Importantly, for none of these authors is capitalism merely reducible to the sum of individual actions: a ruling class continues to exist, and they still represent the prime beneficiaries and agents of the system. However, these authors’ approaches help us highlight and contextualize the way financialized capitalism is also rooted in the cultural processes of daily life as never before. If capitalism is elementally a viral or cancerous logic that measures and subjugates the play of social values to the austere logic of economic value, then culture (being the name we give to the endless and limitless negotiation of social values and meanings) is not merely the superstructural ephemera of a “real” economic base. Yet such a perspective does not lose sight of the realities of economic exploitation, nor does it allow us to imagine that the negotiation of values is somehow an autonomous field of activity driven by some mythological concept of “agency” or “resistance.”

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 563