The hegemony of finance compels social agents to alter their priorities: companies are more concerned with the moods of their shareholders than with their longstanding commercial success; governments subordinate the welfare of their constituents to the appeasement of their creditors; and private citizens are less inclined to stake their livelihood on the income of their labor than on the appreciation of their resources – capital goods, skills, connections.
That firms, States and people depend more on the rating of their assets than on the product of their activities proves equally transformative of the critiques leveled at capitalism. Rather than on corporate profits, grievances now center on 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 the main focus of social struggles. Taking stock of this shift, Michel Feher examines the resistances triggered by the exigencies of investors and speculates on the new political aspirations that investees draw from their condition of rated agencies.
Michel Feher is a philosopher and the author of several books. He is the founder of Cette France-là (migrants aid collective which has published several books with La Découverte) and the prestigious American publishing house, Zones Books (with Hal Foster and Jonathan Crary).