Rated Agency - (Near Future) by Michel Feher (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

About the Author

Gary Tomlinson is John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and Humanities at Yale University, where he directs the Whitney Humanities Center. His books include Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others; Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera; and The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact.