My suggestion here is that we entertain a thought experiment that would see us imagine the most recent round of financialization as based, in part, in the resistance of working people to capital. It is not a very promising form of resistance, at least in terms of contributing to a brighter future. Since the Second World War, people and constituencies have embraced finance in multiple ways as a means to gain a tragic and ironic agency over the material conditions of their lives, as imposed by capital. … As Brett Benjamin (2007, 55–88) illustrates, revolutionary figures of the third world resistance engaged with transnational finance as a form of resistance to formal colonialism, as a strategy towards autonomous national agency (see also Haiven 2013a; Khagram 2004). While this might have been a tragic and ironic miscalculation, we should not discount this defining moment of post-war global political economy: finance here appeared as a means to break free of colonial relations, or at least renegotiate them on different terms – at least, in the absence of duly deserved reparations from colonizing countries, and in the absence of indigenous forms of modernized manufacturing, scientific and technological infrastructure and expertise.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 514