Rated Agency
Investee Politics in a Speculative Age
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- £20.99
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- £20.99
Publisher Description
The hegemony of finance compels a new orientation for everyone and everything: companies care more about the moods of their shareholders than about longstanding commercial success; governments subordinate citizen welfare to appeasing creditors; and individuals are concerned less with immediate income from labor than appreciation of their capital goods, skills, connections, and reputations.
That firms, states, and people depend more on their ratings than on the product of their activities also changes how capitalism is resisted. For activists, the focus of grievances shifts from the extraction of profit to the conditions under which financial institutions allocate credit. While the exploitation of employees by their employers has hardly been curbed, the power of investors to select investees — to decide who and what is deemed creditworthy — has become a new site of social struggle.
In clear and compelling prose, Michel Feher explains the extraordinary shift in conduct and orientation generated by financialization. Above all, he articulates the new political resistances and aspirations that investees draw from their rated agency.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Belgian philosopher Feher (Powerless by Design) argues that, though industrial capitalism once pitched employers' interests against those of workers, in the present "financialized" form of capitalism the conflict is between investors (those who decide when to extend credit) and "investees," and activism must adjust accordingly. He begins by tracing neoliberal thought from its origins during the postwar era to its "third way" manifestations near the turn of the millennium. He describes how not letting creditors fail has become the focus of governance, and how workers were "de-proletarianized" by being encouraged to view themselves as entrepreneurs (and thereby not in conflict with the entrepreneurial class). Nowadays, "the pursuit of credit is the prevailing preoccupation" for corporations, governments, and individuals, and "the power of investors to select investees to decide who and what is deemed creditworthy has become a new site of social struggle." Feher posits that activists should take ownership of the "investee condition" and engage in "counterspeculating" to change the parameters under which investors extend credit, through, for example, divestment campaigns, debt strikes, and discrediting of political parties. The reading can be difficult, as moments of conceptual clarity compete with dense, complex passages, but the phenomena that Feher describes and the counterstrategy he outlines are likely to spark intra-left debate.
