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T H E L I M I T S O F I NSI D E J OB :
C R I S I S , I D E O L O G Y, A N D T H E
B U R D E N O F C A P I TA L I S M

Robert Froese

When accepting the Oscar for Inside Job, Charles Ferguson began his
speech by reminding the audience that “three years after a horrific financial
crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to
jail and that’s wrong.”1 How should the Left respond to this form of moral
outrage? Perhaps we should respond in exactly the same manner as the
senior bank executive who, in dealing with public backlash due to the robust
AIG bonuses amidst financial ruin, (unknowingly) asked the proper question:
“What good does it do to be demonizing an industry that you need to revive
the economy?”2 Ironically, such a conservative response touches on a veiled
truth absent in many critiques surrounding the financial and economic
crisis of 2008. When asked from a different perspective, this question, origi-
nally intended to insulate industry from criticism, puts on trial not mere
individuals, but the economic framework itself.
As the title might suggest, Inside Job develops a narrative that seeks to
implicate the specific actors who, through seeking personal profit, prestige,
and power, tested the threshold of the global economic order in 2008 by
imploding the financial markets.3 The final scene provides the distilled
argument for the film:

For decades, the American financial system was stable and safe, but then
something changed. The financial industry turned its back on society, corrupted
our political system, and plunged the world economy into crisis. At enormous
cost, we have avoided disaster and are recovering. But the men and institu-
tions that caused the crisis are still in power and that needs to change. They
will tell us that we need them and what they do is too complicated for us to

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understand; they will tell us it won’t happen again; they will spend billions
fighting reform; it won’t be easy, but some things are worth fighting for.4

This last statement, which concludes with a panoramic shot of the Statue
of Liberty, encapsulates three prominent, interrelated themes that are both
implicitly and explicitly developed throughout this kind of critical analysis
of the financial crisis. The first is the somewhat nostalgic impulse that, in
the face of crisis, expresses the longing to return to a previous era. The
second is the emphasis on individual actors and their personal psycholog-
ical rationalities that motivated them to pillage and spoil the previous epoch.
The third is the positing of the state and markets in an antagonistic relation-
ship in which the former was dominant in the previous idyllic era, whereas
the latter’s prominence dictates the current catastrophic predicament.
According to Inside Job, the latest financial crisis is the exclamation point
on an escalating scandal that has been unfolding since the Reagan admin-
istration of the 1980s. There is a yearning to return to the more innocent
manifestation of pre-Reagan capitalism comprised of small businesses and
banks that dealt directly with so-called “real” goods and services. In order
to fully demonstrate the depths of the crisis, Inside Job begins with the juxta-
position of a pre-neoliberal vision of Iceland, depicted through sweeping
shots of sublime green landscapes and descriptions of low unemployment,
clean energy, healthcare, vibrant natural environment, and, as one commen-
tator put it, “an almost end of history status.”5 This exact sentiment is
repeated later in the film regarding the United States:

After the Great Depression, the United States had 40 years of economic
growth without a single financial crisis. The financial industry was tightly
regulated, most regular banks were local businesses, and they were prohibited
from speculating with depositor savings. Investment banks with handled
stock and bond trading were small private partnerships.6

