is not the financial markets, as Vogl assumes, but it is the financial capital that has transformed itself into a judge over governments and virtually into a fourth power and has built a new "enclosure environment" (Vogl 2015: 25) into which companies, states, households, and semi-democratic institutions are integrated. Take only the private creation of money through banks and the liquidity, control and derivative instruments with which today all fields of the economic, the social and the political are traversed by financial capital and sometimes occupied. In the financial markets, capitalization - the discounting of future earnings streams and the corresponding trade in financial assets - takes place as a process of continuously assessing risks by means of derivatives. Since every future return flow is contingent and unknown, no financial capitalization can take place without the calculation of how the respective specific risk for future generation of returns should be assessed. Capitalization, then, requires a particular mode of identification, calculation, and order of economic entities, of socio-economic events that must first be distinguished and then objectified as risk events. At least in this regard, today every capital must be regarded as fictitious capital. In addition, capitalization requires certain technologies that allow risks to be differentiated, compared and traded, that is, it includes a process of normalization according to statistically identifiable risks. (See Sotiropoulos / Milios / Lapatsioras 2013b: 157ff.) When examining the pricing of derivatives, it could already be seen that the prices of fictitious capital are neither directly related to the costs of production nor necessarily trigger credit for the production processes, but the prices here have a stringent influence on a future-oriented (monetary) Utilization insofar as it always carries out the translation and transformation of class struggles. If price harbors a very specific, "ideological" representation of capital, then the problem of information efficiency in the financial markets seems to be losing importance, at least for understanding the structures and processes of financial capital. Although informational dispositions certainly play a role when it comes to the competitive determination of the prices of derivatives, information in this case should be understood as "ideological" representations. The representation of economic power relations and their transformation into financial products makes relations appear as objects or events that, in the context of a fabric of discourses, Knowledge formations and mathematical models (from econometrics to dynamic stochastic equilibrium models) are first quantifiable and secondly responsible for the fact that certain actions and behaviors can be addressed to and accessed by market participants. (Ibid .: 225)Quantification here means not only the counting or assignability of methods to numbers, but an algebraic representation produced by standards, which represents a precursor to the algorithmic processing of the representation. The rise of derivatives allows the replication (bundling and separation) of the financial collateral and thus the commodification / capitalization of risks. What gets capitalized has a price. The derivative type of pricing inherent not only time technologies, but in particular also technologies of capital power. And dThe power technologies condense in particular forms of knowledge, semiotypes, mathemas and discourses insofar as they represent the socio-economic reality, i. e. naturalize or even obscure the economic reality in a certain way. In the mainstream of economics, certain economic events are in theory so updated that representation also creates rules for controlling the individual actions of market participants (performance), which participants recognize as the truth of their own lived reality. (Ibid .: 103) For John Milios, price movements and their corresponding informationalizations remain embedded in the processes of ideologization or, in other words, the mechanisms of financial pricing (economic models), whether efficient or not, are already part of the ideological apparatus. (Ibid .: 149) Milios refers here to Althusser and his theory of ideological state apparatuses, where Althusser understands the problem of ideology in general in the context of the constitution of the ideological subject and its pragmatics, as invocation, indeed as the call, a set of social Behaviors and (discursive) practices, habits, gestures and prohibitions without any objections. In doing so, social actors not only accept the social relations represented by discourses in a specific way, but they also experience ideology as an expression of the truth of their own social life. When individuals are called as subjects, they are given the necessary motivations to identify with the dominant imaginary and symbolic behaviors, discourses, and notions. For Marx, one does not "find value" in a thing, nor does it represent an imaginary relation; rather, it appears in two distinct and polarized relations: money and commodity. ( Ibid .: 63) If the derivative - for Milios money as a commodity sui generis - is a "reification" of the capital relation, then its exchange value must also be seen in the context of the representation of specific socio-economic power relations, and that is, economic events on the financial markets are translated "spontaneously" into objective perceptions and quantitative signs. And all these objective perceptions (and signs) shape the dimensions of a concrete and an abstract risk. Even Deleuze / Guattari emphasize that the economic is not given in itself, but contains a differential virtuality requiring interpretation (see Deleuze 1992a), which can also be masked by discursive forms of updating the economic. However, Deleuze / Guattari reject the concept of ideology. Especially Guattari has often brought against the term a-significant semiotics (algorithms, diagrams, mathematical equations, indices, statistical accounts, etc.) into play; Semiotics, which are not so easily subsumed under the "ideological state apparatuses". Namely, a-significant semiotics are not speech-centered devices for the reproduction of ideology, but rather diagrams, binary or probabilistic codes and algorithms, who operate the financial capital in a future-oriented manner. The financial capitaloperates with signs (of power) that represent nothing, but anticipate, create and shape something. The a-significant signs open up an economy of virtualization and a scope for future optionalities - they serve to calculate the future in terms of capital-compliant exploitation. For Deleuze / Guattari, capital appears less as a linguistic operator than as a semiotic operator. The team of authors around Milios claims that the mechanisms of financial capital today clearly contribute to the intensification of competition between companies, no matter which sector they are now, by their mobility, the tendency to produce an average rate of profit and at the same time to realize extra profits in wears, improves and at the same time reinforces the control of its efficiency.The operations of financial capitalization are to be understood as attempts to create capital-immanent, effective conditions of recovery (surrender of value), insofar as they help to transform savings of various origins into investments, whereby this function has a causal priority for the monetary utilization of capital. Modern finance generates, especially in its neoliberal version,and aim at maintaining the capitalist power relations altogether. In this context, the economic fundamentals of corporations can by no means be considered to take precedence over the forms of knowledge, discourses, and representations of the financial industry, but are themselves to be understood as a form of interpretation of capitalist reality, or, to put it another way, they are ever Part of the various ways in which market participants perceive, model and affirm economic structures by practicing certain theoretical practices in the fields of economics. (Ibid .: 152) This non-empiricist view denies the distinction between fundamentals and the information related to them, in that competition between the various actors in the financial sphere implies from the outset that To translate information about the fundamentals of companies into current prices and thus to induce companies to perform certain operations. (Ibid .: 51) It is generally assumed that in the case of sufficient market efficiency of a company, its stock prices correctly express the dynamics of value added taxation according to the fundamentals of the company. However, a company whose fundamentals point to insufficient recovery will quickly become the financial markets" Confidence " of investors / speculators lose, which can lead to a reduction of the market capitalization of the company. For classical finance, this kind of correction has the function of promptly compensating capitalist investors, who are still willing to invest in the company, with higher risk premiums, for the affirmation of an increased risk that corresponds to the deteriorated economic prospects of the company , The company must therefore expect more difficult financing options in the financial markets. The permanent "control" of companies through financial capital involves their molecular interpretation and valuation at a business level, and this is done systematically through the performative design or use of mathematical and stochastic models, which aim at operations and procedures that occur within the production processes of the company Companies to be evaluated, evaluated and evaluated in order to then develop specific strategies for profit maximization. This type of operationalization is practiced by using a variety of tools (algorithms, mathemes, and models). If a large company depends on the financial markets for its financing, then any suspicion of inadequate recovery increases, even if it is unfounded, the cost of financing reduces the room for economic maneuver, i. e.he lowers the stock and bond prices of the company. The workers of the company are also exposed to such economic restrictions, they may be faced with the dilemma of accepting unfavorable results for them in collective bargaining or, by a militant point of view, forcing the company to insolvency or takeover (Transfer of capital into other investment spheres and / or countries). The latter option almost always involves workers forcibly restructuring their own working and living conditions. So it's exactly for the workers, to accept the "laws" of capital, or to live with a higher degree of insecurity or even a fall into unemployment. This dilemma is inherent in the effect and functioning of the fictitious capital, because its effects affect not only the organization of the companies, but also the