Monsters of the Market – Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism by David McNally

Author:David McNally [McNally, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: frankenstein, mary shelley, karl marx, marxism, rembrandt, The Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp, zombies, vampires, africa, folk tales, amsterdam, working class, commodification, capitalism, labour, london
ISBN: 9781608462339
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2012-08-24T22:00:00+00:00

Wild money: the occult economies of late-capitalist globalisation

Late capitalism is a conjurer’s realm of wild money. So demonically out of control is financial wealth that, like an apparition, it appears able to materialise in monstrous concentrations only to melt away just as quickly. Take, for instance, the December 2001 collapse of Enron, a company ranked months earlier as the seventh largest in the United States. A mere year before, as it generated over $100 billion in revenues, Enron was publicly valued at $65 billion. Then, as if at a wizard’s command, all that wealth simply vanished. Sold some weeks after declaring bankruptcy, Fortune magazine’s five-time ‘most innovative company in America’ went for nothing, literally nothing. Or consider the even more staggering collapse of venerable investment-firm Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2008, which shattered confidence in global markets. Prior to its crash, Lehman was valued at more than $690 billion. It too went for almost nothing.

If we seek to understand the occult economy of late capitalism, and its cryptic world of enchanted wealth, it would be hard to find better case-studies than Enron and Lehman Brothers. For here we encounter, in pristine form, the bizarre workings of capital today. Yet, to truly grasp these debacles, we must move beyond the mainstream-tale of corporate greed and corruption. However much Enron or Lehman offer paradigmatic examples of fraud and deceit, what brought them down goes much deeper than that. Their pathologies were systemic, not idiosyncratic. Even one mainstream-journalist has observed that the Enron tale is ‘the story of how American capitalism worked at the close of the twentieth century’.134 And that larger story, to which I return shortly, is also the tale of the 2008 disintegration of all five Wall-Street investment-banks, none of which can be divined outside an analysis of what has happened to global capitalism, and how world money has transmuted, since about 1970.

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