Paying Attention

The English translation of Capital and Language comes at a juncture that is enormously revealing—both for Christian Marazzi’s work, and of the late capitalist formations he studies. Encountering this book is even more illuminating now, because we are in a position to evaluate Marazzi’s arguments about the post-Fordist “New Economy” in ways that extend beyond the novel problems presented by the high-tech and internet boom at the turn of the 21^st Century. This is, of course, thanks to the global financial and economic crisis that precipitated the staggering meltdown of late 2008. The housing bubble and its attendant speculation in the mortgage securities market do indeed throw Marazzi’s argument into sharp relief, particularly his thesis that the financialization of the economy has a fundamentally linguistic character. On a theoretical level, Marazzi proves particularly topical, as political economy’s two standard theories of value (the neoclassical utility theory and the Marxist labor theory) are increasingly regarded as bearing fatal analytical and ontological flaws. Marazzi’s account takes steps in the direction of rethinking value, managing along the way to breathe critical theoretical life into the economic clichés of the turn of the 21^st Century (e.g., “the knowledge economy”) and connect them to concerns that surfaced a decade later (e.g., “financialization”).

Marazzi’s account of financialization is a fitting point of departure for discussing this book, since it is the work’s principal focus and a source of great political and theoretical interest today. For most commentators, financialization means the shift from a real economy to a speculative one, corporations’ increasing (if not exclusive) focus on shareholder value, and the push to securitize all assets. Marazzi’s discussion of these patterns combines familiar elements in a way that serves as a useful correction, however, to the recent view of financialization that emphasizes the 1999 dismantling of Glass-Steagall. Marazzi reminds us of the relentlessly disinflationary policy regime that began in the 1980s. He characterizes the push toward disinflation as a response to both the abandonment of the gold standard in 1971 and stagflation in the late 1970s. He describes how the change in workers’ compensation from salaries and pensions to stock-options and 401(k) accounts over the subsequent decades played critical, if underappreciated roles in disinflationary policy programs, and therefore in the process of financialization.

This shift in the structure of earnings and savings for a critical segment of the working population is momentous. Marazzi explains how it eliminated a great deal of savings that were previously invested outside of financial markets, and it fostered a “deep, vast market” with lots of liquidity. It also dramatically broadened the class of investors, a process he calls the “socialization of finance” (“socialization” here meaning something like “compulsory participation”). In a vein mined directly from Negri and Hardt, he goes on to argue that financialization shifted from governmental institutions to financial ones the power to constitute peoples out of multitudes, since it is in financial markets, rather than in government-regulated pension plans and in welfare state programs, that people come to imagine their futures.

Throughout this analysis, Marazzi, like many before and after him, departs decisively from the idea (endemic to dominant paradigms in economic theory) that price expresses total information. Of course, the refusal of mainstream economists and policymakers to follow Marazzi and his kind has visited us with consequences that are by now all too familiar. While Marazzi draws from the literatures on behavioral finance to justify discarding the rationality assumption, he follows the linguistic turn, broadly understood, to orient his account. To this end, Marazzi begins with the observation that the economy is not nature, but culture: economic things are by and large conventional. They are, in a word, language. Extending the linguistic rubric to refigure the way we think about finance and capital, and sensitive to the ways that a financialized...