There is a specter haunting political economy. It is the specter of finance. Just when it would seem that the truth of the system would disclose itself in the full light of day, that the irrationalities of capitalism would allow us to stare clear eyed at it, that the occult would become transparent, eerie shadows creep over our field of vision. Finance has been so described—not merely fictitious but false, not merely speculative but parasitical, not merely epiphenomenal but unreal. As those who have and would benefit most from crisis seek to declare it past, the magical moment when the truth of the whole might be demystified and revealed seems also to slip away, if not to return us to a normalcy of events but of thought. But the events as such, no matter how horrendous for so many, have not necessarily engendered the kind of rethinking that would enable us to examine extant critical categories so that they might become more illuminating. Crisis, which promised an audience for a renewed skepticism toward capitalism itself turned out to do bad things for similar reasons. Cycles went around, bubbles formed and burst, profits continued to be squeezed from properly hedged risks and productivity gains from a diminished work force.

It was, after all, capital’s crisis, and as its great communicator, Ronald Reagan quipped, “there you go again.” So conceived, what suddenly occasioned attention to a critical standpoint just as quickly takes it away, as capital returns to its throne. And finance, rather than being something that might challenge and open that very perspective, that might suggest what is novel in the present so that due attention would be paid, instead is replayed as the familiar morality tale. Self-maligning during boom times, the state would step up to the plate and throw the book at those who had gone too far, restore liquidity to those gushers whose wells had run dry, and restore the proper order of wealth matters by judicious rules of law. The watchdog that had shuffled this particular deck would now assume the role of dealer as well. Regulation would make the state itself a fair trader, and make the old game fun again. Whether through regulation as a final settling of accounts as to what caused the crisis, or something more ambitious as to what its outcomes might portend, perhaps the time has come to stop giving all the attention to capital and place the emphasis on labor, to reverse the polarities of what has value and who can speak, but also to try to understand what politics issue from the crisis of labor bound up in these financial tremors. Doing so would compel reconsideration of the knowledge that was supposed to make finance work, but that might also disclose what it means for knowledge to be unmade and finance created otherwise.

Of all the many things said about the meltdowns and tantrums that began their din in 2007 and could be felt round the world since, this was a crisis of knowledge where it was supposed to rule. These were, after all, the smartest guys in the room, and they had the billions to prove it–or perhaps the money passed as a quotient of intelligence. If so, what was once smart quickly became dumb, and dumbness could be measured with the same exceptionalism that once justified wealth, the venality, corruption, excess of a few had brought down the great estates of greed. Alan Greenspan, who had long used his regulatory authority to disavow how important it was to monetary expansion, belatedly admitted a collapse of the “whole intellectual edifice” of risk management that he had relied on (Andrews), but also removed the crisis from thought itself as a flaw in human nature, an inability to master the equilibrium that the invisible hand extended to self-interested investors. Then Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson asked Congress for hundreds of billions of dollars, justified but not explained in a terse two-page memo. His successor Tim Geithner continued to procure huge sums for banks with the explanation that they needed it or else we would all suffer if credit did not continue to flow. Two years latter, the banks had increased their reserves from $30 to $830 billion, the investment houses that had been consolidated by the collapse of their peers had billions for bonuses, and top hedge fund managers were sitting pretty, but the needed bailout funds remained in the coffers, unexplained.