specific forms of organization of the collective worker and, last but not least, the distribution of income between labor and capital. Financialization, therefore, permanently promotes the need to restructure capitalist production processes, and as a result longer working hours, increased work intensification, and more layoffs are being recorded while workers' demands for real wage increases are steadily shut down, which of course is also due to the fragmentation of the working class and in general to the phenomenon of a transversal precarization. These developments presuppose, on the one hand, the increasing power of the capitalist class as a whole and, on the other hand, the possibility of exhausting the flexible instruments of modern finance, in order to liquidate all inadequately exploiting capital (closure of enterprises) and at the same time contribute to the more effective economization of constant and variable capital. Mariana Mazzucato has argued that companies, with their practices such as share buybacks, which serve to increase the company's prices, have blocked rather than promoted research and innovation.In 2011, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer "invested" 90% of its net profit in share buybacks, which represents about 99% of its research and development spending. (Mazzucato: 2013: 41) In addition, such companies would prove to be free-riders, insofar as they consistently tapped the waves of innovation that had ultimately initiated the state through various channels. Although this may apply to individual companies, one must always keep an eye on the role of financial capital or capitalization in terms of capital as a total complexion. Today, financial capital has largely emancipated itself from previous value creation insofar as its systematic calculation and evaluation is aimed at future exploitation, so that even new "innovative growth industries" are financed or even constructed, even if the state still has a not inconsiderable share from sums of money to basic research. Thus, the capital hoped in the run-up to the stock market boom in the 1990s in the then emerging IT sector for decades to achieve above-average profit rates, or think about the so that even new "innovative growth industries" are financed or even constructed, even if the state continues to provide a not inconsiderable share of sums of money for basic research. Thus, the capital hoped in the run-up to the stock market boom in the 1990s in the then emerging IT sector for decades to achieve above-average profit rates, or think about the so that even new "innovative growth industries" are financed or even constructed, even if the state continues to provide a not inconsiderable share of sums of money for basic research. Thus, the capital hoped in the run-up to the stock market boom in the 1990s in the then emerging IT sector for decades to achieve above-average profit rates, or think about the Capitalization of biotechnology and of certain natural resources, of genetic patents, with which parts of the natural heritage of humanity are transferred to private property. Here a free good is capitalized and the resulting capital becomes the reference point for the creation of new fictional capital as soon as biotechnology companies are issuing shares or taking out loans. Another way to realize rising rates of profit is evident in the creation of the real estate boom, driven by the hope of ever-increasing real estate prices. At present, the central banks play an important role in the new production of fictitious capital when they buy government bonds on a large scale and at the same time pump fresh fictitious capital into the money and capital markets with their negative interest rate policy. With the help of the low interest rate policy of the central banks since the financial crisis in 2008, large sums of money have flowed into the real estate sector. However, because the natural resource land is finite, this is reflected, especially in the metropolises, in rapidly rising real estate prices. The analysis of financialization should not at all be confined to individual capital; rather, it should be transferred to the level of total capital (the tendency to produce an average rate of profit). In addition, all market participants should be included in the analysis, businesses, households and also the states whose evaluation and control modern finance demands to enforce the neo-liberal form of capitalist power and austerity policies. It is ultimately the implementation of the neo-liberal political agenda in the entire social field. If today's sovereign borrowers - states - deviate from the fiscal discipline imposed on them by the neoliberal agenda, then they destabilize their position in the international money and capital markets and they quickly lose the "confidence" of capital and, like Greece at the front, are exposed to the restrictive measures of an institution like the Troika (EU Commission, ECB, IMF) , (Sotiropoulos / Milios / Lapatsioras: 2013a : 168) The call on governments to pursue consistent austerity policies, including: a. Budget cuts, government budget reductions and privatizations imply that financial markets are ready at any time to re-price the respective risks of financing states in order to signal the loss of their confidence, i. e. to increase the borrowing costs for the states in the money and capital markets. At this point, the team of writers around Milios once again picks up Marx's line of argumentation on fictitious capital in order to further develop it using the example of financialization, without, however, abandoning the essential problems and conceptual constellations of Marx's analyzes themselves.Thus it is shown that in the third volume of capital Marx defined fictitious capital as the most concrete form of capital, which can be described in a formula at a complex level of analysis as follows: G - [ G - W - G '] - G "or even G - G". (Ibid .: 155) For Milios, this formula, which stands for fictional capital, refers to the form of money as capital, and this simply implies commodification, i. e. Money as capital in its most developed concrete form assumes the form of a commodity sui generis, which has a price: W - G. The authors point out in this connection that Marx objected several times against Proudhon, that the form of the interest-bearing or fictitious Capital should always be understood as a commodity. (Ibid.) Not only natural resources such as land, but capital itself can become commodities in the form of self-exploiting money. Here, the money can be sold in a variety of forms, u. a. a money capitalist can swap his money for a title of title against a legally fixed monetary claim which in turn can be traded by him. Thus, in the "trade" of money capital, its use value is transferred as potential capital to the buyer, and at the same time the money capital is used by the seller. This trade takes the form of a contract whereby the money capitalist transfers his capital to the buyer, who uses the money productively and at the same time undertakes to make certain payments to the money capitalist in the future. One has to do here with a doubling of the fictional capital. At this juncture, however, we already report doubts about the determination of the notional capital or derivatives as commodity sui generis, although we certainly agree with Milios that the derivatives are not money, since derivatives have just been exchanged for money and realized. The exchange of the commodity against money is for Marx, apart from the special commodity of labor, an exchange of equivalents. When exchanging derivatives for money, this type of exchange transaction is not exactly the thing, because a profit is to be made with the realization of the derivatives. Daheri is therefore talking about a new form of speculative money in derivatives. But let's look further at the course of reasoning at Milios. The use of fictitious capital generates the expectation (E1) of future income and profit streams (Dt + 1, Dt + 2, Dt + 3 ...) which are to flow back to the owner of the capital. In the case of Appendix D (for reasons of simplification, it is assumed that there is a reflux of cash flows with a constant interest rate up to (R10) - an interest rate that takes into account all the risks involved) the capitalization or the price increases to estimate expected future income streams according to the following equation: (Ibid .: 140) Capitalization includes in the course of fixing the price (Pt) the calculation of the expected value of future yield or income streams. At the same time, the fluctuating liquidity on the financial markets should serve purely to increase the money capital. For the Marxist interpretation of the above formula, however, there are two problems to consider: First, the materiality of price formation always includes the complex articulation of social power relationships that co-organize and reproduce the exploitation of monetary capital. Second, the structure of monetary utilization (capitalization) can not be separated from the "real economy" at all, and it can be assumed today that financial capital, as the dominant form of capital, possesses its most important instrument in the derivatives and exactly with its trade dominates and controls the »real economy«. Here it applies, the mutual translation of the dynamics between capitalistic power relations and the price formation, which in the sizesEt [Dt + i] and (R) is considered to be essential when it comes to the processes of financialization. (Ibid .: 141) At this point, the team of writers around Milios introduces the notions of "risk" and "governmentality", with whose analysis the derivatives understood not only as a new form of money capital, but also as a technology of power that very efficiently assures the reproduction of capitalist power relations as a whole become. Recalling Foucault's governmentality studies (Foucault: 2004b), Milios's team of authors describes the processes of financialization as technologies of power that enable economic, political, and social power relations to be representationally articulated. ( Sotiropoulos / Milios / Lapatsioras 2013a: 155ff.) Representations that are always connoted in the pricing of financial instruments are to be understood as active entities operating within the power relations. Derivatives are thus not only concerned with the increase of money capital, but also with the representative reproduction of capitalist power relations in relation to the mode of financial operation. This now has to be demonstrated on the basis of the problem of risk production. Modern finance operationalizes the capitalization of expected future income and income flows condensed into derivatives or synthetic securities, whether these returns or income now come from the extraction of surplus value by private companies, government taxation or the subtraction of