This claim that previous banks were small and responsible is followed
by the notion that bankers were also cautious, modest, and middle class
(underscored by an interview with Paul Volker, who claimed he made a
measly $45,0007 a year as a financial economist for Chase Bank before going
into the Treasury in 1969).
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So who or what precipitated this fall from paradise? While there are
several villains in these accounts of the crisis, the genesis of the fall begins
with massive deregulations following the 1981 election of Ronald Reagan
and his appointment of Donald Regan to the Secretary of the Treasury.
While in the previous era risk was conservative and profits were modest,
the deregulation of industry in the wake of Reagan, Clinton, and Bush led
to the consolidation of financial firms and advancement in financial markets
(like derivatives and Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs)), which
enabled individuals to engage in periods of wild, uncontrolled speculation
with unimaginable financial rewards. This was not a natural evolution or
logical outcome, but rather a conscious and systematic attack on government
to loosen restrictions and take full advantage of consumers, pension funds,
and even one’s own company. The responsibility for this is placed on individ-
uals in two ways: first, by implicating specific people that knowingly took
full advantage of their positions of privilege, and, second, by focusing on
the generalized psychological undercurrents of the major Wall Street players.
The film repeatedly emphasizes the conflicts of interest where particular
individuals, either directly or indirectly, participated in the overlapping
spheres of business (where profits are generated), government regulation
(where they were expected to hold those same business interests account-
able), and academia (where they train for, theorize about, and advise on all
things related to the market). In attempting to fully articulate the type of
beast unleashed on the economy and society, there is a significant section
of the film that makes use of neuroscience and a “Wall Street therapist” in
order to describe the personality traits exuded by executives and top traders.
Here we see an exposé on “type A” businessmen who are “impulsive risk
takers” with an insatiable thirst for money, prostitution, cocaine, and strip
clubs. The not-so-subtle message is that deregulation releases these forces into
the market.
The third theme (already suggested by the first two) posits markets and
state intervention in an oppositional relationship. According to Inside Job,
state regulation is needed for two different reasons. First, in order to keep
unscrupulous actors from taking advantage of the system, the state should
quarantine them with proper restraints so they cannot prey on consumers

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and are likewise kept at arm’s length from government decisions. Second,
regulation is required for the stability of markets (recall the claim that the
previous era, from 1940–1980, was tightly regulated and was without crisis).
While there are many references to this argument in the film, none is more
effective than the image of an oil tanker as described by George Soros
(Chairman of Soros Fund Management), who analogizes that markets are
inherently unstable like oil tankers, which are so large that they need to
incorporate separate compartments into their design in order to prevent
the oil from sloshing around and causing the ship to tip. After the Great
Depression, Soros continues, watertight compartments were introduced
into the design of capitalism, and hence deregulation marks the end of
economic compartmentalization.
It is worth comparing the film with the government-commissioned
“Financial Crisis Inquiry Report” (FCIR), which has some interesting similar-
ities and a few key differences. The objective of the report is to understand
how America found itself backed into a corner with no desirable way out.
As it states:

But our mission was to ask and answer this central question: how did it come
to pass that in 2008 our nation was forced to choose between two stark and
painful alternatives—either risk the total collapse of our financial system and
economy or inject trillions of taxpayer dollars into the financial system and
an array of companies, as millions of Americans still lost their jobs, their
savings, and their homes?8

Ultimately, the report comes to many of the same conclusions: enthusi-

astic speculation and risky business practices were ignored by institutions
and bodies like the Federal Reserve, which had the power to “stem the flow
of toxic mortgages.”9 In driving this point home, the Commission’s conclu-
sions are replete with images similar to the oil tanker metaphor, such as
highways with “neither speed limits nor neatly painted lines,”10 or comparing
investment banks to Icarus because “they never feared flying ever closer to
the sun.”11
However, a subtle nuance separates the Commission’s report from the
previous analysis. While deregulation is similarly the hinge of their critique,

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the Commission does not attribute the previous 30 years of policy to the
conscious manipulation of underhanded elites, but rather to the result of a
sincere but ultimately misguided ideological victory of Greenspan and other
successive administrations.12 The question becomes: if a handful of devious
individuals are not responsible, then why did the system end in such utter
catastrophe? One of the Commission’s final conclusions gives the answer
that “there was a systematic breakdown in accountability and ethics.”13 They
go on to explain the overarching problem:

The integrity of our financial markets and the public’s trust in those markets
are essential to the economic well-being of our nation. The soundness and
the sustained prosperity of the financial system and our economy rely on the
notions of fair dealing, responsibility, and transparency. In our economy, we
expect businesses and individuals to pursue profits, at the same time that
they produce products and services of quality and conduct themselves well.
Unfortunately—as has been the case in past speculative booms and busts—
we witnessed an erosion of standards of responsibility and ethics that
exacerbated the financial crisis. This was not universal, but these breaches
stretched from the ground level to the corporate suites. They resulted not only
in significant financial consequences but also in damage to the trust of
investors, businesses, and the public in the financial system.14

