TOAs the opening of Cop26 approaches, on October 31, in Glasgow, there were many initiatives proposing, like the Dasgupta report (“Economics of Biodiversity”, February 2, 2021), to measure the book value of the environment, climate, biodiversity – in short, “nature” – in order to make economic players – businesses, consumers, public authorities – aware of the financial weight of their destruction. We will not be able to avoid collapse if we do not measure the cost, without “green accounting”: this claim seems to have become the watchword of the current economy, and the policies that go with it.
Fabian Muniesa, research director at the Center for Sociology of Innovation (Ecole des Mines Paris Tech), sees a troubling paradox in this: “To defend nature against capitalism, it would therefore have to be transformed into capital! ” In a collective work, co-edited with Kean Birch, Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism (MIT Press, 2020, untranslated), this sociologist shows that the very criticisms addressed to speculative, predatory financial capitalism do not ultimately emerge from the “political cosmology” that the domination of finance in technoscientific capitalism – that of companies in the digital, biotechnologies, big data, fintech (technological companies in the world of finance) – has, in fact, forged.
Using the tools of Anglo-Saxon “cultural studies” to explore the vocabularies, rituals and moral legitimations of actors in business and finance, Fabian Muniesa shows that the objective of companies is not so much to “commodify “Our behaviors (like Google or Facebook), our genes (like Big Pharma), our data (like Amazon) by buying and selling them, than transforming them into assets (” assets’ in English, hence the term ” assetization »), To hoard them in order to derive from this heritage a future rent rather than an immediate profit – that drawn from advertising for example.
New “ecological-compatible” forms
In this regard, “sustainable finance”, corporate “social responsibility”, “crowdfunding”, “impact investing”, opening up governance to “stakeholders” are the new forms “ ecologico-compatible ”of finance. They do not depart from the moral ideal summarized by the pervasiveness of the metaphor of “value creation”, the keystone of the discourse of capital on itself: the role of the free, enlightened and rational investor is to allocate capital optimally in order to increase the wealth and well-being of society – even if it means correcting the markets by regulation when they prove unable to fulfill this role, but it is then a matter of get back on the right track so that they can exercise their “natural function”.
You have 32.46% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.