salaries. (Ibid .: 179) This type of capitalization also means that the class struggle and the inherent balance of power between classes and class fractions are connected with monetary quantification, which in turn is related to the representation of capitalist reality. (Ibid .: 156) The singular financial events that are present in the socio-economic structures, are on the financial markets with the help of scientific discourses, charts, models, etc. interpreted and then converted into quantitative characters (commodity prices). Once the economic events have been translated into the semiotics / linguistics of the financial markets, they include the specific design of the economic risk. Both the concept of fictional capital, the Marx in the third volume of thecapitalhas developed in fragments, as well as the practices of the current capitalization for Milios formally cry out for a sophisticated analysis of the concept of risk. It must always be remembered that the "value" of a financial investment (the value of money capital) is not subordinate to the capitalist production process, but logically precedes it. I. e. it does not exist because either it has already produced surplus value or realized another kind of income or asset in the markets, but because the financial capital is to some extent confident that the realization of returns in the production / circulation of capital take place in the future and will repeat itself according to the standards of extended reproduction. The author team around Milios transposes the risk problem in the Marxist discourse. If one considers the risk in the application of statistics or stochastics solely as uncertainty about the development of future volatility (the measure of the fluctuation of parameters such as stock prices, interest rates etc. - commonly, volatility is the standard deviation of the change of the respective parameter considered defined) describesthen we do not take into account what the objective mechanisms of capitalization and their corresponding practices of the different market participants in the financial markets really indicate. There are countless research departments in the various financial institutions that are trying to assess the future trends of global price movements of the derivatives and evaluate by collecting corporate fundamentals and classify the "fit each to their mathematical models," and this is based on the use of Statistics or stochastics, in order to finally be able to predict possible probabilities of the occurrence of economic events. First of all, risk is to be understood as a socio-economic term that serves to interpret and evaluate the potential of future economic events in order to increase the chances that very specific - profitable events will occur. (Ibid. 157f.) And risk management implies the attempt of financial capital, including its affiliated discourse systems, opinion industries and research departments, to anticipate future economic events and trends; Events which are continuously formulated with the help of models of statistics and probability calculus, which are attributed to economic mathem. (Ibid .: 161) capitalization, a method of calculating fictitious and speculative capital, In other words, it involves a specific mode of representation and identification, regulation and forecasting of future economic events, which must be distinguished from each other in order to then identify and objectify them as risks and finally act as derivatives. There is no capitalization without the specification and comparison of risks, without identifying economic events in the context of specific risks, then objectifying them, that is, addressing and acting as risks (as abstract risk). (Ibid. 175) There is no capitalization without the specification and comparison of risks, without identifying economic events in the context of specific risks, then objectifying them, that is, addressing and acting as risks (as abstract risk). (Ibid. 175) There is no capitalization without the specification and comparison of risks, without identifying economic events in the context of specific risks, then objectifying them, that is, addressing and acting as risks (as abstract risk). (Ibid. 175)The risk sui generis is integrated into the logic of capital. Economics classifies risk as an opportunity expressed as a measure of confidence in realizing the future price of an income stream, with the statistical variance of price and returns as the measure of confidence. (Ibid .: 157) Securities with a high variance (in terms of yields) are to be classified as more risky than those with a lower variance. If the price of government bond A is only half as volatile compared to the price of stock B, then this can be written as follows: x · VjA = 2 · VjB (V is the variance, j refers to individual, hypothetical estimates). (Ibid.) In this equation, which is usually used by the public finance, it is not considered that the subjectively anticipated variance can by no means express the abstract risk that eventually has to be accepted by all market participants. The subjective expectations of a market participant j can be written using the following formula: x · VjA = y · VjB = z · VjC = ... (ibid.). Obviously, a measure is lacking here which serves to homogenize the different expectations of the market participants, i. e. there is no comparison of the various concrete risks (ie abstract risk) so that the economic objectivity and relationality that capital demands can not necessarily be established. (Ibid .: 158) x · VjA = y · VjB = z · VjC = ... (ibid.). Obviously, a measure is lacking here which serves to homogenize the different expectations of the market participants, i. e.there is no comparison of the various concrete risks (ie abstract risk) so that the economic objectivity and relationality that capital demands can not necessarily be established. (Ibid .: 158) x · VjA = y · VjB = z · VjC = ... (ibid.). Obviously, a measure is lacking here which serves to homogenize the different expectations of the market participants, i. e. there is no comparison of the various concrete risks (ie abstract risk) so that the economic objectivity and relationality that capital demands can not necessarily be established. (Ibid .: 158) All processes of pricing of derivatives require the sizing of concrete andabstract risks. This requires a specific economic space (financial markets) in which the various market participants, as carriers of risks, are assigned a specific risk profile that enables them to negotiate or price out contingent claims.(Ibid .: 168) These are market fields in which concrete risks are shaped, formed and transformed into abstract risks that inherent in the comparison of specific risks through derivatives. The financial capital "normalizes" the market participants on the basis of risks; the financial machinery enables the distribution and diversification of the various specific risks among market participants (who are in heterogeneous market populations and in competition with each other) and the pooling of specific risks, However, if all market participants invariably make use of risk management, they are by no means subsumed under identical risk categories (the specific risk events must therefore be compared) and even those in the vicinity of similar risk assessments and risks therefore own not the same opportunities to realize certain risks. (Ibid .: 161) We have to deal with a specific formation of the different risk profiles from the outset: the anticipation, the evaluation and the comparison of possible financial events and the resulting opportunities to realize the desired event in the context of a necessary evaluation of the respective risk carrier. (Ibid.) The creation of risk profiles can be interpreted as a process of normalization, since the attribution of these profiles to certain market participants distinguishes these from each other and at the same time compares them in order to individualize them in terms of risk. (Ibid .: 157ff.) Consequently, we are dealing with highly flexible processes of normalization, i. H. a very specific type of individualization in the context of socio-economic power relations, within which, without exception, every market participant is considered a risk factor, i. e. each market participant per se is exposed to the risk that characterizes it. (Ibid .: 161) However, the process of risk allocation does not imply the affirmation of an invariant norm, which market participants have to incorporate from the outset, but normalization is to be understood as a game of "differential normalities" (Foucault), which is related to the fluid economic relations in which market participants find themselves competing in financial markets and making profits by trading derivatives , Normalization by statistical models proves to be differential and at the same time homogenizing; It includes the permanent evaluation of information, that is, variable statistical surveys and situational probabilistic calculations used to calculate normalities. if they want to compete in the financial markets and realize profits by trading derivatives. Normalization by statistical models proves to be differential and at the same time homogenizing; It includes the permanent evaluation of information, that is, variable statistical surveys and situational probabilistic calculations used to calculate normalities. if they want to compete in the financial markets and realize profits by trading derivatives. Normalization by statistical models proves to be differential and at the same time homogenizing; It includes the permanent evaluation of information, that is, variable statistical surveys and situational probabilistic calculations used to calculate normalities. The writing team around Milios brings Foucault's provinciality studies into play again. Foucault raises the question of how a systemic market population characterized by a variety of power relations can be put into a "state" by the classification and regulation mechanisms of financial capital, with which cohesion and continuity become more objective and subjective economic forms of transport is guaranteed. The question remains whether and how the concept of governmentality could help to understand the organization and operationality of financial markets, assuming that in their territories, differential power relations are scattered and distributed in quite hierarchical formations. To answer this question, It addresses the analysis of heterogeneous market populations, whose normalizing regulation is aimed not only at distinguishing, comparing and individualizing market participants, but above all at producing very specific populations, which are regarded as higher-scale agencies. (Ibid .: 164) Current financial governmentality focuses on controlling these market populations, integrating them into existing economic power relations through very