Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

Criminogenic Cyber-Capitalism: Paul Virilio, Simulation, and the Global Financial Crisis

  • Published:
Critical Criminology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

The day when virtual reality becomes more powerful than reality will be the day of the big accident.—Paul Virilio.

Accident is statistically inescapable.—Yi-Fu Tuan.

Abstract

This essay is a manifesto expounding the relevance of the critical theory of Paul Virilio to critical criminology. I interpret the global credit crisis as a criminogenic ‘event’, explicable in terms of Virilio’s theory of speed-politics. The trans-national space(s) of globalization are inherently criminogenic. ‘Power crime’ is the criminogenic ‘substance’ of global capitalism. Globalization—intensity, extensity, velocity, and impact—equates with cyber-capitalism, which ensures the operational primacy of simulation. Simulation, the fast moving manipulation of post-reality, causes the ‘disappearance of the real’, which underlines the epistemological crisis that attenuates global economic catastrophe. Simulation equates with the ‘logistics of perception’, which manifests itself through both pure war and speed-politics. Simulation and power crime merge on the level of the criminogenic manipulation of reality, resulting in the ‘accident’ of the global credit crisis. Power crime is the criminogenic medium through which the periodic crises of global capitalism will now occur.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. See below.

  2. An ‘economistic’ ontology, with, of course, a concomitant political catastrophe; ‘The wondrous machine of global revolution [i.e., ‘globalization’] is oscillating out of control, widening the arcs of social and economic instabilities in its wake. The destructive pressures building up within the global system are leading toward an unbearable chaos that, even without a dramatic collapse will likely provoke the harsh, reactionary politics that can shut down the system’ Greider (1997, 316).

  3. A point labored at great length by Greider. ‘The power of global finance includes an extraordinary ability to create its own version of reality and persuade others to believe in it. When investment analysts determine the financial outlook for a company or nation, their portraiture [sic] is based on statistical indicators, market trends and political intelligence—an analysis clearly abstracted from the messy facts of daily life. The financial data seems so concrete and logical, so consistent with orthodox principles of economics, that others are regularly seduced by the markets self-confident assumptions. Governments, press and politicians typically embrace these financial projections and amplify them into a general metaphor of economic progress’ Greider (1997, 259).

  4. Soros’ account touches directly on the vital question over the role that trust plays in economic transactions. The classic discussion is Akerlof (1970).

  5. ‘Freed by deregulation, the banks found new business converting consumer debt into tradeable securities and then selling those securities to the [pension and mutual] funds (or other banks).’ Blackburn (2008, at 67; also 74). See the summary provided by Wark (1994, 200). Published in 1994, Wark’s ‘Site #4: Wall Street, New York City, Planet of Noise’ is an utterly prescient anticipation of the global financial catastrophe of September 2008. Idem, 165–247. In particular, chapter eight, ‘Crash!’, is an early Virilian analysis of the then newly emergent cyber-capitalism. Idem, 205–247.

  6. For the role played by simulation in contemporary critical theory, see Cubitt (2001).

  7. In this paper I will be focusing on Virilio’s earlier writings where he develops the seminal notions of speed-politics and pure war. In my opinion, these are the Virilian concepts of the most direct relevance to critical criminology. Virilio’s later work on phenomenology, while of great interest to me, are not of the greatest importance here. However, I hope to visit the applicability of neo-phenomenology to critical criminology at a later time.

  8. ‘We lose, in simulation, the grounds of our metaphysical certainty concerning the difference between the real and the abstraction, the real and the representation, the real and knowledge about it. The difference is the crucial thing that we have lost, since without that difference that separates the two poles of any of these systems of truth, picturing or science, we cannot distinguish one from the other. This is the profound implication of the indifference of simulation, its assimilation of all separations into an indefinite cloud of self-generating models’ Cubitt (2001, 50).

