INVESTING IN THE FUTURE

Annie McClanahan

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2013, vol. 6, issue 1, 78-93

Abstract: This essay explores not the imaginative fictions that represent or respond to the financial economy but the fictions produced by financialisation, the historical ideologies that have underwritten a newly financialised economy in the post-1973 epoch. It connects recent popular discourses about the future to transformations in the economy, arguing that the adjacent ideologies of ‘the end of history’ and ‘investment in the future’ emerge, respectively, out of the ‘new economy’ of immaterial labour and the deferred temporality of financial speculation. It further suggests that certain of these ideological fictions also haunt explicitly critical accounts of the period. The fiction of end-of-history abundance appears as a historical fact in post-marxist theories of ‘immaterial labour’, while an almost messianic account of finance capital appears in post- structuralist theories of financialisation. The ideas of history that have come to dominance since the 1980s are not only deeply rooted in the economy but have also blocked our access to actual economic history. This essay thus concludes with a reading of Marx's term ‘fictitious capital’, locating in it a reminder about the necessity of critical historical materialism, even in an age of ostensibly ‘immaterial’ value.

Date: 2013
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DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2012.745442

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