Critique and Discourses on Finance

My talk will address the role of critique in my current book manuscript, which concerns interwar discourses on finance capital in Germany and Britain.  My research revealed a tendency, expressed in a broad archive of popular and elite sources, to impute economic hardship exclusively to monetary and financial phenomena.  This kind of criticism frequently shaded into financial conspiracy theories, including the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism.  I argue that engaging these discourses critically requires not only attending to their political instrumentalization, but also accounting for their transnational plausibility.  This in turn demands rethinking the ways in which economic crises have appeared to historical actors.  For this panel I then focus on one example of my approaches to that rethinking.  Such phenomena as the destruction of grain and livestock during the interwar Depression indicated to a wide range of observers that it had become possible to overcome material scarcity.  This possibility then served as an emergent standpoint for the critique of liberal capitalist political-economic orders.  However, if economic crises thus helped to render this kind of possibility thinkable, they also rendered obscure the reproduction of that scarcity.  One can thus observe figures struggling to locate the sources of ongoing scarcity – a struggle expressed in the popular notion of a “paradox of poverty amidst plenty.” Some of these figures, including J. M. Keynes and a host of proto-Keynesian reformers, then isolated monetary factors (such as the gold standard) as the putative forces constraining the realization of post-scarcity futures.  Addressing the questions posed by my research thus has necessitated a form of “immanent critique”: the fundamentally interpretive tasks of understanding these discourses demands investigating the ways in which emergent possibilities have rendered historical institutions palpably contingent and therefore politically contestable.