  9. See Wark on this point: ‘The “economic real” is in some quite fundamental ways, elusive, ineffable, unknowable. To assume that there is a “true” price or set of prices at which buyers and sellers will match up perfectly and the market will clear, assumes away everything dynamic and changing in the market. It assumes away time itself. To assume that there is a knowable correspondence between prices and the value of the goods and services they represent assumes that one has access to a knowledge of the movements of the economy which is independent of the institutions and discourses that make it manifest by representing it…The vector [of finance capitalism] feeds information into the market, but the “efficiency” of the market’s response depends on being able to interpret that information in an appropriate way’ Wark (1994 176 and 185; see also, 181–182).

  10. A notion that Greider intuitively grasps in a non-theoretical manner. ‘The world, one could say, was now divided by three different planes of consciousness in terms of how people thought about time. The global financial market and its electronic participants traded continuously around the clock and no longer paused to recognize day or night. Most people in modern society measured time in segments of hours and days, weeks or months. But the primitive [sic] among us, still existing in many places, continued to think and function according to the ancient cycles of seasons’ Greider (1997, 349).

  11. In Wark’s own account, the ‘vector’ of high speed Finance Capitalism ‘responded enthusiastically to immaterial [information] technology, making one suspect a close affinity between the abstract social force that is money and the principles of the new technologies…Now, the vector and capital are complicit in this, but the vector and capital are not identical. Capital drives the vector further and harder, forcing its technologies to innovate, but at the same time it tries to commodify the fruits of this development. The vector may have other properties, values that escape the restriction of its abstract potential to the commodity form…the vector and capital are not the same thing…and the vector is not always a functional tool for capital’ Wark (1994, 168, 171 and 222). For a similar themed account, see Sassen (2006, chapter seven), ‘Digital Networks, State Authority, and Politics’, 323–376. Once established, ‘expanded decentralization and simultaneous integration enabled by global digital networks produce threshold effects. Today’s global electronic capital market can be distinguished from earlier forms of international financial markets due to some of the technical properties of the new [information and communication technologies], notably the orders of magnitude that can be achieved through decentralized simultaneous access and interconnectivity and through the softwaring of increasingly complex instruments.’ Idem, 376. Contrast Wark and Sassen with Brenner’s tepid account of information technology which reduces the whole of digitalization to yet one more opportunity for over-investment and financial speculation. Brenner (2002, 223–229). As is typical for a neo-Marxist, Brenner is unable to conceive of technology apart from the commodity form.

  12. For much of what follows, see Wilson (2009b).

  13. For the flattening of the profitability of the world-economy, see Brenner (2006, xxi, xxii, 1–9, 101). For the absolute decline in real wages, see idem, xxviii, 2–3, 193, 201, 208–211.

  14. This forms the essence of Arrighi’s critique of Brenner’s orthodox neo-Marxist account of the credit crisis: ‘Despite Brenner’s characterization of the late twentieth-century long downturn as a situation of over-production, what he actually describes is a variant of the kind of over-accumulation of capital that, in Smith’s theory of economic development, drives down the rate of profit and brings economic expansion to an end’ Arrighi (2007, 165–166).

  15. This transition must not be simplistically mistaken as a movement away from the ‘true’ and towards the ‘false’. As Baudrillard has argued, industrial value, which broadly corresponds to a form of use-value, is itself a form of simulacra; ‘Up to this point, we have considered production and labour as potential, as force and historical process, as a generic activity: an energetic-economic myth proper to modernity. We must ask ourselves whether production is not rather an intervention, a particular phase, in the order of signs—whether it is basically only one episode in the line of simulacra, that episode of producing an infinite series of potentially identical beings (object-signs) by means of technics’ Baudrillard (1993, 55).

  16. See below.

  17. To ‘save phenomena is to save their speed of apperception’ Virilio (1999, 45). Cubitt rightly places the cinematic—which connotes simulation—at the center of Virilio’s oeuvre; idem, 54–64, passim. First and foremost, Virilio is a ‘simulationist’; speed is the medium of simulation.