specific power technologies. These are collective phenomena which, to some extent, are to be classified as aleatory, and which at the same time must be investigated serially, that is, over certain periods of time. So you can assumethat financial machines provide for a flexible normalization on the basis of risks, by assigning risk profiles designed specifically for different market participants. It is therefore important to capture the processes of risk production in those virtual-current dynamics that act within the framework of the differential structures of the financial economy. When companies go to the financial markets to sell bonds or conclude loan agreements or insurance policies, they must be endowed with risk profiles whose structure, scale and taxonomy depend on their ability, in the opinion of the relevant financial firms, in a competitive economic environment are to pursue effective profit strategies. Complementarily, today a capitalist state as a sovereign debtor needs a risk profile produced by rating agencies that articulates its ability to successfully exercise neoliberal hegemony through austerity policies without causing the onset of class disputes so dreaded by ruling capital groups. And the risk profile of a wage earner is based on his complacency in affirming the capital-regulated employment relationships. It should also be assumed that, as part of normalization processes, financial firms not only differentially spread risk profiles on the basis of risk, but also continuously perform stress tests, which demand a very specific pragmatism of market participants in the context of the differential distribution of risk on the basis of monetary capitalization. Normalization as risk production is intrinsic to the mechanisms of financial markets and requires a specific technology of power (financialization) to achieve a reasonably stable organization of capitalist power relations, in the spirit of economic and political efficiency gains by corporations, states and households. (Ibid .: 168) As a technology of power, financialization directly affects the accounting, financing, and crediting of companies. Risks are constantly being re-generated, ie traded, diversified and bundled or packaged. At this point, the capitalization of the two sides of the company balance sheets is recorded: There is both the securitization of debt obligations (liabilities) and the securitization of income (assets). (Ibid .: 227) If different market participants are integrated into the mechanisms of risk production and thus incorporate certain socio-economic practices that they individualize as bearers of risk profiles, then they will also be forced to engage in specific risk management, which includes insurance or hedging against risks, On the other hand, it leaves open the possibility to take risks offensively, that is, to exercise specific strategies that promote the efficiency of projects in order to pursue the goal of profit maximization, as required by socio-economic power relations and accumulation dynamics at the level of total capital. (Ibid .: 169f.) Together, these two moments of risk management outline a complex technology of power. In general, the risk calculation implies a systemic evaluation of each individual market participant, with regard to the effectiveness of his respective risk management and the objectives implemented in it, i. e. every market participant lives the risk as his own reality and at the same time is caught and caught in his role as a risk taker. This process contains in itself the complex contours and constellations of a technology of power. (Ibid .: 164) And the shaping of power technologies requires an ensemble of different social institutions, knowledge arrangements, analytical discourses and tactics: represented by banks, hedge funds and insurance companies with their highly specialized research departments, rating agencies, magazines, think-thanks etc. with regard to the effectiveness of its respective risk management and the objectives implemented in it, i. e. every market participant lives the risk as his own reality and at the same time is caught and caught in his role as a risk taker. This process contains in itself the complex contours and constellations of a technology of power. (Ibid .: 164) And the shaping of power technologies requires an ensemble of different social institutions, knowledge arrangements, analytical discourses and tactics: represented by banks, hedge funds and insurance companies with their highly specialized research departments, rating agencies, magazines, think-thanks etc. with regard to the effectiveness of its respective risk management and the objectives implemented in it, i. e. every market participant lives the risk as his own reality and at the same time is caught and caught in his role as a risk taker. This process contains in itself the complex contours and constellations of a technology of power. (Ibid .: 164) And the shaping of power technologies requires an ensemble of different social institutions, knowledge arrangements, analytical discourses and tactics: represented by banks, hedge funds and insurance companies with their highly specialized research departments, rating agencies, magazines, think-thanks etc. every market participant lives the risk as his own reality and at the same time is caught and caught in his role as a risk taker. This process contains in itself the complex contours and constellations of a technology of power. (Ibid .: 164) And the shaping of power technologies requires an ensemble of different social institutions, knowledge arrangements, analytical discourses and tactics: represented by banks, hedge funds and insurance companies with their highly specialized research departments, rating agencies, magazines, think-thanks etc. every market participant lives the risk as his own reality and at the same time is caught and caught in his role as a risk taker. This process contains in itself the complex contours and constellations of a technology of power. (Ibid .: 164) And the shaping of power technologies requires an ensemble of different social institutions, knowledge arrangements, analytical discourses and tactics: represented by banks, hedge funds and insurance companies with their highly specialized research departments, rating agencies, magazines, think-thanks etc. You can implement the fi nanzialisierung in capital accumulation do not understand if you do not examine the structure of commensurability which the differents concrete Risike n'll Ever Meet AuPt only comparable and measurable. The different risk profiles include various concrete risks, with the first being theThe probabilities of realizing these risks must be taken into account, whereby with the use of stochastics the trade of risks seems to be possible today. However, if there was no guarantee that the significantly different types of concrete risks could be compared by means of a highly differential and at the same time general "measure," which supplemented the economic math of money, then financialization would be neither a normalizing power technology nor could their functioning be structurally understood within the framework of capital as a total complexion. In order to conceptualize normalization on the basis of risk in the context of socio-economic power relations, it seems evident that that different types of concrete risk need to be transformed into a singular dimension - an abstract risk through which the derivative is embodied, trading in money. (Ibid. 178)Today, derivatives are definitely an effective solution that ensures the commensurability of specific risks. The derivative instruments with which companies capitalize their risks play a crucial role in the functioning of financialization, both in terms of technology of power and in terms of deepening monetary capitalization. It is only with the help of derivatives that it is possible to compare different types of concrete risk, and thus the derivatives stabilize and reinforce both the processes of capitalization and the control functions of financialization, giving them a homogenizing and differentiating character Assessment of different aspects of the monetary circulation of capital becomes possible. The rise of derivatives markets today means intense exploitation, with the profit maximization strategies of companies being geared not only to increasing absolute profit sums, but above all to increasing profit rates. If capitalist A invests 1000 euros and realizes 200 euros profit, and capitalist B invests 100 euros and realizes 50 euros profit, then it may be capitalist A who disappears from the market, and not capitalist B. Capitalist A would have entered the production process Investing capitalist B and thus possibly realize a profit of 500 euros instead of 200 euros, because the function of finance is just to make such splits, transformations and shifts of investments with a high fluidity, and an uneven increase in profit rates (extra profits at the microeconomic level). It is also about the availability of interest rates, whereby the analysis of the ratio of profit and interest rate indicates why under certain circumstances no investment will be made (also due to the problematic of a declining rate of profit discussed in the Marxist theory formation, see Kliman 2006, Roberts 2015 , Shaikh 1992 etc.). It is important to note once again that dodern Finance neither a threat to the "real capital" is not explicitly a general stukturelle weakness of capital (tendential fall of the rate of profit) symbolizes rather the "sets the finance as a specific technology of power (in addition to their function of recovery of money capital) Laws "capital more effectively by than ever, so they made more flexible to the current capital own Axiomatiken and rules, which derivatives are to be understood as an integral part of the transverse capital accumulation, which differentiate the individual capitals on the basis of risk production, but at the same time the exploitation strategies in terms Make the increase in efficiency comparable and, if possible, more effective. There is a permanent mobilization of the individual capitals, Milios' writing team discusses the different moments of financialization with an example (ibid .: 170ff.): An actor A buys a security S that contains a number of concrete economic risks that play an important role in the further pricing processes of the security. Here are in this exampleThe specific risks are reduced to two risks: interest rate and default risk. Actor A enters into a relationship with Actor B holding a US Treasury Bond. The two players agree to exchange their securities. Actor A will overwrite the security with all its future claims and payments involved in it, and will receive a long-term bond with the same maturity, within which all payments involved in the US Treasury Bond take place, exposing the B to the default