ABSTRACT
This chapter critically synthesizes Pearce’s Crimes of the Powerful (CotP) and his radical Durkheimianism to theorize the interpellative moral framing of the fiscal sacrifices that have followed the extraordinary bailouts of firms that were key agents in precipitating the global financial crisis. These sacrifices subject people to cuts to public goods, services and hard-won benefits while being couched in a contradictory discourse about the moral necessity of sacrificing for the greater good. Doing so secures accumulation conditions for capitalist enterprises grown frail, reflecting the formation of a “zombie capitalism” with its legions of “living-dead” firms and households. Drawing on Pearce’s theorem that the reproduction of capital requires “continuous effort,” my central contention is that fiscal sacrifices are an expropriative moral-political patch on contradictions in zombie capitalism, generating a primitive accumulation of the future and aiding the reproduction of a capitalism unable to survive on its own.