  18. For these technologies of ‘de-realization’, see Virilio (1989, 79–89). ‘Ours are cinematic societies. They are not only societies of movement, but of the acceleration of the very movement. And hence, of the shortening of distances in terms of time, but, I would also add, of the relation to reality’ Armitage (2000, 27).

  19. See also Virili (2005b at 78). ‘Many inexperienced military observers focus their attention on the destructiveness of new weapons. While awesome power can be delivered, sharpening the point of the spear is really secondary to locating the enemy. For decades war games have proven that it is more important to improve the military’s sensor systems and command and control processes than it is to increase firepower. Once an adversary is located, we know how to destroy him. This philosophy has driven the research and development budget’ Alexander (2003, 41).

  20. See Alexander (2003 41–47).

  21. On the complex ‘triangulation’ between the New Deal, Bretton Woods, and U.S. hegemony, Helleiner (1994).The centrality of ‘economic statecraft’ to international relations is ordinarily overlooked by mainstream economists and international relations scholars. For an extensive consideration of international economic policy as a continuation of ‘national geo-economic strategy’ by other means, see Hudson (2003). ‘One lesson of U.S. [hegemonic] experience is that the national diplomacy, embodied in what now is called the Washington Consensus, is not simply an extension of business drives. It has been shaped by overriding concerns for world power (euphemized as national security) and economic advantage as perceived by American strategists quite apart from the profit motives of private investors.’ Idem, 1. For Bretton Woods as the mechanism facilitating the transition from U.K to U.S. hegemony, see Eichengreen (1996 91–92).

  22. See also, Hudson (2003, 12–14). It is important to note that the US was far from the only nation to do so; the shift towards ‘suicide’ is a phenomenon that encompasses the whole of the developed world. In his magisterial study on the post-war Japanese economic ‘miracle’, Chalmers Johnson places military Keynesianism at the centre of Japans success. Between 1911 and 1961, 'the Japanese Economy remained on a war footing. The goal changed from military to economic victory, but the Japanese people could not have worked harder, saved more, or innovated more ruthlessly if they had actually been engaged in a war for national survival, as in fact they were. And just as a nation mobilised for war needs a military general staff, so a nation mobilised for economic development needs an economic general staff' Johnson (1982, 241). See also idem, chapter six, 198–241, passim.

  23. For a full discussion of the nature and implications of parapolitics, see the Wilson (2009a).

  24. On the shift in the US economy from manufacturing to finance, see Brenner (2006, 47–50, 155, 227, 267–280, 290). For developmental strategy as a forum for inter-state rivalry, see Chang (2003).

  25. Peter Gowan has labored to demonstrate that the financialization of the world-economy constituted a strategic shift in U.S. hegemony away from ‘direct power’ and towards ‘structural power’ Gowan (1999, 23–38). ‘The Nixon strategy in “liberating” international financial markets was based on the idea that doing so would liberate the American state from succumbing to its economic weaknesses and would strengthen the political power of the American state.’ Idem, 23. Emphasis in the original.

  26. Uneven development occurs not only between economic sectors but between geographical zones. See Agnew (2005, 204–214), for an account of uneven development within the US, between the high-speed ‘global cities’ (New York, Boston, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco) and the low-speed globally disconnected local and regional economies. ‘What is clear is that U.S. cities are at the heart of the emerging U.S. economy. The leading industries in terms of contribution to U.S. GDP growth in the 1990 s have been those in information technology, processing, and telecommunications, on the one hand, and users [of] the products of these industries in finance, insurance, and real estate…on the other.’ Idem, 208.

  27. See also Hudson (2003, 24, 377 and 386).

  28. It was essential for the U.S. to repudiate the gold standard. ‘The key to understanding today’s dollar standard is to see that it has become a debt standard based on U.S. Treasury IOUs, not one of assets in the form of gold bullion’ Hudson (2003, 35). The ‘disappearance’ of the ‘real’ world-economy of the gold standard into the ‘simulated’ economy of floating currencies was the unintended consequence, or ‘accident’, of U.S. hegemony. ‘The Nixon administration was determined to break out of a set of institutionalized arrangements which limited U.S. dominance in international monetary policies in order to establish a new regime which would give it monocratic power over international monetary affairs. U.S. capital was indeed being challenged by its capitalist rivals in product markets at the time. The break-up of the Bretton Woods system was part of a strategy for restoring the dominance of U.S. capitals through turning the international monetary system into a dollar-standard regime’ Gowan (1999, 19).