risk Securities S takes over. At the same time, actor A may sell interest rate risk to actor C, who, as the holder of a US Treasury bill, also wishes to sell interest rate risk. Until the 1980s, the majority of financial transactions carried out on the money markets were. In the course of the incessant global rise of the derivative financial markets, however, derivatives trading has been decoupled from this type of exchange: In order to stay with the above example (Ibid .: 171): The three market participants now succeed in absorbing further risk potential by using the exchange their securities with future income streams. So instead of exchanging the property titles themselves, the actors are taking further risks by exchanging and offsetting the future income streams that these papers anticipate. Actor A now continues to hold Securities S, but exchanges the future cash flows related to them with those cash flows corresponding to a sequence of future Treasury Bonds and Bills payment streams. Actor A is the only one who holds the security S and players B and C carry the respective default and interest rate risk in isolation. While actor B carries the risk in the event of the security defaulting, actor C must expect losses if the short-term interest rate increases. This type of agreement implies the conclusion of a CDS (credit default swap) and an IRS (interest rate swap). With the derivatives specific risks, in the above example the default and interest rate risk, can be outsourced from the original security and then also cut, bundled, transferred and quasi-autonomously, ie independent of the price movement of the underlying. This "repacking" of specific risks includes pricing processes and the trading of abstract risks. Although interest rate risk and default risk can be considered to be the bundles of various concrete risk components, it seems reasonable to conceive of these risks as a specific derivative form insofar as they are currently tied into a complex set of specific market operations. Thus, CDS and IRS are considered to be a condensation or Bundling spot market transactions into a single financial instrument. (Ibid.)Derivatives can only act as an objectification of an abstract risk when different types of assets / collateral are combined in a single security. (Ibid.) This (virtual) reality as a value enables the comparison of heterogeneous, concrete risks, or to put it another way, the derivative refers to the abstraction of the inequality of the specific risks by reducing them to a singular social attribute : on an abstract risk. In this context, on the financial markets - ie economic spaces sui generis - the valuation of the individual capitals and the promotion of particular forms of financing takes place in the course of the enforcement of profit maximization strategies. And the derivatives have to be considered as necessary multilinear "instruments" of a financial system, However, traditional Marxist or heterodox economists continue to claim that derivatives are only a fatal detachment from classical capitalist production. In the end, these arguments come to the same conclusion again and again: the development of the derivatives industry is definitely linked to a fall in the rate of profit in classical production, with the industrial sector of the economy in stagnation (tendentious fall in the rate of profit). Milios, on the other hand, argues that modern finance is a particular, yet at the same time highly effective, way of organizing capitalist reality (at the level of individual and total capital), which may even lead to an increase in rates of profit; The mechanisms of capitalization normalize the various market participants in the financial markets on the basis of risks. Various specific risks are associated with different risk profiles, which in turn indicate different ways of realizing the risks. First of all, the process of normalization by financialization may include as many versions of risk management as there are subjective expectations about the evolution of future income streams. (Ibid .: 174) At this point we should again ask ourselves: Can there be anything like a kind of general measurement of the concrete risks, which are coupled with different (subjective) risk expectations? Is there any comparison of different concrete risks based on objective measurement? Provided there is a relation between the processes of normalization based on the risk and the general organization of socioeconomic exploitation processes and power relations of capital, it seems first necessary to classify different types of risks as singular and monodimensional in order to then present them in an objective way Way to compare.(Ibid .: 174) Precisely because each singular risk strategy pursues a single goal within the framework of the economy of capital (monodimensional maximization of profit),However, if the realization of capitalist efficiency initially takes the form of a mono-dimensional (profit-oriented) process, this can not be said about the market participants' risk assessment on the financial markets: there are different categorizations and subjective aspects of the risks, but that is precisely why the process of Normalization on the basis of risks to the comparability of specific risks, otherwise the financial reproduction process of the total capital would sooner or later break apart. This is where the derivatives really come into play, because with their help you can compare the different concrete risks and start a kind of objective measurement. Derivatives contribute to the resolution of the multidimensionality and multi-subjectivity of the risks, which are now reduced to an objective level, i. e. A "system" is established that at least tends towards a homogeneous or socially sound measurement of different risks. Suppose that in the framework of theCAPM model of term »beta« involves a quantified assessment of the risk of each individual asset. All assets with a given / identical "Beta" can now be considered as perfect substitutes from the risk point of view. However, this does not apply to every single concrete risk involved in a security, because the comparability of the different assets is not equal to the reasoning of the various concrete risks, as each asset incorporates different types of specific risks. The comparison of the different risks is therefore possible only with the help of the derivatives, which relate to the price movements of the assets. Even if you now assume that the "beta" could express an adequate measurement for every single risk contained in an asset, This would not be enough to compare the individual specific risks, because "beta" involves a calculation that does not have to be accepted by every market participant, while the monetary "value" of derivatives, ie the fact that they are cashed but guarantees something like an "objective" measurement, which is recognized by every market participant in the course of their day-to-day financial transactions. (Ibid .: 243) which is recognized by each market participant in its daily financial transactions. (Ibid .: 243) which is recognized by each market participant in its daily financial transactions. (Ibid .: 243)Only with the help of the derivatives, whose trading in turn is largely independent of the underlying assets, are the processes of pricing on the financial markets now possible. And it is important to note that the trade in derivatives always measures the abstract risk in terms of money. How can this process of capitalization by derivatives now refer to the most important statements of Marx's theory of capital? The author team around Milios again provides a simple example (Ibid .: 176f): Assuming that the swap has to be considered as a central form for all financial derivatives, one introduces a fixed-for-floating-rate-swap. (Ibid .: 175) In general, the swap is a contract designed to exchange the future cash flows of risk-based assets. It is now assumed that asset A is the sovereign bond of a sovereign, developed capitalist state guaranteeing a fixed income Ra, while B is a loan borrowing from a capitalist enterprise with a floating interest rate Rb. At an abstract level, the fixed-for-floating-rate-swap expresses in itself the comparison between two future cash flows (two different yield streams are swapped): x · Ra = y · Rb (Ibid .: 176) This equation by no means indicates the exchange of two different types of commodities, but instead exchanges two different future-oriented income streams. It must be noted that, in contrast to the (simple) value form developed by Marx, neither of the two income streams expresses their value in a different value, because the value expression of the income streams is already established, since the future income streams are basically measured in money and exchanged. Therefore, one can not assume that derivatives similar to an aggregated system, different currencies, interest rates or different assets compare with each other, but this comparison is set by the money ever. This is a completely different kind of commenting: The future income streams Ra and Rb are therefore commensurable on a monetary level. How should one now understand the socio-economic relations that are necessary in order to arrive at a quantitative comparison of the rate x / y at all? The two streams of income can only be measured and exchanged for money if the socio-economic relations, that of state governance in case A and that of private surplus production in case B, are to some extent uniform, that is, to the satisfaction of financial capital which requires a kind of comparison of the assets (besides their measurement in money). The above equation is based on this fundamental condition: series of class conflicts, which are each already identified as risks, are subjected to comparison, or, To put it another way, the comparison of the two future income streams, which are ever realized in money, additionally requires an objective representation and commensuration of the universe of concrete risks. In this context, the new institutional quality of financial capital, which is signified by the existence of derivatives, is based on a more integrated, normalized and refined manner than economic capital in the context of monetary capital circulation be represented. Concrete, different risks and the associated probabilities tend to be exposed to the valuation and the comparison, i. e. they receive an objective status with the form of the abstract risk and function largely independently of the subjective assessments of the market participants. (Ibid.: 177) Financialization and derivatives markets have made it possible, in unison, that objective assessments of financial assets and assets take place as a generalization of the interpretation and observation of the capitalist reality from a risk point of view. When derivatives integrate specific risks and thus incorporate