This sentiment is explained further in the last section, where the

Commission writes: “These conclusions must be viewed in the context of
human nature and individual and societal responsibility. First, to pin this
crisis on mortal flaws like greed and hubris would be simplistic. It was the
failure to account for human weakness that is relevant to this crisis.” This
amounts to the claim that blaming individuals is fruitless because the crisis
is not the result of some extraordinary, devious, or unusual attribute. There
is no need for an exposé on one’s addiction to money or cocaine because there
is nothing unique about greed and weakness; it is engineered into our DNA.
This is why the Commission feels legitimated in generalizing the blame:
from those who took out mortgages they “never had the intention or capacity
to repay,”15 to the government whose aggressive homeownership policies
“failed to ensure that the philosophy of opportunity was being matched by
the practical realities on the ground,”16 to the business community that

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took advantage of borrowers and their own corporations. As they conclude

further, while not everybody participated, “a crisis of this magnitude cannot
be the work of a few bad actors, and such was not the case here.”17 The
responsibility for the crisis is abstracted from individuals and personality
traits, which suggests that a large portion of the population either did act,
or would have acted similarly when put in those circumstances. (The
Commission treats it like a riot that occurs after the power goes out, where
everybody grabs as much loot as possible before the lights come back on.)
From this perspective, it is a different type of scandal because the public
is not merely duped by high-powered scoundrels. While we do not need
the state to protect us from the barons on Wall Street per se, the implicit
message is that we need the state to protect us from ourselves. The crisis
was caused by mistaken ideas that led to an anemic government and an
intense period of deregulation, but we were all, in a sense, blinded by our
human weakness, and kept participating. This is precisely why the
Commission states that “as a nation, we must also accept responsibility for
what we permitted to occur. Collectively, but certainly not unanimously,
we acquiesced to or embraced a system, a set of policies and actions, that
gave rise to our present predicament.”18 According to the Financial Crisis
Inquiry Commission (FCIC), the government is still the repository of values
and all that is good, as opposed to markets; however, this binary takes on
a much different sense than in Inside Job. In the latter, the government takes
a paternal role to protect the community from external danger, while the
former conceives the state as the external conscience (or superego) that
restrains and sublimates the selfish desires of our inner id.
So what are the limits of such analyses? Perhaps we should begin with
Slavoj Zizek’s favourite question: how does ideology function today? Here,
ideology is not meant as a coherent strategy of ideas needed for solving
political problems, but rather the background noise or embedded parame-
ters of the very question. (In this way, we could say that ideology proper is
precisely what is left out by standard ideologies.) Hence, Zizek states that
“the duty of Philosophy is not to solve problems but to redefine problems,
to show how what we experience as a problem is a false problem…It just
asks, when we use certain notions, when we do certain acts, and so on and

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so on, what is the implicit horizon of understanding?”19 We should thus

resist every impulse to accept the problem as it is presented to us in an effort
to find better solutions—the task is rather to find better questions. What
we witness in the first two accounts is not false solutions to a so-called real
problem, but rather a false problem.)
Zizek, in responding to accounts of the economic collapse, states that
“the central task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose a
narrative which will place the blame for the meltdown not on the global
capitalist system as such, but on secondary and contingent deviations (overly
lax legal regulations, the corruption of big financial institutions, and so
on).”20 He continues to explain that,while today we are so often solicited
to escape our “external” symbolic roles and social responsibilities by retreating
to the inner sanctuary of “who we really are,” this process of contrasting
the inner self with one’s objective actions and social relations is ideology in
its most distilled form. “The first lesson of psychoanalysis,” Zizek states,
“is that this ‘richness of inner life’ is fundamentally fake: it is a screen, a
false distance, whose function is, as it were, to save my appearance, to render
palpable (accessible to my imaginary narcissism) my true social-symbolic
identity.”21 In this sense, the story we tell ourselves about the “sincerity” of
our actions and the personal motivations that provoked them is precisely
where we should locate the falsity of the situation; the truth lies in our
objective actions, not in how we symbolically account for what we do. Zizek
illustrates this point beautifully when he critiques The Lives of Others, another
Oscar-winning film:

