Re: <nettime> Franco Berardi & Geert Lovink: A call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software

["Patrice Riemens" <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Pace WIRED's famous "Generation Equity" cover somewhere in the late 90s
there is one thing that has remained unchanged during the fast evolution
of financial capitalism from an unruly but manageable bourse to a full
fledged casino going bananas: small holders stay out or get douzed. So so
much for "ordinary people's desire for accruing wealth by taking chances
on the stock market". The desire is there allright every now and then
(remember the great privatizations in UK, France and NL with its call for
smallholder capitalism), the result has always been the same:
disappointing returns for the lucky, shake-out for the stupid (oh yes, we
also had the 'day-trading for dummies' interlude). The 1% are not staying
the 1% (1 in 10.000 - and counting up -  is probably more accurate btw)
for nothing.

> It seems to me that there is a double of FINAZISM that goes
> unaccounted for in this otherwise provocative text. And this is the
> risk society or ordinary people's desire for accruing wealth by
> taking chances on the stock market. While it is undeniable that there
> is an undemocratic, dictatorial element in financial capital (as
> 401Ks, mutual funds, and public finances are injected into the stock
> market without taxpayers and workers' consensus) there exists also a
> diffused, molecular desire for financial rent that fuels the system.
 <...>


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