abstract risks, they can be viewed from the perspective of comparing specific risks as a generalization of the interpretation and observation of capitalist reality from the point of view of risk. When derivatives integrate specific risks and thus incorporate abstract risks, they can be viewed from the perspective of comparing specific risks as a generalization of the interpretation and observation of capitalist reality from the point of view of risk. When derivatives integrate specific risks and thus incorporate abstract risks, they can be viewed from the perspective of comparing specific risksand the capitalization of the abstract risk. Thus, the commensurability of the different, concrete risks first demands an abstraction from their concrete character and their transformation into a single abstract risk. (Ibid.) On the assumption of a fictitious exchange, each particular risk can then be considered equivalent to any other arbitrary risk, and as a result any derivative traded on the derivatives markets can be viewed either from the perspective of the concrete or the Consider view of abstract risk. (Ibid.) We can regard the abstract risk as a singular risk insofar as it is considered to be risk from the point of view of the general comparison of specific risks and the measurement of risk, whereby the abstract derivative risk is ever realized in money, and hence the derivative as an important financial relation within the extended reproduction of capital and the structure of capitalist power. The form of the abstract risk or its incorporation as derivative thus contains the risk measured in money. (Ibid .: 178)The conditions for the abstraction of (virtual) risk complexions are given by money, which also means that the distinction between concrete and abstract risks does not mean the existence of two risks, but the presence of two inseparable dimensions of risks inherent in the construction and the circulation of derivatives are implied. In the process, the abstract risk inheres a mediating function and a corresponding dimensioning of the concrete risks, which in the first place can assume a socio-economic dimension. The comparison of contingent, different, concrete risks therefore requires an abstraction from their concrete character and their subsequent modification into a singular and quantitatively comparable abstract risk.The abstract risk is thus considered as a mediating factor, which makes it possible to unify different concrete risks, that is, the plurality of heterogeneous types of risks is reduced to a singular level in the course of their bundling, by exchanging the abstract risk as a derivative. x · IRS = y · CDS = z · [FXfuture] =. , , (Ibid .: 178) It concerns with the synthetic securities always a partially determinate actuality (specific risks) as well as a virtual structure (abstract risk) whose radical determination, however, operates to be the money capital as differential movement. D ie ability to be virtualized abstraction is always already given by the money that is in turn integrated in the form of money capital in virtualization update interconnections. In this context, the abstract risk is sold by derivatives such as the COD or CDS. For example, synthetic synthetic CDO has the potential to aggregate (mix, package and bundle) a heterogeneous set of securities into a single homogeneous pool, acting as a single stream of money and as an abstract risk. As a result, the homogeneous pool can be divided back into different classes of risk and cash flows, which can radically change the quality of both components (the emerging risk classes are called tranches, which vary in liquidity, maturity and cash flow in different ways can arrange again). Milios understands derivatives as specifically incorporating and "abstracting" a set of known concrete risks as a commodification of risks. HeIn this context, two aspects are essential: on the one hand, derivatives should not be categorized as money, but as (fictitious) goods, because derivatives are always exchanged for money. Derivatives are also to be understood as instruments that serve a specific form of power and the organization of the circulation of capital. However, Marx decides the exchange between money and commodity, apart from the special "commodity" labor force, as an exchange of equivalents. However, the exchange of derivatives for money is not an equivalent exchange, but the objective of the exchange is clearly to make a profit by realizing the derivatives in money. We therefore speak of derivatives as a new form of speculative money capital. 2To speak of speculative money capital means that as a form of capital it takes over the function of implementing the imperatives of capital in general or as a total complexion, namely profit maximization, differential capital accumulation and increasing productivity through innovation. Added to this is the incorporation of a power technology of capital. Detlef Hartmann expresses this in a similar way, even if he assumes a FED-driven credit tsunami. He writes: "For the petty-bourgeois and petty-bourgeois critics of speculation - including the left - usually forget that speculation is not just gambling. When Milios writes that derivatives within a financial universe of partial representations (those involved in the different types of portfolios) participate in the production of profits as duplicates of the capital relation and complement this relation, then it just seems appropriate to abstain from the derivatives as goods and not as money, but as a specific form of capital. To clarify this, it is assumed that the collateral A and B include the debts of two capitalist companies.If then a swap on an abstract level in itself the comparisonbetween the future flows of these securities, it is not the exchange values of two commodities that are compared with each other and subjected to monetary exploitation, but rather the comparison or exchange of two future flows of capital. If one is so consistent in subsuming stocks or bonds among fictional capital, then one must be so consistent in qualifying derivatives as fictitious or speculative capital. As a result, derivatives are to be structurally understood as a specific form of money capital, as the currently most profitable form of speculative money capital, and at the same time as an effective mode of operation, with which the conditions. 1 Speculative money capital, which, as we have seen, has different contingencies, absolutely needs quantification. This concerns the one side of modulation, namely the economic math or the modularization of all processes as normalization, number, algorithm, measurement and rasterization by money. Modularization includes the metrical and rasterizing reterritorialization, think of cellular automata and modules, the existence of standard measures, from the industrial norm to the money. It is also about time and space in all directions becoming increasingly fragmented in order to measure smaller and smaller parts of economic variables (think of the introduction of the decimal system on the stock exchange), i. e. to reduce the scale endlessly - and this interferes with the deterritorialization, the excessive valorization or increase of the money capital and the smoothing of time and space. Modularization thus always remains on the dynamics of Virtualization / Deterritorialization / Differentiation of speculative money. Regarding the latter aspect, Gerald Raunig speaks of modulation, which sets in motion the continuous non-numerical smoothing of all possible retritization attempts and their spatio-temporal realizations. (Raunig 2015: 185f.) As such, non-numerical virtualization is by no means subjugated to quantification - Malik sees this as quite right, while constantly under-emphasizing the problem of quantification and measurement. But what mediates the discourse of money capital with the quantification (mathem of the economy)? What Raunig calls mediation at this point certainly has nothing to do with the introduction of a mediating third party. By medium is meant always meanness, barre or difference between two sides, and not one side or the other. (See Fuchs 2001: 151) Raunig speaks at this point of the »Einelung «of the difference, of a process or a mode of modulation, both the modularization as a framing, standardizing, quantifying method (mathematician) as well as the modulation as permanent reformulation and smooth, non-numerical variation of forms (not quantifiable processes of re-formation such as de-formation). The stratification of layers and layers and the formation of modules (modularization) interfere with the modulation, the deterritorialization, the machine consumption and the differential price movement. Although modularization and modulation can be separated analytically, they intermesh, as Raunig says, as double modulation. Raunig finally speaks of qualitative alignment as a prerequisite for quantitative grading in terms of the relation between modulation and modularization. The indefinite multiple then tilts into the definitely measurable and this tilting process marks Raunig as a possible interface of social transport, which today becomes a principle of order. (Raunig 2015: 185f.) On the other hand, in laruell terms we would say - and this in fact is much more precise in terms of the unification of difference - modulation and modularization overlap each other, and they are at the same time related to the one modulation of capital as a total complexion in the last instance. The superposition of modulation and modularization thus remains related to the modulation in the last instance. Superposition indicates a non-classical relationship between different possibilities. (See Barad 2015: 87). Being and becoming are indefinite - the superposition can not be measured or counted as such and remains ghostly. In the The post-feminist conception of quantum mechanics by Karen Barad is not only about the questioning of the essence of the two-oneness, but also of unity, and not only that, but even multiplicity and being should be completely deconstructed. Laruelle, on the other hand, attaches the superposition to the one-real (it is not unity, but occasional), which, however, does not over-regulate the relations of the superposition, but under-determines, in the last and not in the first instance. The last reason here is the real, the occasional. However, the real should not be equated with the reality of capital, and this in turn should not be equated with the concept of capital. The relationships between modularization and modulation must definitely be related to the quasi-transcendentality of capital. Of course, the relationship between modulation and modularization has to be determined more precisely, that is, the modulating contingent processes must be presented as possibilities for quantification and measurement. At the same time, it must be determined how the contingency is produced and controlled by capitalism. Identifying transformations of the potentially diverse into the potential equal here means pressing a fractal rhythm or a polyphony into a comparable transcendence of capital. It therefore remains to be doubted whether a libertarian derivative policy can be constructed and practiced in the sense of Randy Martin's, who demands a hypertrophic intersectionalism, a maximally heterogeneous set of all forms of difference, without necessarily having to consider the specificity and difference of all elements of the set. Perhaps today one should rather start from a minimal heterogeneity in which the communities of alterity are characterized not by radical difference but by radical commonality. This type of non-ontology of difference, if described in terms of radical equality, would be more likely to invoke the axiomatic exploration of the insufficiency of identity than the euphoria of difference. 