Like so many other films depicting the harshness of Communist regimes,

The Lives of Others misses their true horror. How so? First, what sets the film’s
plot in motion is the corrupt minister of culture, who wants to get rid of the
top German Democratic Republic (GDR) playwright, Georg Dreyman, so
he can pursue unimpeded an affair with Dreyman’s partner, the actress Christa-
Maria. In this way, the horror that was inscribed into the very structure of
the East German system is relegated to a mere personal whim. What’s lost is
that the system would be no less terrifying without the minister’s personal corrup-
tion, even if it were run by only dedicated and “honest” bureaucrats.22

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Zizek is claiming that, in these situations, explanations that rely on

personal pathology are not strong enough; by reducing the horror of the
GDR to individual explanations, you ignore the horror that is built into
the very structure of the situation. Here, Zizek flips Marx’s famous notion
of fetishization (i.e., what people think is only a relationship between objects
is really a relationship between people) on its head and states that, in contem-
porary capitalism, the objective relations between things appear as a
“pseudo-personalized” relation between people.23
What, then, is missing in the interpretations of the crisis put forth by
Inside Job and FCIC? There is a single moment in each analysis where the
narrative unknowingly exposes its inherent limit (or, what is excluded by the
question “who is responsible?”). In Inside Job, this occurs early in the film,
when it emphasizes the fall from “real” to “abstract” capitalism, and when
one of the commentators, Charles Morris (author of The Two Trillion Dollar
Meltdown), mentions that a friend of his in the 1970s needed a second job
because he could not live off of a bond trader’s salary. By 1986, he was
making millions of dollars and thought (foolishly) it was because he was
smart.24 This anecdote is used to illustrate the dramatic transition from the
honest “goods and services capitalism” to the wild, speculative and corrupt
“financial capitalism.” However, the truth of his statement (that what his
friend thought was his personal genius was really just an expression of
external irrational forces) betrays the entire spirit of the film. This brings us
to the second truth, which occurs in the opening lines of the FCIC report
and the simple question: “how did it come to pass that in 2008 our nation
was forced to choose between two stark and painful alternatives?”25 It is
through crisis that we obtain a negative illustration of the first example that
the irrationality of capitalism can be experienced not only as genius and
prosperity, but also as catastrophe. These two occurrences illustrate that
once capitalism becomes embedded in our political imagination to the
degree that it can no longer even be perceived as a limit,26 the only option
is the transubstantiation of the problematic ethic into human form. This is
an interesting twist on Feuerbach’s famous thesis that religion is nothing
more than the projection of human hopes and ambitions onto “God,” and
these hopes then become displaced in the sense that whatever is attributed

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to God is subsequently deprived from ourselves (i.e., God is perfect and

we, therefore, are imperfect; He is infinite while we are finite etc.).27 Instead
of projecting our human potential, Inside Job and the FCIC report project
the “evils” that objectively exist in the logic and structure of capitalism onto
either “human nature” or a few insidious individuals (and, in both cases, the
state becomes the redeemer in either the manifestation of parental authority
or as superego). Brought together, these two moments portray a funda-
mental truth of our economic system: that capitalism contains a remainder
that cannot be accounted for by psychological explanations or assumptions
about human nature.
What Inside Job and the FCIC report obfuscate is that the “scandalous”
elements surrounding the crisis have grown out of, and in fidelity to, the
underwriting logic of the capitalist system. The term “burden” can be used
to describe these structural imperatives and constraints because it perhaps
best encapsulates the complex, and somewhat contradictory, ways that our
personal and political lives relate to capitalism: burden contains a sense of
reward, but not without obligation; consent, but not uncoupled from
coercion; and, most importantly, contingency amidst structural limitations
(or, logic without teleology). It is through Zizek’s theoretical perspective
that one should view the central thesis of Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin’s
work in political economy, which is that states and markets mutually consti-
tute each other.28 To describe this dynamic where the political is separate yet
intertwined with the economic, Panitch and Gindin appropriate the well-
worn concept “relative autonomy”:

