Doug wrote:
?At the pinnacle is the financial sphere and its major players, but
> all that is quite abstract. You can?t demonstrate against an
> abstraction,? explains the sociologist Alain Mergier.
It's complex in the details, but not in the power relations: the financial system is about the construction and exercise of ownership and control by a possessing class. The left does no one any favors when it speaks of finance as detached, otherworldly, epiphenomenal, or anything like that.
Excuse my personal pique, but I find it endlessly exasperating that I wrote a book about this shit, published 13 years ago by the leading left house in the English-speaking world and now available everywhere for free download, yet my analysis has had almost no visible effect on left discourse.
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I think Doug is missing the point, which is not that the world of high finance is unfathomable conceptually. It can be understood,
broadly speaking, and Doug's book (which I've read) is valuable in this respect. But the article is about the consciousness of the
working class. In the industrial era, class relations were more transparent due to the fact that capitalists needed workers, lots of them! The capitalist was palpably present to the worker, if not in person, then through the factory, and its managers and foremen. The finance capitalist, on the other hand, exists in a social space devoid of workers (apart from secretaries and maintenance personnel).
And since there is no direct daily contact between the classes, workers have a hard time conceiving of financiers as an object of hostility. Far easier to vent one's frustrations against immigrants, minoriities and other poorer people, with whom they have numerous encounters,
and and into whose ranks they are in constant fear of falling. This is one point of the artice.