Beyond Voluntary Servitude? The Emergence of Post-Capitalist Financialization

• In Event: Rethinking Neoliberalism: Concepts and Critiques

Abstract

This paper addresses a tension at interface of two literatures. The first concerns an alleged ‘authoritarian’ turn in recent neoliberal praxis. The second concerns the prolonged, problematic ‘recovery’ of capitalism, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and the question of whether or not it may be appropriate to speak of a ‘death’ of capitalism. The term neoliberalism evokes the movement among ideologically powerful experts and elites to reengineer the postwar consensus model, and create in its place a regime of exclusively market-based governance. Despite occasional nods to the importance of ‘everyday life’ as the essential terrain to which such governance is applied, recent debates about neoliberalism have tended to focus on questions over the ‘variegated’ nature of its genealogy, and the implications of this for our understanding of the relationship between neoliberalism and capitalism itself. Overlooked here, however, is the idea that the market itself is a superlative tool of everyday subjectification or, in Dardot and Laval’s terms, ‘practical normativity’. From this perspective, the willing subject of contemporary austerity is merely the most extreme expression to date of a mode of social power which, while it predates neoliberalism, functions nevertheless as the affective precondition of neoliberalism’s recent success. In this paper, I set out a typology for assessing the significance of financialization as a generative, asignifying element of Late Capitalist power. On the one hand, attention is given to the confessional aspects of our habituation within the domain of capitalist money, a factor which has clearly intensified since first discussed by Marx, in Das Kapital. On the other, attention is given to what scholars like Lazzarato discuss as the emergence of a kind of post-post-Fordist regime. Not only does the labor theory of value appear to be fracturing, as it is displaced by financialized means of expropriating value from human life itself, but the ubiquitous quantification of social life in austerity suggests an unprecedented degree of power for finance, in the determination of possible human action.

Author

• Nicholas J. Kiersey, University Of Texas Rio Grande Valley