The role of the state in this respect is not merely a reactive response to contra-
dictions emanating from the process of accumulation. Capitalist states have
developed sophisticated measures for promoting and orchestrating capital
accumulation, and for anticipating and limiting future problems. It is in
these terms that we should conceptualize the ‘autonomy’of the capitalist state:
not as being autonomous from capitalist classes or the economy, but rather
in having capacities to act on behalf of the system as a whole (autonomy),
while their dependence on the success of overall accumulation for their own
legitimacy and reproduction nevertheless leaves those capacities bounded
(relative).29

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This puts forth a radically different relationship between the state and
the market than the one presented by Inside Job and the FCIC report. To
differentiate between these two conceptions, a crude analogy might suffice:
state intervention should not conjure up an image of the government as a
bull rider who slaps on a pair of chaps, straddles the beast called capitalism,
and pulls on the reigns to steer it toward prosperous and peaceful pastures;
instead, it is something closer to the stable boy who, in order to earn his
living, feeds the beast when it is hungry, clears territory for it to stampede
and graze, and then cleans up its mess. The analogy holds to the degree that
it illustrates that states and markets cannot exist apart from each other, and
that each one’s capacity to act is constructed in relationship to the other; the
health and happiness of the stable boy is connected inextricably with the
overall health and vitality of the beast in question, and vice versa.
If one accepts this perspective, it situates the entire neoliberal period in
alternate conceptual coordinates. First, it clarifies that markets are not
circumventing the state, but rather are penetrating deeper into social
relations through state intervention. Panitch and Gindin describe this
dynamic as follows:

The idea that states had withdrawn from the economy amidst the global-
ization of capitalism was a neoliberal ideological myth, as states in the
developed capitalist countries at the centre of global finance pumped more
money into the banks, while they ensured that in the developing countries
crises were generally used to impose financial and market discipline on their
populations.30

No longer do states and markets compose a simple binary that puts the
paternal state in opposition to the impulsively juvenile market (a dichotomy
that becomes unstable only with the appearance of subversive “double
agents,” or systematic deregulation stemming from bad ideas). Second, this
permits a theorization of neoliberalism that does not define it as an epoch
characterized by the ideological victory of Ronald Reagan and his free market
practitioners, nor by unscrupulous businessmen who had penetrated the
halls of government, but rather as “a response to the unsustainability of the
earlier period for capitalism.”31 Defining neoliberalism in this way is not

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meant to ignore or downplay the severity or importance of deregulation

stemming from the late 1970s; instead, it is to emphasize that deregulation
was less determined by neoliberal ideas (be they dubious or merely mistaken)
than by “a series of pragmatic decisions, usually driven by the exigencies of
the moment, to remove barriers to financial dynamics that had already
gathered decisive momentum within the old form of regulation.”32 The
consequence of this realization—that neoliberalism is more about pragmatic
decisions related to the imperatives and obstacles of accumulation, rather
than any ideological doctrine—rids the neoliberal debate of the remaining
dregs of economic nostalgia, since returning to a more innocent form of
capitalism would merely reintroduce the previous set of contradictions. If
the Left insists on defining neoliberalism as an independent scandal, it has
no choice but to give this political movement the connotation of a regret-
table addendum that can be easily edited out of the narrative of capitalism.
This definition of neoliberalism can also advance a deeper contextual-
ization of financialized capital within the larger functioning of the economy.
Parallelling its binary discussion of states and markets, Inside Job strikes a
false dichotomy between “real” productive capitalism and “abstract” finan-
cial capitalism that masks the ways in which they are inextricable linked.
When we view the evolution of markets within a historic context, it is diffi-
cult to ignore the degree to which the financialization of capital was accepted
and encouraged because it had become “not only functional to, but also
essential for, the domestic and global expansion of the capital involved in
producing goods and nonfinancial services.”33 Not only is financial capital
integral to the workings of the whole, but its very components (risk and
speculation) are the necessary fibres that constitute capitalism as such. As
Zizek puts it, the “paradox of capitalism is that you cannot throw out the
dirty water of financial speculation while keeping the healthy baby of real
economy.”34 Portraying financial capitalism only as unnecessary and exces-
sive deviations—labelling it parasitic, rentier etc.—obscures the fact that it
was an integral development within the proper function of capitalism, which
implicitly posits a “burden-free” capitalism that either existed in the past
or could possibly develop sometime in the future.

