Total Commitment

This chapter explores the strategies used in finance-dominated capitalism to ensure worker compliance with company demands, using mechanisms of fear, hope of external reward, self-evacuation, and the convergence of employee desires with that of the company. It will contrast these strategies, point by point, with the way in which commitment to God is related to more mundane commitments. Attention is drawn to the way Christian commitment imitates at a critical remove the enterprise self of contemporary capitalism.

Chained to the Past

This chapter considers the way in which persons, as both workers and debtors, are encouraged to relate to past decisions that constrain present action within finance-dominated capitalism. The presumed inevitability of this way of relating to the past is undercut by appealing to Christian forms of self-repudiation in conversion and to the ruptured narratives that go along with them.

Nothing but the Present

With special attention to the effects of scarcity, this chapter investigates the causes and consequences of a preoccupation with the present in the lives of both workers and the indebted poor, and of the short-termism typical of finance-dominated capitalism. It lays out the different reasons for Christian attention to an urgent present, along with the different effects of the Christian understanding of the present.

The New Spirit of Capitalism and a Christian Response

This chapter discusses Max Weber’s approach to the influence of Christian beliefs and practices on economic behavior, and ties it to the sort of comparison of forms of ‘spirituality’ offered by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his Collège de France lectures. The chapter explores the general characteristics of finance-dominated capitalism, especially with reference to derivatives and financial markets. It discusses how finance disciplines other economic organizations, such as states through the issuance of public debt, and non-financial corporations through the priority given to shareholder value. The culture of finance-dominated capitalism is also talked about as a specific form of work ethic. Finally, the chapter outlines the basic shape of the larger argument of the book, concerning the potential for Christianity to counteract contemporary capitalist modes of control.

Another World?

This chapter explores how present and future are collapsed in the evaluation of assets on secondary financial markets such as stock exchanges, and the way efforts are made, by way of derivatives and other tactics typical of finance-dominated capitalism, to limit the potentially disturbing character of an unpredictable future in circumstances of enormous potential volatility. The chapter establishes how Christianity, to the contrary, allows for a future radically different from the present that is not simply compensatory of the present’s failings.

Which World?

This chapter discusses how finance-dominated capitalism encourages one to relate to oneself and the bearing of that on one’s understanding of relations with others. It considers the emphases on individual performance and responsibility in finance-dominated capitalism, the specific forms of competition typical of wage relations and market dynamics, winner-take-all profit mechanisms and herd behavior in financial markets, privatizing tendencies in the provision of public goods, and the shifting of risks onto vulnerable individuals. It contrasts these trends with the general ways that Christianity links one’s relationship with oneself to relations with others.