Rated Agency bookcover

Rated Agency

Investee Politics in a Speculative Age

Michel Feher 

(Author)

Gregory Elliott 

(Translator)
4.9/5.0
21,000+ Reviews
Bookshop.org has the highest-rated customer service of any bookstore in the world

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.

Product Details

PublisherZone Books
Publish DateOctober 26, 2018
Pages192
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconHardback
EAN/UPC9781942130123
Dimensions7.9 X 6.3 X 0.8 inches | 0.9 pounds

About the Author

Michel Feher, a Belgian philosopher, is the author of Powerless by Design: The Age of the International Community and the editor of Nongovernmental Politics and Europe at a Crossroads, among other titles. Founder of Cette France-là, a monitoring group on French immigration policy, Feher is also a founding editor of Zone Books.

Reviews

A new book by the philosopher Michel Feher takes on the crucial task of imagining a politics capable of responding to the dominance of finance. Feher's project focuses on a major consequence of the neoliberal turn: the centrality of speculative investment in the contemporary economy. Though this "financialization" was not an intended result of the architects of neoliberalism, it has had a profound impact on the scope of political possibilities today. And despite the formidable constraints a financialized economy places on the democratic left, Feher believes it is possible to find within its logic the tools for social change.

--Books & Ideas

Offers both critical evaluations and political discussions of the existing socio-economic theories about the dynamics of capitalism in the past half-century and the possible alternative directions current capitalism could take. His original and timely contribution lies in the argument that we can move beyond neoliberalism once we know how to use it as the source of resistance.

--Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association

Offers a story of how we got here and how activists can, if not throw off the yoke of debt, at least begin to alter the deal a bit more in their favor.

--The Baffler

Feher clearly and systematically lays out how following the money may not be the grand capitulation that the Left considers it to be...his subtle but important conceptual shift of emphasis from "value" to "credit" may be Rated Agency's most enduring contribution to political economy going forward.

--Hyperallergic

Belgian philosopher Feher (Rated Agency ) 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....The phenomena that Feher describes and the counterstrategy he outlines are likely to spark intra-left debate.

--Publishers Weekly

Earn by promoting books

Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.sign up to affiliate program link
Become an affiliate