Over the past couple of months, liberals and the Right—despite their (albeit minor) differences apropos solutions to the financial crisis—have teamed up to ensure that the narrative of the events are centered, not around a crisis of capitalism as such (this would require something akin to a “radical Keynesianism” rather than the much fetishized “pragmatism” hailed by our Pragmatist-in-Chief), but rather as a crisis of “bad actors.” In other words, so the story goes, the system works until a few bad apples on Wall Street, e.g. Bernie Madoff and subprime lenders, screw things up for Main Street, that way the system can continue to basically function as it had.¹

This is all to say that the current “critique” of capitalism hinges on the idea that things became corrupt (prevailing doxa says due to deregulation and so now we need some pragmatic regulation, which in reality means majority non-voting shareholder status for quasi-nationalized zombie banks), so now we just need to remove corruption. So I like this James Kwak post over at The Baseline Scenario, where he makes the point that what we really need is not regulation of corruption, but a different kind of socio-symbolic network, a new symbolic order. Referencing this New York Times article, Kwak writes:

I don’t know Tim Geithner. But I have no reason to believe he is corrupt. Instead, the simplest explanation of the Times article is that he has internalized a worldview in which Wall Street is the central pillar of the American economy, the health of the economy depends on the health of a few major Wall Street banks, the importance of those banks justifies virtually any measures to protect them in their current form, large taxpayer subsidies to banks (and to bankers) are a necessary cost of those measures – and anyone who doesn’t understand these principles is a simple populist who just doesn’t understand the way the world really works.

Here I think Kwak makes a far more radical point than he intends to: there is something obscene about the how “art” and “knowledge,” especially radical art and radical knowledge, become annexed by the upper and upper middle classes.² So despite the fact that many museums, for example, are “public” space, they remain essentially “private” in their function because, as Zizek has pointed out, the ability to speak about the artwork itself is what is important as a designation of class boundaries.

So to restate the point: if we were really looking for radical solutions to the financial crisis, the logic would be grounded not in corruption, but in cultural capital and beyond, to the logic of class struggle through which the boundaries of these annexes of knowledge and space, taste and language can be perceived formally. The next step is to ruthlessly overthrow them.

1. Putting aside the fact that, under capitalism, all industry is inherently speculative, they just have to go through the trouble of producing commodities. Hence, the split between “authentic production” and finance is already laden with proto-fascist hints. ↩
2. This is also why the common sense criticism of art, philosophy, and opera as “elitist” is totally misguided: what is elitist is the appropriation of these mediums into a language of elite classes who are not so much interested in the content, but in being able to “speak the same language” as other members of an elite class. ↩