2 The Randy Martin in his book Knowledge LTD ang esprochene aspect, which states that derivatives various forms of capital and varieties make each other commensurable and provide an extremely flexible measure, supported in some way the thesis of the derivative as a form of money capital. Martin writes: "While the mass production line gathered all its inputs in one place to produce a tightly integrated commodity that was more than the sum of its parts, financial engineering spooledthis process is reversed by disassembling a commodity into its constituent and mutable elements and dispersing these attributes to bundle them together with the elements of other commodities that are of interest to a globally oriented market for risk-controlled exchange. All these moving parts are reassembled with their risk attribute, so that they are worth more than their individual goods as derivatives. "(Martin 2015: 61, translated by Gerald Raunig) And further:" But while goods are a unity of wealth appearing that can abstract parts into a whole, derivatives are still a more complex process in which parts are no longer consistent, but are constantly being decomposed and regrouped when different attributes are bundled and their value exceeds the whole economy, under which they had been summed up. Shifts in size from the concrete to the abstract, or from the local to the global, are no longer external yardsticks of equivalence, but within the circulation of bundled attributes that duplicate and set in motion derivatives transactions. "(Ibid .: 60, translated by Gerald Raunig) Translated by Dejan Stojkovski taken from: by Achim Szepanski The financial investors, who focus primarily on the realization of short-term profits, are today important players in the financial markets. In their own interest in the markets, they observe all the news that points to better profits for companies, as well as their observation of the attractiveness of nation states, and it is particularly gratifying for governments to announce budgetary cuts, curtail social benefits and to reduce the regulations on the financial markets. The valuation of individual human capital also depends on similar criteria, such as the speculation about future qualifications and the question of flexibility and adaptability of the employees. Just as the working-class movement has always denounced exploitation in wage-bargaining and sought new forms of negotiation and struggle, according to Michel Feher, today's activists fighting in the sphere of circulation should use their opponents' skills and forms of negotiation, In so far as it concerns the manner of speculation, to invent new forms of struggle itself, ie the Investee activism itself should change the conditions of accreditation of capital, even play the game of self-fulfilling prophecy of investors to something to that Feher calls "counter-speculation." It is important to constantly confuse the governance of the states and the investment activity of the companies and at the same time increase the attractiveness of their own practical alternatives, Today's big companies always create a dominant shareholder / owner relationship with a number of other players, including managers who are not only responsible for increasing dividends over wages and reinvestments, but also constantly worrying about increasing stock market valuation of companies. This "corporative governance" is not geared to the endogenous growth of companies, as was the case with management in Fordism, but is primarily about the valorisation of the financial assets that companies represent in the eyes of investors. Instead of the long-term profits that result from the sale of goods, it's about the methods of short-term capitalization, On the one hand, a certain responsibility towards the stakeholders must be preserved, but without losing sight of the performance for investors for just one second. If it is the role of the managers to focus on the stock market value of the companies, this also very quickly affects the very different interests of different groups of stakeholders. If the social impact of measures that are necessary for investors to gain confidence in a company is generally negative for stakeholders, then they will have to consider whether to formulate their claims on investors together rather than their particular interests to follow. To develop a class consciousness of the stakeholders to share a common antagonism is therefore necessary, but not enough, to achieve joint mobilization. The organizations that represent the various stakeholder interests - trade unions, consumer groups, fair trade propagandists, environmental activists, etc. - must look after the various relationships and "links" between the particular interests of the stakeholders and strive for any kind of subversive cooperation. Stakeholders should also strive to "simulate" the methods of the credit rating agencies, which are important players in the financial markets when it comes to evaluating the short-term projects of financial investors, by creating their own organizations that send signals to investors that point to the social and environmental accountability of companies and the fact that Failure to comply with certain standards can even lead to business losses. This concerns, for example, the "global print" of companies, their influence on the climate, the health of workers, working conditions and the influence on state budgets. Feher calls on stakeholder organizations to develop something like a "common accreditation index" that takes into account labor laws, environmental protection, consumer protection and the fight against tax cuts for corporations. As financial capitalism became hegemonic, the influence of the tripartite relationship responsible for Fordism - entrepreneurs, workers, and state employees - receded and was overshadowed by the triangular interaction between shareholders, managers, and stakeholders. But even if the influence of the states has declined, they are not disappearing from the scene, but they are in a dual dependency in the developed countries. On the one hand, governments are still dependent on the electorate, but on the other hand, they must constantly defend the interests of the people consider financial investors. While the first aspect concerns democratic legitimacy, the second concerns the size and design of households. The economic stagnation that hit most industrialized countries following the exhaustion of the Fordist model of capital accumulation, as well as new opportunities for capital owners (made possible by floating currencies, energy liberalization, and deregulation of financial markets), seriously curtailed the autonomy of states. When productivity in mass production stagnated in the 1970s, governments had to adjust wages to prices for fear of further worker and student protests. This kind of inflation, which was supposed to ensure social peace, quickly met with the reluctance of financial asset holders who refused to accept the depreciation of their portfolios. The savings moved more into speculative investments than productive investment, due to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, with its fixed exchange rates, oil price volatility and new financial instruments/derivatives. It was Paul Volcker, the head of the Fed, who in the late 1970s focused the US government's interests on the supply of money and the support of financial investment owners, triggering a dramatic rise in interest rates. In a period of declining growth rates, this shock led to the cessation of the inflationary developments that were part of Keynesian politics. Volcker's monetary asceticism and Reagan's corporate tax credits that speculators from all over the world went to the US capital markets because of the high returns of investment and the favorable fiscal regime. At the same time, while the sudden inflow of foreign money capital led to a rapid fall in interest rates, all developed-country governments made raising their investors' financial attractiveness an absolute priority for investors. The monetary and fiscal policy of Keynesianism came to an end. that all the governments of the developed countries made investing in the financial attractiveness of their territories an absolute priority for investors. The monetary and fiscal policy of Keynesianism came to an end. that all the governments of the developed countries made investing in the financial attractiveness of their territories an absolute priority for investors. The monetary and fiscal policy of Keynesianism came to an end. It is the power of financial investors to blame for declining wages and the dismantling of the welfare state. The abolition of legal and administrative barriers, facilitating both the circulation of capital at international level and financial activities, and allowing the creation of new financial instruments, was also a prerequisite for financial investors to be competitive both in business and in business States could influence massively. Therefore, the accreditation, the valuation of capital, should be judged regardless of the consequences for distribution and production. If, on the other hand, labor disputes are no longer as important as in Fordism, that does not mean that they have lost all their value, because the experiences which can be drawn from them also remain relevant to today's social movements. But if we live in a time when capital accumulation is driven by finance, then new forms of struggle must necessarily be developed. translated by Dejan Stojkovski taken from: by Achim Szepanski Michel Feher, in his new book Rated Agency, claims that the financialized capitalism that began in the 1970s amounts to a Copernican revolution in that the new regime of capital accumulation no longer focuses on industrial enterprises built on vertical integration and internal growth, but that in this regime both the corporations and the economies of which they are