  29. As Klein ably shows, Chile under Pinochet is a classic example of this phenomenon: ‘For the [neo-liberal] experiment to work, Pinochet had to strip [neo-Keynsian] distortions away—more cuts, more privatization, more speed’ Klein (2007, 80).

  30. Throughout his text, Stiglitz naively laments the ‘politicization’ of IMF decision making. With greater acumen, Scheurerman expressly links the global rise of the central banks to the operation of speed-politics; ‘How better to allow for financial regulation of our high-speed capitalism than by minimizing the direct interventionist instruments of slow moving legislatures while outfitting a group of financial experts with significant discretionary power to respond to fast-moving market shifts’ Scheuerman (2004, 245 fn. 92). Scheuerman outlines the various recent innovations in international economic law underpinning the legal indeterminacy governing global economic regulation in idem, chapter five, 144–186. ‘Although it remains true that every functioning capitalist economy requires some minimum of legal protections (private property, contracts, a system of binding dispute resolution) even that minimum is more pliable than generally acknowledged. By no means can we endorse the orthodox view that capitalism and a robust rule of law—based on a system of clear, general, stable, prospective, public norms—are likely to go hand in hand. On the contrary, economic globalization flourishes precisely where such legal forms are lacking. The overlap between economic globalization and social acceleration helps explain why. The temporal mismatch between economic activity and traditional forms of adjudication is particularly acute within global law because of the striking employment there of new possibilities for high-speed social action.’ Idem, 181.

  31. Even the ‘un-theoretical’ Soros has acknowledged this point. For him, globalization ‘has an asymmetric structure. It favors the United States and other developed countries at the center of the financial system and penalizes the less developed economies at the periphery. The disparity between the center and the periphery is not widely recognized, but it has played an important role in the development of the super-bubble’ Soros (2008, 93). On the manifold linkages between global neo-liberalism and speed-politics, see idem, 96–102.

  32. See also Brenner (2002, 40–43, 54, 57–58, 67, 81–89, 130, 132). For de-regulation as a form of inter-state competition, see Helleiner (1994, 167): ‘The mobility of capital was behind the dynamic. When one state began to deregulate and liberalize its financial markets, other states were forced to follow its lead if they hoped to remain competitive in attracting footloose funds and financial business. The United States and Great Britain were the leaders of the competitive deregulation movement’.

  33. As with neo-liberalism frequently identified with ‘Americanization’. ‘Globalization is the outcome of the geographical projection of American marketplace society allied to technical advances in communication and transportation’ Agnew (2005, 72).

  34. Mike Davis writes in a similar fashion; ‘With a literal “great wall” of high-tech border enforcement blocking large-scale migration to the rich countries, only the slum remains as a fully franchised solution to the problem of warehousing this century’s surplus humanity…The urban edge is a zone of exile, a new Babylon’ Davis (2006, 200–201).

  35. See also ‘The Consumption of Security’, 119–129, in Virilio (1986). On the deleterious effects of speed-politics on the conventional operation of liberal democracy and the rule of law, see Scheuerman (2004).

  36. Davis is salient on this point. ‘The demonizing rhetorics of the various international “wars” on terrorism, drugs, and crime are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around gecekondus, favelas, and chawls that disable any honest debate about the daily violence of economic exclusion. And, as in Victorian times, the categorical criminalization of the urban poor is a self-fulfilling prophecy, guaranteed to shape a future of endless war in the streets’ Davis (2006 , 202).

