With the 2008 financial crisis, the supposedly sturdy foundation of finance capital shook and nearly crumbled. Millions of working-class Americans saw their wealth, security, and jobs evaporate. Financial institutions got massive bailouts, while a tidal wave of foreclosures and evictions swept the country. The housing crisis in particular flipped the epitome of American stability and middle-class aspiration — the home — into a symbol of predatory financial exploitation. But while the failure of the system did not precipitate a revolt against those responsible, the resulting insecurity, injustice and anger around housing could form the basis for a broader struggle against a new financialized capitalist class.

This struggle can only come to fruition through organization, but the Left’s tactics have been wanting. We publish, we hold panels, we sell newspapers, we put on conferences, we create art. We desperately try to build a left discourse in a hostile environment. This instinct is a reasonable one in an era of neoliberal hegemony where all facets of life are reduced to the market. Meanwhile, our reliance on discourse has obscured the vital understanding that, in order to build a socialist movement, the contradictions of capitalism must be felt and experienced in the fabric of daily life.

As Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward explain, “Workers experience the factory, the speeding rhythm of the assembly line, the foreman, the spies and guards, the owner and the paycheck. They do not experience monopoly capitalism.” Homeowners experience the paperwork, the bank manager, the police and the lawyers, the phone calls, the fear of homelessness, and the eviction. They do not experience finance capital, therefore few of them embrace a critique of finance capital. We can only analyze and transform hegemonic ideology through what Antonio Gramsci calls a “war of position.”  But while we have identified that we are indeed in a war of position, the Left largely fails to grasp what it means to fight that war.