Rated Agency: Selected Bibliography
The hegemony of finance compels a new orientation for everyone and everything: companies care more about the moods of their shareholders than about longstanding commercial success; governments subordinate citizen welfare to appeasing creditors; and individuals are concerned less with immediate income from labor than appreciation of their capital goods, skills, connections, and reputations.
That firms, states, and people depend more on their ratings than on the product of their activities also changes how capitalism is resisted. For activists, the focus of grievances shifts from the extraction of profit to the conditions under which financial institutions allocate credit. While the exploitation of employees by their employers has hardly been curbed, the power of investors to select investees — to decide who and what is deemed creditworthy — has become a new site of social struggle.
Capital vol. 1, by Karl Marx
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"What chance has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them." -Marx, Grundrisse (Also a Penguin Classic)
The image on the front cover of the Penguin Classics editions of Marx's Capital Volume I comes from Adolph von Menzel's painting "The Modern Cyclops". The image is fitting, not only in how it captures the harrowing danger of mass industrial labor, but also in how such awe-striking powers can breed their own kind of mythology. Part of Marx's great work describes the rise of massive machines taking on the features of "an animated monster", confronting workers who seem to be at the mercy of the machine rather than the machine's masters. A crucial intervention by Marx in this book is to pierce through mystifying forms of economic understanding that naturalize such abasement of human beings in capitalist production. Instead, he offers workers a critical analysis of the economic system that binds them and an opening to seize hold of the forces that subject them. —Conor
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