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The repetition of this false dichotomy between abstract and real capitalism
similarly infects progressive debates surrounding the successive bailout plans.
The problem begins with the continued reliance on symbolizing the bailout
as a “robbery” or “heist,” which serves only to obscure the reciprocal relation-
ship between Wall Street and Main Street.35 This point, as it relates to Guy
Sorman, is expressed hauntingly by Zizek:

The populist slogan ‘Save Main Street, not Wall Street!’ is thus totally
misleading, a form of ideology at its purest: it overlooks the fact that what
keeps Main Street going under capitalism is Wall Street! Tear that Wall down
and Main Street will be flooded with panic and inflation. Guy Sorman, an
exemplary ideologist of contemporary capitalism, is thus indeed correct when
he claims: ‘There is no economic rationale for distinguishing ‘virtual capitalism’
from ‘real capitalism’: nothing real has ever been produced without first being
financed...even in a time of financial crisis, the global benefits of the new finan-
cial markets have surpassed their costs.’36

Sorman is correct precisely because he understands much better than

most Leftists that the relationship of capitalism, the state, and the public is
better described by burden than scandal. What is absent in responses like
that of William Greider of The Nation, whose account of “The AIG Bailout
Scandal” states that “[t]he Federal Reserve proved to be a weak and unreli-
able regulator for the public interest,”37 is the fact that the Federal Reserve
did act in the public interest in the precise sense that public interest cannot
be uncoupled from a healthy economy—and the public interest is currently
tethered to an economy that has just jumped off a cliff. The “real” scandal
is the reality that an attack on Wall Street does become, in the confines of
the capitalist system, an attack on Main Street, which is why the words
“robbery” and “heist” are simply too conservative.
In this context, we should summon Panitch and Gindin’s concept of
“informal empire” to further illustrate how the bailouts represent the burden
of capitalism par excellence. Empire today should be theorized with the
same sense of burden as discussed above: not as the direct outcome of a
round table discussion in some mysterious and hidden fortress, but as the
accumulation of innumerable, small, pragmatic decisions and agreements
guided by the imperative to overcome obstacles that hinder accumulation.

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It is important to distinguish this from previous empires that were defined

by their colonies, military strength, political coercion, and wealth extraction.
When measured against these outmoded forms of imperialism, today’s
informal empire will appear as anti-imperialist because of the inclusive
nature of global capitalism that often assumes the formal equality between
nations. Panitch and Gindin’s description is useful here:

As the domestic separation of the economic and political is extended into

the international domain, it becomes possible to think in terms of an ‘informal’
empire. As other states, for the most part, take on liberal-democratic forms,
and the US comes to oversee global capitalism through these states, a unique
type of imperial political rule emerges.38

In this way, the globalizing aspirations of the new “anti-imperialist”

