Abstract
What can money do? Can it be put to work to address deepening forms of social and economic inequality associated with the financial crisis, ongoing recession and still unfolding politics of austerity? Can we have faith in money as an injustice-remedying substance in a crisis-ridden and (still thoroughly) financialised reality? While the latter scenario is implied in recent feminist calls to redistribute resources to redress widening socio-economic inequalities under austerity, in this article I suggest that such a redistributive logic fails to account for the shifting capacities of resources, including the capacities of money. To track these shifting capacities, I revisit the demands of the 1970s women’s liberation movement and especially the assumptions at play in these demands that money both measure and distribute justice. While these assumptions were arguably politically efficacious in that moment, in the contemporary present, pervasive financialisation has involved a material transformation to the capacities of money, a transformation that, I will suggest, leaves its justice-distributing potential in doubt. This article therefore not only calls for careful exploration of the capacities of resources in analyses of crisis, recession and austerity, but also for feminist theory to rethink redistributive justice in the light of such transformations. Central to these considerations is money in the wages form.
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Notes
My interest in this roundtable discussion is driven by a concern to identify a number of taken for granted truths that have emerged within feminism and beyond in regard to the economic crisis, austerity and women. I am not suggesting therefore that the views articulated within the discussion are specific to the individuals concerned.
It is important to reiterate that I am locating this roundtable discussion as paradigmatic of feminist sentiments that have emerged regarding the effects of the crisis and austerity on women.
Whereby remedies to injustices constituted by unequally distributed resources—especially socio-economic resources such as property, wealth and money—are sought via strategies of the redistribution of those resources (see, e.g., Fraser, 1995, 1997, 2013).
While a transformation of money was not sought in the demands of the women’s liberation movement, feminist utopian fiction produced during this time did imagine alternative scenarios in regard to money. Societies were imagined, for example, with no currency but with credit systems.
Although this political effectiveness did not necessarily translate into economic efficaciousness. I am grateful to one anonymous reviewer for making this important point.
Where debt is transformed into an asset and traded on financial markets.
Other measures include the sheer volume of daily financial transactions (Epstein, 2005), the rollout and expansion of new financial markets (Mackenzie, 2007) and the increasing inseparability of the operations of finance from other sectors of the economy (Lazzarato, 2011).
As this suggests, in financial capitalism time itself becomes a resource, with profits generated not over time, but via relationships between different points in time (Adkins, 2011).
As Federici argues, the entanglement of women in these relations of dependency and subordination captures the energies and inventiveness of women worldwide. She also makes clear that in regard to household and personal debt, women constitute the preferred subjects of banks and other finance institutions.
Such analyses tend simply to extend the spatial reach of their enquiries beyond the nation-state.
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Adkins, L. what can money do? feminist theory in austere times. Fem Rev 109, 31–48 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2014.37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2014.37