The crisis of 2007 and 2008 brought a once-shadowy realm of finance and its component instruments—securities, derivatives, brokerage firms, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, credit rating agencies, high-frequency trading, and more—to popular concern. In finance—ever-expanding, spectral, and blithely self-confident—many found the sign of a radically new force in social life. Finance suggested an answer to that essential modernist question about what separates us from previous eras. In Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction, political theorist Ivan Ascher considers financialization through a creative, comparative rereading of Marx's Capital. Where Marx found labor and commodities, Ascher finds risk and securities. By inducing people to seek security through ever more speculative means, he argues that the world of Anglo-American financialized capitalism requires us to rethink profit-making, inequality, and power. With only the volatile world of finance to stand on, this elegant conceptual and historical essay leverages Marx's analytical framework to insist on the novelty of contemporary capitalism.
