The Time of Money

"As more women worldwide fall under the sway of monetary relations, the impact of 'financialization' on their lives has become an increasingly urgent question. A major contribution to this discussion, The Time of Money advances the development of a feminist perspective on finance as a force that is shaping women's social condition even as it shapes the economy." -- Silvia Federici * Professor Emerita, Hofstra University, and author of <i>Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation</i> * "As you open this book, you will find that its pages unfold on many levels. On one level, The Time of Money tells a gripping story about money and its place in today's Anglo-American capitalism. On another level, it is also a book about time itself and the multiple temporalities of our financialized lives. But perhaps most significantly, it is a sustained and compelling analysis of the logic of speculation that subtends so much of contemporary capitalism, one that is bound to compel the interest of readers across disciplines. Adkins's book also has the merit of attending to the distinctly political and gendered dimensions of financialization, which is but one of its many virtues." -- Ivan Ascher * University of WisconsinMilwaukee, and author of <i>The Portfolio Society</i> * "The Time of Money offers a powerful account of the damage created by the time of money, not least by making visible the emerging temporal experiences we miss when we limit our attention to the passing of the old." -- Jane Elliot * <i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i> *

Lisa Adkins is Head of the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney and the author of The Post-Fordist Sexual Contract (2016).

Contents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter sets out how, rather than being simply associated with finance and financial trading, a logic of speculation is at the heart of contemporary capitalist accumulation strategies and guides and directs the dynamics of social formation. It suggests that a logic of speculation has replaced a logic of extraction and operates as a rationality that defines the telos of action. It is argued that what unites speculation as a mode of accumulation and a mode of social organization, that is, what precisely constitutes the logic of speculation as a rationality, is time. 1Money on the Move chapter abstractThis chapter investigates the logic of speculation operative in post<->Bretton Woods agreement finance markets. It addresses the claim that at the heart of the 2007-8 financial crisis lay unregulated and excessive speculation on the part of finance traders, especially to the claim that at the heart of this activity was a trading of the future at the expense of the present. Through a focus not on the actions of traders but on movements and flows of money in financial markets, this chapter lays out how in regard to finance markets the issue is not a trade on the future but a shifting relationship between time and money. It argues that speculation concerns a particular form of time. 2Austere Times chapter abstractThis chapter engages with the contemporary politics of austerity. It outlines how austerity must be understood not as a fiscal response to the global financial crisis but as a political strategy through which the economy of debt is being extended. It shows how this extension enrolls the productivity of populations into the generation of surplus via the movements and flows of everyday money. This chapter also discusses how transformations to everyday money, especially transformations to what money can do, must be center stage if we are to understand this enrollment. These transformations turn on the emergence of money as a value. 3The Speculative Time of Debt chapter abstractThis chapter is concerned with mass debt and indebtedness. Against the view that debt is destructive of time, it outlines how securitized household and personal debt involves a specific time universe and the binding of populations to this time, a binding to a nonchronological time, or speculative time. It lays out how central to this time and to this binding is the operation of the calculus of securitized debt, a calculus concerned not with working lives of repayment but with lifetimes of payment. This chapter elaborates how this calculus opens up specific modes of practice that expand the productive potential of populations in regard to the generation of surplus from everyday payments from households. 4Wages and the Problem of Value chapter abstractThis chapter is concerned with wages in the era of financial expansion. Existing accounts of wages in this era point to endemic wage stagnation and outline strategies to reconnect labor with value as a remedy to this problem. This chapter outlines how such accounts bracket a broad-scale restructuring of wages. It points to and maps a reworking of the relationship between labor and money. This reworking concerns the emergence of wages that are not a measure of external things but an in-motion surface. It also concerns the replacement of the free laborer, who must exchange her or his labor for a wage, by the speculative subject, who must speculate on their (stagnant) wages and their whole lives and lifetimes to ensure survival. 5Out of Work chapter abstractThis chapter explores how a restructuring of labor in the era of financial expansion has taken place on the ground of unemployment through a set of coordinated policies and programs. It shows how this restructuring has eroded the distinction between unemployment and employment by positioning both the in-work and out-of-work as in need of adapting to events that have not yet and might never h