Fabio Mattioli

Dark Finance

Illiquidity and Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

"This book describes the importance of finance and real estate for the emergence of authoritarian regimes. Through an ethnographic study of the pseudo-oligarchs, failed European businessmen, frustrated managers, and unpaid workers that populate Macedonia's construction sector, Fabio Mattioli illustrates how financialization results in illiquidity, rather than cheap money. Mattioli's manuscript describes the political relations that emerge from restricting access to cash, a political-economic juncture that has received little attention in the literature on financialization, but that is increasingly recognized as a critical research agenda. Guiding readers through the genesis and contradictions of a landscape of political oppression and financial failure, the book details Macedonian workers' and managers' struggle to recover meaningful social lives as they become more deeply entangled in the web of illiberal politics"--

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 248
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. Juni 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 157mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 522g
• ISBN-13: 9781503611658
• ISBN-10: 1503611655
• Artikelnr.: 57167730

Autorenporträt

Fabio Mattioli is a Lecturer of Social Anthropology at the University of Melbourne.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: The Making of Illiquidity in Macedonia
chapter abstract
From stocks to illnesses, financialization is at the core of contemporary
life. But what is financialization? How can it be studied ethnographically?
And how does it relate to the rise of global authoritarianism? This chapter
introduces the book's main arguments and situates them within the debates
surrounding financial expansion. Rather than a function of calculative
devices or liquid capital, the chapter describes financialization as a
multi-scalar political process and offers an example of how to interrogate
ethnographically the different relationships that generate financial
expansion.
1The Magic of Building
chapter abstract
Until 2015, Macedonia's authoritarian regime received international
coverage largely in relation to the Skopje 2014 project and the hundreds of
new buildings and statues that celebrated a fictional Hellenic and
neo-baroque past. Chapter 1 describes how Skopje 2014 constituted a
mask-obscuring shady businessmen who colluded with former secret agents,
plotted to ruin former socialist companies, and invested in a wealth of
real estate developments in Skopje. The chapter describes the financial
networks that are at the core of Skopje's construction expansion, their
connection to the socialist era's need for foreign currency, and their
crucial role in supporting Gruevski's political ambitions. Following the
trajectory of these networks through the postsocialist transition, the
chapter shows how the built environment has become a magical device through
which dirty money is made clean, and ambiguous power relations are recast
as a national identity.
2Peripheral Financialization
chapter abstract
Postsocialist-transition Macedonia is a country with few natural resources,
high unemployment, and few value-added industries. Where did the money for
Skopje 2014 and other construction-related public investments come from?
Chapter 2 details the international conditions that favored and structured
the inflow of capital in Macedonia, focusing on two pillars of financial
expansion at the periphery: foreign direct investment (FDI) and aid. It
describes why international investors and agencies decided to provide funds
to the Macedonian government despite the lack of credit that characterized
the global economy. The chapter also follows the peregrinations of a group
of Italian businessmen who tried to escape global illiquidity by
intercepting international investments in Macedonia. Their stories portray
the domestic, rent-seeking structures put in place by Gruevski's rule and
illustrate how an increasingly unequal and subdivided European Union
generates financial peripheries and supports authoritarian regimes.
3Forced Credit and Kompenzacija
chapter abstract
How did international loans translate into domestic power for Gruevski's
government? Chapter 3 explores the characteristics of Macedonia's domestic
financialization, focusing on the reemergence of in-kind exchanges, known
as kompenzacija, that followed the global financial crisis. Outlining
kompenzacija's postsocialist trajectory and its relation to the Macedonian
banking system, the chapter describes how politically disconnected
companies receive payments in goods they don't want. These objects, such as
apartments or eggs, lose value, thus obligating businesses either to absorb
losses or offload these properties on subcontractors and workers. By
describing the political coercion and financial dispossession that ensues,
the chapter shows that kompenzacija constitutes a form of forced credit
fully integrated into global financial flows. At the periphery of the
European and global financial systems, the need to convert value across
means of payments allows authoritarian regimes to increase their power by
reaching deeply into people's social networks.
4Illiquid Times
chapter abstract
In a landscape punctuated by illiquidity, production is not constant but is
rather subordinated to the rhythms of debt repayment. Chapter 4 focuses on
the disruption of daily routines that takes place once illiquidity makes
manual work almost irrelevant. Based on a fine-grained description of the
actions, rituals, discussions, and pauses that characterize work under
illiquidity, this chapter details the strategies used by workers to regain
agency and meaning. The chapter narrates the poetic resilience of workers
and their capacity to generate spaces for empathy in the interstices of
financial uncertainty. Filled with potential for social transformation, the
tempo of workers' acts, jokes, and conversations does not remain merely
performative. Framed by financial precariousness, their tricky
conversations slide toward opportunism and reduce their moral capacity to
oppose the Gruevski regime.
5Speculative Masculinity
chapter abstract
Illiquidity affects not only workers' self-conception but also their
collective identity. Chapter 5 shows how Macedonian illiquidity generates
gendered paradoxes that dislodge earlier models of work-centered, hegemonic
masculinity despite the regime's insistence on aggressive manhood as a
fundamental component of Macedonian identity. The chapter follows a group
of male Macedonian construction workers as they try to restore patriarchal
authority within their company. Unable to provide for their families,
challenged by economically ascendant ethnic Albanian males, and dislodged
from the nurturing attentions of Macedonian female colleagues, their
failures leave them exhausted. Scorn and mockery emerge as hierarchical
ways to keep male solidarity alive, forcing workers to consume their energy
in containing their microaggression and projecting the regime as their only
anchor.
6Finance and the Pirate State
chapter abstract
Illiquidity is without doubt a process intertwined with Macedonia's
socialist and postsocialist history, intrinsically linked to its
geopolitical marginality. And yet, it also enlightens some of the social
dynamics that fuel authoritarian processes at the global level. This
chapter expands on the insights derived from the Macedonian case,
highlighting the importance of financial paradoxes and predatory
relationships to map out how finance encounters (or emerges from) social
life. Suspended between dreams and exploitation, financialization
delineates a crucial domain of politics.