a part would have to refer to the financial markets, which would be dominated by large global banks and institutional investors (and by the shadow banking system, one must add). The financialization of developed economies can be measured by the relative size of the financial sector compared to GDP, the volume of profits that financial institutions realize compared to other firms, and the portfolio incomes of non-financial firms. Beyond such indicators demonstrating the transfer of funds from the real economy to the speculative financial circuits, what characterizes lenders today is their power to seek out those projects that deserve financing, which in turn defeats those that do are dependent on credit, constantly have to prove their attractiveness to investors and thus have to gear their economic activities not only to making a profit, but also to establishing creditworthiness. Stock corporations in particular must not only strive to maximize the difference between income and production costs in the long term, but also work to increase the stock prices, which are evaluated by the financial markets, in the short term in favor of the shareholders. Thus, the real success of these companies does not result solely from the realization of profits made from the sale of products and services, but is based on the capital gain that can also be obtained from share buybacks. The hegemony of credit does not only affect the private sector, but also relates to national governments, which must now make their national location more attractive to financial capital. In order to increase the competitiveness of their companies in a global environment where financial capital can circulate freely, states must make their territory as attractive as possible for international investors by protecting property rights. At the same time, governments and parties are being forced to organize their re-election, which according to Feher has contributed since the 1980s to states increasingly financing themselves through the issue of government bonds instead of taxes, i.e. fueling government debt to meet the tax burden not to go too high for the population and not to completely dismantle the welfare state. Thus, states and their governments continually increase their dependence on the financial markets, which are then lauded for promoting the economic discipline of the agents they credit to everyone's satisfaction. To forestall the distrust of the bond markets, which is reflected in rising interest rates on government bonds, governments must increase the flexibility of the labor markets, cut welfare programs, reduce taxes on capital and scale back any serious regulation of the financial markets. In the 1990s, however, the national debt, which was intended to compensate for the loss of tax revenue, assumed such proportions that private lenders worried about the solvency of the states, so that social benefits had to be further cut and parts of the population depended on public services were encouraged to take out loans to compensate for the lack of social benefits. In typical neoliberal fashion, it has been argued that this would encourage citizens to increase discipline in managing their own lives as autonomous and self-responsible businesses. And of course the question of creditworthiness also affects individuals who can no longer rely on long-term jobs and state-guaranteed social benefits, since the companies and states, which are themselves dependent on the evaluation of financial investors, can no longer offer long-term employment contracts and sufficient social benefits, so job-seeking individuals need to make themselves valueable, such as through well-paid subject-related skills, flexibility, and sufficient networking. Their ability to find a job is now more influenced by the credit attributed to human capital than by collective agreements on wages and working conditions. The material precarization forces the need for large parts of the population to take out loans in order to access houses, continue their studies and meet certain consumer desires or simply to survive. And for borrowing, you have to provide proof of collateral. If this is not the case, then in order to prove solvency, at least prospects (increasing market value of the house) or reputation, which consists in the fact that the loan can be repaid through wages, for example, must be proven. The neoliberal reforms contributed to transforming the individuals, who are obsessed with the utilitarian calculus of maximizing their own utility or income, into the financialized subject, who shifts their own value to the assets to be continuously valued, to the small capital to maximize x. As a result, the criticism of capitalism, which is directed against the profit-driven nature of companies, has shifted to the financial institutions that are busy allocating credit. While capital's exploitation of wage labor has by no means disappeared, it is the demands of financial investors that have met with widespread public opposition, blaming them for increasing labor market insecurity and precarious working conditions. In his text, Feher once again presents Marx's well-known theory of surplus value in order to then show that today's financial investors do not simply assume the role of classical capitalists. Specific to this type of investor is not soaking up huge dividends, interest payments and other financial income, what matters here is that these investors have the power to select participants who need financial resources. It is not the appropriation of income but the allocation of capital that is constitutive of the role of the financial investor, that is, accreditation is more important than appropriation. For Feher, the increased criticism of the selective power of financial investors over that of the exploiting capitalists does not mean that the exploitation of labor power has declined; on the contrary, in companies that are set up especially for the shareholders, managers must continue to do so very strictly strive to reduce labor costs. But it is not the new forms of corporate management that are largely to blame for the transfer of income from work to capital; on the contrary, the stagnation of real wages and the dismantling of the welfare state is the "rating power" of financial ones hold investors accountable. The disappearance of legal and administrative regulations that freed the circulation of capital across national borders (as well as that of financial activities) and enabled the creation of new forms of assets, derivatives, meant that only traders in financial liquidity were responsible for the competitiveness of the Assess and evaluate companies and the economic attractiveness of national territories. Accreditation as a form of assessment of capital is now to be determined. From a class identification perspective, there is a fundamental difference between the classical entrepreneur and the financial investor. The functional difference here has to include the aspect of its operation. For the entrepreneur, it is the labor market where a commodity called labor power is offered by its owners. The investors, on the other hand, are on the financial markets, where transactions of all kinds are transformed into assets. Companies try to extract and realize value, while investors determine the allocation of credit and determine the creditworthiness of their customers. The entrepreneurs run the business of appropriating the surplus value that the workers have produced, the investors decide what is actually produced. The distinguishing feature of investors, then, is not that, like industrial capitalists, they increase the prices of their products in order to make profits, or that they minimize production costs, to put it simply, but what the investors throw themselves into are projects that are theirs increase own capacity for credit. Such projects relate to states' budgets, corporate business plans, student loans, consumer desires, the fictions of start-ups, and the credit scores of wage earners. For financial institutions, governments, corporations, and households are legal entities that serve as objects that may or may not be credited. The investors constantly evaluate these properties for their creditworthiness, whereby the reversibility between investors and those who receive them, which Feher calls »Investee«, is not guaranteed, at least not like that between entrepreneurs and employees who have a dual function as buyer and seller take in. Even if financial capital in its global, liquid and anonymous forms can be described as the "pure investor", the "investees" must be included as concrete institutions and individuals, but they do not maintain a symmetrical relationship with the investors who own their Use funds and invest in projects that they evaluate themselves. At the same time, investors are also taking out loans. In labor markets, the buyers and sellers of labor power negotiate prices. In the capital markets, price determination does not take place through negotiations that exchange something, but through the speculation of investors whose object is the "value" they assign to tradable assets, depending on the attractiveness of the assets, on which other market participants have a say. Therefore, Minsky assumed that financial markets are structurally unstable because operations on them never lead to the determination of an equilibrium price. Rather, price increases in assets, which can be based on rumors and expectations, lead to further price increases, while, conversely, price reductions in phases of distrust lead to further price reductions in assets. Negotiations between traders are not coordinated on the financial markets, rather it is up to them to constantly generate liquidity in order to enable investors to speculate. The optimization of costs, which inspires the transaction on the classic markets, is replaced by the calculation of future expectations of the various market participants. What has taken place here is the shift in investors' interests and their activities from profit extraction to attribution of credit. The freedom that capitalism affords to both investors and investees (those who borrow to set up projects that may well be profitable) is not that of negotiation, with which both capitalists and investees engage workers faced in industrial capitalism, rather it is the freedom to speculate or to speculate on the speculators of others to shape one's assets. Investors and investees try to influence the selection of what is produced more than the distribution of what is produced. It is less the distribution of income between labor and capital than the conditions of capital allocation that are the decisive moment of operationalization here. translated by Dejan Stojkovski taken from: |
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November 2019
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