Rethinking Money, Debt, and Finance after the Crisis

Marc Notes: The financial crisis of 2007-8 has been widely understood as a result of the financial system's exceeding its proper place in society;the system became unbalanced, unsustainable and deprived of a solid foundation. Even as capitalist finance seeks to reinvent itself in the wake of massive upheaval, critics continue to portray the financial system as fundamentally irrational - an unstable, destructive inventor of fictitious money. The essays in this special issue take the financial crisis as an opportunity for much-needed conceptual innovation. Table of Contents: Rethinking Money, Debt, and Finance after the Crisis Contingency and Foundation: Rethinking Money, Debt, and Finance after the Crisis - Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings State of Speculation: Contingency, Measure, and the Politics of Plastic Value - Martijn Konings Money, Debt, and the Business of Free Stuff - Fiona Allon Risk and Value: Finance, Labor, and Production - Dick Bryan, Michael Rafferty, and Chris Jefferis What Are Post-Fordist Wages? Simmel, Labor Money, and the Problem of Value - Lisa Adkins Speculative Values and Courtroom Contestations - Marieke de Goede Money after Decolonization - Randy Martin Shadow Money and the Shadow Workforce: Rethinking Labor and Liquidity - Melinda Cooper AGAINST the DAY - Reconfigurations on the Left in South Africa Introduction: Reopening the Constituent Process - Ahmed Veriava Between Old and New: Struggles in Contemporary South Africa - Prishani Naidoo The Economic Freedom Fighters and the Politics of Memory and Forgetting - Noor Nieftagodien Labor-Community Alliances in South Africa: Reclaiming (Some of) the Past, Inventing the Future? - Dale T. McKinley"Publisher Marketing: The financial crisis of 2007 8 has been widely understood as a result of the financial system s exceeding its proper place in society; the system became unbalanced, unsustainable, and deprived of a solid foundation. Even as capitalist finance seeks to reinvent itself in the wake of massive upheaval, critics continue to portray the financial system as fundamentally irrational an unstable, destructive inventor of fictitious money. Characterizing finance in this way, however, neglects the growing connection between the worlds of high finance and consumer credit. The essays in this special issue take the financial crisis as an opportunity for much-needed conceptual innovation. Its contributors move beyond strictly moralistic criticisms of financialization to rethink core economic categories such as money, speculation, measure, value, and the wage, as well as the relationship among labor, finance, and money. Melinda Cooperis an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. She is the author of "Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy," also published by Duke University Press. Martijn Koningsis Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of "The Development of American Finance." Contributors: Lisa Adkins, Fiona Allon, Dick Bryan, Melinda Cooper, Marieke de Goede, Chris Jefferis, Martijn Konings, Randy Martin, Michael Rafferty" Contributor Bio:  Konings, Martijn Martijn Konings is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He has a Ph. D. from York University (Toronto) and has held postdoctoral research positions at York University and the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely in the field of political economy, including several edited volumes and articles in such journals as the New Left Review, the European Journal of Sociology, the Review of International Political Economy, Politics, the Review of International Studies, Critical Sociology and Theory and Event.