American empire have effectively rendered irrelevant the question of “inter-
imperial rivalry.” While America may have a privileged position at the centre
of empire, this should not be interpreted according to previous theories of
empire, which, because they oppose states to one another in an antagonistic
way, can conceive of empire only as outside-in. This analysis misses how
various historical circumstances, such as America becoming a global
economic “vortex”39 in the 1970s and 1980s, led to the internationaliza-
tion of American investment, which in turn resulted in states seeking stable
investment back in the United States.
While this globalization of capital is by no means a result of altruistic
motivation, this does not mean that it is only a relationship of dominance.
The deeper integration of state capital into global markets increases the global
responsibilities of each state to its own end (which is tied to capitalism in
general), and since the United States is the only state that developed the
capabilities at specific historical junctures, it is burdened with the mainte-
nance of global capitalism more than others. We should not be shocked then
(like many journalists) upon discovering that the Federal reserve felt compelled
to bail out not only American banks after the crisis, but also those in Germany,
France, and Belgium.40 None of this, however, should suggest a diminished
role of the state; state power is necessary to perform critical functions in
order for capitalism to exist, which is precisely why the informal empire does
not challenge statehood, but works through the legal equality of states.
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Amidst numerous proclamations that the era of empire was over, the
crisis, like a puff of smoke illuminating rays of light, made visible both the
power and burden of American empire. Panitch and Gindin’s 2004 claim
that the “American empire is no longer concealed”41 has never been truer,
and to which we can add that it is exactly through its “nakedness” that it
functions. This, however, should suggest anything but a weak or more
amiable empire: the degree of internalization that runs through each state
and individual person has made empire far more authoritative and hence
difficult to decolonize. A parallel can be drawn to an interview in which
Zizek points out the difference between a “totalitarian” father and a
“postmodern” father.42 The totalitarian father says “I don’t care if you like
it but you are going to Grandma’s house” while the postmodern father says,
“You don’t have to go, but don’t you know how much your grandma loves
you and how much we would all appreciate it if you came?” Here, Zizek
states that, despite the illusion of free choice, the postmodern request holds
even more authority than the totalitarian one because now not only does the
child have to go to grandma’s, but has to like it as well. The new informal
empire is more authoritative in the same sense—not only do independent
states have to conform to a global order, but they also have to like it (or, in
other words, in order to be succeed in the emerging global economy, states
must internally promote the logic of empire).
All of this is to say that when theorizing crisis within capitalism, we must
be careful not to obscure the crisis that is capitalism. After all, if capitalist
crisis is defined as a disruption in the process of accumulation, does the
term “crisis” not merely express the spilling over of a particular experience
that billions of people face every day of their lives? And does not this “crisis”
of capitalism extend beyond the traditional confines of the specific burden
expressed by the signifier “proletariat”? To the great mass of progressive
critiques that view capitalism through the lens of the diabolical motivations
of individuals or groups who exploit their positions in power in order to
increase accumulation, this notion that capital may carry a burden to the
capitalist seems strange, if not heretical. However, is it so different from
Marx’s claim that even the capitalist is alienated in capitalism? And does
this realization not clear the path for a more profound critique of capitalism?

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Far from stressing the unrestrained agency of elites to execute their desires,
this approach emphasizes the fact that there is an inherent block between
desire and effect—and the economic imperatives and obligations of our
current situation necessarily mediate this gap.
This provides a more comprehensive critique of not only the long list of
economically motivated atrocities, but also of the efforts to redefine
capitalism by inscribing markets and corporate leaders with alternative
ethical content (green, fair-trade, philanthropist, organic, sustainable etc.).
This is not meant to diminish (nor suggest an inevitability of ) the cruel,
horrific, and often criminal acts that have been committed by individuals,
corporations, and states. It is, however, meant to contextualize them by
noting that they did not originate spontaneously out of a disturbed mind
or some trans-historical nature, but arose as pragmatic solutions to questions
posed by the requirements of the capitalist system. Nor is it to disguise the
fact that particular states and individuals benefit from these decisions, but
it is to emphasize that these consequences—spoils for some and suffering
for others—should not be attributed primarily to ideological commitments
or malicious intentions (we can easily imagine a scenario in which a person’s
inner-most desires and values may run completely contrary to the impact
of a company that person works for or a product they produce). This is also
how we should deal with the attempts to inscribe the capitalist system with
more cordial values. The radical critique of the philanthropic activities of
Bill Gates,43 for example, is not that he is secretly manipulating the masses
by using these charitable endeavours for increased private accumulation
(advertising for the Microsoft brand etc.), but that he may in fact want to
solve issues of poverty; however, it is precisely this goal which is impossible
to accomplish within the capitalist coordinates.44 Whether these desires are
played out in the register of charity, or relegated to the logic of markets,
the medium will always betray the message. When we subtract capitalism
from personal pathology and principled desire, we are left with nothing but
the residue of burden.