  37. Compare Davis with Virilio on this point. ‘In summary, the Pentagon’s best minds have dared to venture where most United Nations, World Bank or Department of State types fear to go: down the road that logically follows from the abdication of urban reform…Indeed, in the absence of other paradigms, the Pentagon has evolved its own distinctive perspective on global urban poverty…Pentagon doctrine is being re-shaped to support a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor. This is the true “clash of civilizations”’ Davis (2006, 205 and 202–203).

  38. For the 'housing bubble' as the continuation of the generic 'credit bubble', see Brenner (2006, 317, 318, 319, 332). ‘Crudely put, rising equity prices were now enabling US economic growth to depend for its expression to an ever-greater extent on the growth of US private indebtedness’ Brenner (2002, 176).

  39. Brenner (2002, 44–45, 152–153, 175–176, 199, 216, 266, 268–269, 288–289, 302, 304). ‘Financialization encourages households to behave like businesses, businesses to behave like banks, and banks to behave like hedge funds’ Blackburn (2008, 100).

  40. ‘The Bush administration’s vision of the “ownership society” somehow latched onto the codicils of Johnson’s “Great Society” to encourage the poor to take on housing debt at the pinnacle of the property bubble. The quality of the arrangements…avoided the real problem, which is the true extent of property in the United States and the folly of imagining that it can be banished by waving the magic wand of debt creation Blackburn (2008, 73).

  41. Unfortunately, Passas does not elaborate on what falls into the last category.

  42. Although Passas means this to refer to trans-national geographical space, ‘cross-border’ may just as usefully employed to describe criminogenic migrations across domestic juridical or political spaces.

  43. Emphasis added.

  44. On this point, see also Vincenzo Ruggiero; ‘today, economic enterprise is struggling to establish a new moral justification for its activity. For this reason, every economic act, even if it is illegitimate, may become normative, in that it can establish new regulations and values, and may promote new ethical codes and legitimacies’ Ruggiero (2009, 122). For an outstanding example of the corporate legitimation of otherwise illicit economic practices—in this case, ‘control fraud’—see Tillman (2009). See also Black (2005, 734–755). ‘Frauds are a classic case of market failure due to asymmetric information…Accounting fraud is an optimal [criminogenic] strategy because it simultaneously produces record (albeit fictional) profits and prevents the recognition of real losses.’ Idem, 739 and 736.

  45. For an extended discussion of the radical iterability governing the discursive construction of both Law and Crime, see Wilson (2009a). It is important to keep in mind that the criminogenic is not identical with the ‘criminal’. While crime may be defined as the violation of clearly established laws and norms—as reflected in the formal legalism preferred by orthodox criminology—the criminogenic can be usefully understood as encompassing practices that would ordinarily be denoted as criminal if not but for the operation of political or judicial processes that effectively de-criminalize the illicit behaviors. Criminognic phenomena, therefore, pose a direct challenge to the validity of mainstream criminology, which tends to reduce crime to conventional sociological categories of deviance and anti-social behavior. ‘The tendency of orthodox criminology to focus on private crimes of greed, lust and rage—perhaps we should think of this as criminology’s version of the “nuts, sluts and perverts” fetish that has impoverished the sociology of deviance—has rendered institutional crimes of power, that is, corporate, political and state crimes—relatively minor areas of study within criminology’ Michalowski (2009, 312).

  46. Like Turner, Greider is adamant in framing the structural dynamics of globalization as the primary cause of the global credit crisis. ‘Instability, in other words, flowed from the fracturing of power and responsibility that globalization has produced. The immediate force behind the more dramatic swings and currency exchange values was, after all, the monetary policy of the three major central banks [US, Japan Germany] setting interest rates and controlling virtual money supplies. But the currency traders played off those actions, kibitzing and speculating like theatre critics, occasionally vetoing the government’s policy decisions by ganging up and attacking them. And each central bank was itself trapped between its own conflicting obligations—the domestic economy versus the global monetary system’ Greider (1997, 251–252). Michel Albert is even more unsparing in his language; ‘Divided and disunited the nation states and their puny borders can offer no real resistance to the globalized capitalist economy’ Cited in Longworth (1998, 168). As Held expresses it with considerable understatement, ‘In this case, the boundaries between domestic markets and global affairs may be blurred’ Held et al. (1999, 15). What all three are describing could be expressed in Virilian terms as the loss, or disappearance, of the state as the referent, or the ‘real’, of international politics.

  47. In Soros’ opinion, the US housing bubble ‘was supported by a preliminary misconception that the value of the collateral was not affected by the willingness to lend. That is the most common misconception that has fuelled bubbles in the past, particularly in the real estate area.’ Idem, 83.

  48. Guilhem Fabre has implicitly identified international money-laundering as a phenomenon of speed-politics; ‘political will and political means should take into account these realities and overtake this opaque system, where the methods of supervision and the rules of the game are at least a decade behind the rapidity of financial flows and the existing capacities for circumvention’ Fabre (2009, 95). For a useful snap-shot of the trans-national money-laundering system during the heyday of the ‘roaring nineties’, see Woods (1998). Beginning in the early 1990s, it was apparent that the critical variable to transnational money-laundering was the rise of ‘cyber-currency’ or ‘virtual money’; idem, 4, 13–14, 37, 177 and 181. See also Lilley (2003, chapter six, 115–132), passim.

  49. A critical milestone of the criminogenic evolution of the world economy was reached in 1972 with the establishment of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI. See Passas (1993, 1994, 1995, 1996). For an introductory treatment of the other two great criminogenic banks of the 1980s—Nugen Hand and Ambrosiano—see Lernoux (1984, chapters 4, 9 and 10). According to Passas, more attention ‘has been paid to the use of BCCI for criminal purposes than to the demand for its illegal services, which reflects global structural problems’ Passas (1995, 397). As we should expect, these ‘global structural problems’ are inseparable from speed; ‘BCCI was promoting itself as the friendly “can-do” bank. It was extremely fast at providing letters of credit or loan, it was more personal than other major banks, and had “no questions asked” policies’ Passas (1994, 72). The myriad linkages between the covert agencies of the State and cross-border criminal organizations that first began to surface in public awareness following the Vietnam War evidences a parallel evolution of global political economy that is de-noted as parapolitics, ‘a system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished’ Scott (1972, 171). For a recent explication of the meaning of the parapolitical, see Cribb (2009).

  50. The account is provided by Ruggiero and Michael Welch is more illustrative of this. ‘Perpetrators of power crime are offenders who possess an exorbitantly exceeding amount of material and symbolic resources when compared to those possessed by their victims…We can argue, with respect to power crimes, that criminal designations are controversial and highly problematic, due to the higher degree of freedom enjoyed by perpetrators. The capacity to control the effects of their actions allows those who have more freedom to conceal (or “negotiate”) the criminal nature of their actions. If we translate the notion of freedom into that of resources, we can argue that those possessing a larger quantity and variety of them also have greater possibilities of attributing criminal definitions to others and repelling those that others attribute to them. They also have greater ability to control the effects of their criminal activity, and usually do not allow this to appear and be designated as such’ Ruggiero and Welch (2009, 298). The author’s account of the manipulation of ‘symbolic resources’ as a means of effecting the perceptual ‘disappearance’ of criminal substance is highly suggestive of a simulated event.

  51. The related phenomenon of ‘control fraud’ is also a direct product of the formation of systemic ‘criminogenic institutional frameworks’ throughout the 1990s. Neo-liberal policy changes ‘were influenced by the argument that [high speed] New Economy industries operated under a different set of economic rules than [low speed] Old Economy industries and were largely self-regulating. Concurrent with these changes was a broader trend (particularly among New Economy industries) towards financialization—“a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production.”’ Tillman (2009, 370).