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Notes
1. A transcript of this speech can be viewed at <http://www.oscars.org/press/transcripts/text/
speech_docfeature.html>.
2. As cited in L. Panitch, M. Konings, S. Gindin, and S. Aquanno, “The Political Economy of
the Subprime Crisis” in American Empire and the Political Economy of Global Finance (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 288.
3. Inside Job, Charles Ferguson, (director), (USA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2011).
4. My transcription and italics.
5. Inside Job.
6. Inside Job.
7. Apart from the other problems of this argument, the film fails to contextualize this figure.
The median income for American men in 1969 was $6,430. See <http://www2.census.gov/
prod2/popscan/p60-070.pdf> (accessed on 9 June 2011).
8. “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the
Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States” (Washington, DC: National
Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, 2011),
p. xvi.
9. “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report,” p. xvii.
10. “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report,” p. xvii.
11. “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report,” p. xix.
12. “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report,” p. xviii.
13. “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report,” p. xxii.
14. “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report,” p. xxii. My italics.
15. “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report,” p. xxii.
16. “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report,” p. xxvii.
17. “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report,” p. xxiii.
18. “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report,” p. xxiii.
19. Zizek! Astra Taylor (director) (USA: Zeitgeist Films, 2005).
20. S. Zizek, First as Tragedy then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), p. 19.
21. Zizek, First as Tragedy, p. 40.
22. S. Zizek, “The Dreams of Others” in In These Times (18 May 2007), <http://www.inthese-
times.com/article/3183/> (accessed on 18 April 2011).
23. Zizek, First as Tragedy, p. 141.
24. Zizek traces the similar dynamic (that is, the personalization of the external logic of capitalism)
to the Frankfurt School, which first noted that “when global market relations began to exert
their full domination, making the individual producer’s success or failure dependent on
market cycles totally beyond his control—the notion of a charismatic ‘business genius’
reasserted itself in the ‘spontaneous capitalist ideology,’ attributing the success or failure of a
businessman to some mysterious je ne sais quoi possessed.” Zizek, First as Tragedy, p. 141.
25. “Inquiry Report,” p. xvi.
26. The inscription on the campus of York University, “a fish only recognizes water when it
discovers air,” expresses this sentiment perfectly.
27. L. Feuerbach. The Essence of Christianity (York: Prometheus Books, 1957).
28. For this paper, I will be utilizing this thematic arc as it is presented in their work from the
2004 article Global Capitalism and American Empire to the 2010 book (also authored by G.
Albo) In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, though this
trajectory can certainly be found in their earlier work.
29. L. Panitch and S. Gindin, “Superintending Global Capitalism” in NLR, (September-October
2005), p. 102.
30. L. Panitch and S. Gindin, “Capitalist Crisis and the Crisis This Time” in Socialist Register
2011: The Crisis This Time 47 (2010), p. 11.
31. G. Albo, S. Gindin, and L. Panitch, In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and
Left Alternatives (CA: PM Press, 2010), p. 126.

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32. Panitch et al., “Subprime,” p. 256.

33. Panitch and Gindin, “Capitalist Crisis,” p. 10.
34. Zizek, First as Tragedy, p. 15.
35. Michael Moore and Naomi Klein are two such examples of this larger trend. Moore calls the
bailout the “biggest robbery in history” and Klein similarly labels it a “robbery” which was
“the Bush Administrations final Heist.” See http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mikes-
letter/the-rich-are-staging-a-coup-this-morning-a-message-from-michael-moore and
<http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/11/real-change-depends-stopping-bailout-profi-
teers>.
36. Zizek, First as Tragedy, p. 14. My Italics.
37. W. Greider, “The AIG Bailout Scandal” in The Nation (6 August 2010), <http://www.the
nation.com/article/153929/aig-bailout-scandal?page=0,3>.
38. Panitch and Gindin, “Superintending,” p. 112.
39. Panitch and Gindin, “Capitalist Crisis,” p. 11.
40. See for example Gretchen Morgenson, “The Bank Run We Knew So Little About” in New
York Times 2 (2011), <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/business/03gret.html?_r=1
(accessed on 30 July 2011).
41. L. Panitch and S. Gindin, “Global Capitalism and American Empire,” Socialist Register 2004:
The New Imperial Challenge 40 (2004), p. 1.
42. See Zizek! Astra Taylor, (director).
43. See <http://www.gatesfoundation.org>.
44. This line of reasoning need not be limited to issues relating to the distribution of wealth.
The same could be argued for capitalism’s insufficiency in dealing with ecological concerns
like global warming, issues of multiculturalism etc.

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