  52. Helleiner makes the fascinating point that the neutralization of political opposition to neo-liberalism very much depends upon the ‘low visibility’ of the criminogenic alterations of global finance; see idem (1994, 19–20 and 203–205). ‘“It is obvious that the pursuit of liberalisation of capital movements generates les conflict and less ardour than the maintenance of free trade. The reason is that trade restrictions have quick and visible effects on jobs and profits, whereas the impact of restrictions on capital flows is invisible to the public and quite often a matter of great uncertainty for the specialists.”’ Raymond Bertrand, cited in idem, 204–205. Emphasis added. There is nothing more ontologically lethal than a subversive metaphor.

  53. I take with extreme seriousness Harvey’s preliminary speculations in his The New Imperialism and A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism, that the orthodox and highly teleological Marxist account of the historical evolution of capitalism is fundamentally mistaken. The problem is the ‘true’ role played by the primitive stage of accumulation—a violent predatory capitalism that seeks out sustainable rates of profit through the direct expropriation of wealth through violence and extortion. In the seminal eighth chapter of volume one of Capital, Marx clearly situates primitive accumulation at the very origins of the capitalist world-economy in the 16th and 17th centuries, but then rapidly passes over this embryonic stage in favour of later and more sophisticated forms of surplus extraction. Along with Harvey and other ‘open’ neo-Marxists, I have come to doubt the viability of this highly teleological narrative. My own work on parapolitics has led me to conclude that primitive modes of accumulation have not been supplanted by ‘modern’ forms, but have co-evolved, penetrating allegedly non-extortionist forms. A more accurate model than the one offered by Marx in Capital is that supplied by Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, which interprets the ‘modern’ not as the dialectical suspension of the primitive but as the anti-dialectical sublimation of the archaic, in which ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ structures and practices irrationally co-exist. I would go beyond Harvey and argue that primitive accumulation not only co-exists with modern forms of production, it remains the primary means of wealth creation; it is through ‘primitive’ acts of violent appropriation that the fatal catastrophe of capital over-accumulation can be indefinitely postponed—but not, of course, dialectically suspended. On the centrality of systemic theft, or ‘collective embezzlement’ to the corporate culture of cyber-capitalism, see Akerlof et al. (1993). ‘Much as violations of worker safety standards or environmental protection laws are to the industrial production process, collective embezzlement may be the signature crime of finance capitalism…Unrestrained by investments in infrastructure and with little of their own capital at stake, those who handle other people’s money in the casino economy truly operate in a “criminogenic environment”’ Calavita et al. (1997, 171–2). This accords well with Black’s likening of control fraud to a form of ‘looting’ that is highly analogous to a primitive form of accumulation; Black (2005, 738). If I am right, then it becomes imperative to re-conceptualize the whole of global political economy in terms of the criminogenic, the primary analytical tool with which to express the ‘dangerous supplement’ of primitive accumulation.

References

  • Agnew, J. (2005). Hegemony: The new shape of global power. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Akerlof, G. A. (1970). The market for ‘lemons’: Quality uncertainty and the market mechanism. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3), 488–500.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Akerlof, G. A., et al. (1993). Looting: The economic underworld of bankruptcy for profit. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1993(2), 1–73.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Alexander, J. B. (2003). Winning the war: Advanced weapons, strategies and concepts for the post-9/11 world. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

  • Armitage, J. (Ed.). (2000). Paul Virilio: From modernism to hypermodernism and beyond. London: SAGE Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arrighi, G. (2007). Adam smith in Beijing: Lineages of the twenty-first century. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bataille, G. (1991). The accursed share: An essay on general economy (Vol. 1). New York: Zone Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baudrillard, J. (1983). Simulations (P. Foss, P. Patton, & P. Beitchman, Trans.). New York: Semiotext(e).

  • Baudrillard, J. (1993). Symbolic exchange and death (I. Hamilton Grant, Trans.). SAGE Publications: London.

  • Black, W. K. (2005). ‘Control Frauds’ as financial super-predators. Journal of Socio-Economics, 34, 734–755.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blackburn, R. (2008). The subprime crisis. New Left Review, 50, 63–106.

    Google Scholar 

  • Block, F. L. (1977). The origins of international economic disorder: A study of United States International Monetary Policy from World War II to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brenner, R. (2002). The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brenner, R. (2006). The economics of global turbulence: The advanced capitalist economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Calavita, K., Pontell, H. N., & Tillman, R. H. (1997). Big money crime: Fraud and politics in the savings and loan crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chang, H.-J. (2003). Kicking away the ladder: Development strategy in historical perspective. London: Anthem Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cribb, R. (2009). Introduction: Parapolitics, shadow government and criminal sovereignty. In E. Wilson (Ed.), Government of the shadows: Parapolitics and criminal sovereignty (pp. 1–9). London: Pluto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cubitt, S. (2001). Simulation and social theory. London: SAGE Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Culler, J. (1983). On deconstruction: The theory and criticism of structuralism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

  • Davis, M. (2006). Planet of slums. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Der Derian, J. (2001). Virtuous war: Mapping the military-industrial-media-entertainment network. Boulder: Westview Press.

  • Der Derian, J., & Virilio, P. (1998). ‘Is the author dead? An interview with Paul Virilio. In J. Der Derian (Ed.), The Virilio reader (pp. 16–21). Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dick, H. (2009). The shadow economy: Markets, crime and the state. In E. Wilson (Ed.), Government of the shadows: Parapolitics and criminal sovereignty (pp. 97–110). London: Pluto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eichengreen, B. (1996). Globalizing capital: A history of the international monetary system. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fabre, G. (2009). Prospering from crime: Money laundering and financial crises. In E. Wilson (Ed.), Government of the shadows: Parapolitics and criminal sovereignty (pp. 90–96). London: Pluto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gane, M. (1993). Introduction. In Baudrillard 1993, (pp. vii–x).

  • Gane, M. (2000). Paul Virilio’s bunker theorizing. In J. Armitage (Ed.), Paul Virilio: From modernism to hypermodernism and beyond (pp. 85–102). London: SAGE Publications.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Gowan, P. (1999). The global gamble: Washington’s Faustian bid for world dominance. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Greider, W. (1997). One world, ready or not: The manic logic of global capitalism. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harvey, D. (1999). The limits to capital (2nd ed.). London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harvey, D. (2003). The new imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Held, D., et al. (1999). Global transformations: Politics, economics and culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Helleiner, E. (1994). States and the reemergence of global finance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hudson, M. (2003). Super imperialism: The origin and fundamentals of U.S. world dominance (2nd ed.). London: Pluto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, C. (1982). MITI and the Japanese miracle: The growth of industrial policy, 1925–1975. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. London: Penguin Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lernoux, P. (1984). In banks we trust. Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lilley, P. (2003). Dirty dealing: The untold truth about global money laundering, international crime and terrorism (2nd ed.). London: Kogan Page.

    Google Scholar 

  • Longworth, R. C. (1998). Global squeeze: The coming crisis for first-world nations. Chicago: Contemporary Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Michalowski, R. (2009). Power, crime and criminology in the new imperial age. Crime, Law and Social Change, 51(2009), 303–325.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Passas, N. (1993). Structural sources of international crime: Policy lessons from the BCCI Scandal. Crime, Law and Social Change, 20, 293–309.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Passas, N. (1994). I cheat, therefore i exist? The BCCI scandal IN CONTEXT. In W. Michael Hoffman, et al. (Eds.), Emerging global business ethics (pp. 69–78). Westport: Quorum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Passas, N. (1995). The mirror of global evils: A review essay on the BCCI affair. Justice Quarterly, 12(2), 377–405.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Passas, N. (1996). The genesis of the BCCI scandal. Journal of Law and Society, 23(1), 57–77.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Passas, N. (2000). Globalization and international crime: Effects of criminogenic asymmetries. In P. Williams & D. Vlassis (Eds.), Combating transnational crime: Concepts, activities and responses (pp. 22–56). New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Passas, N. (2007a). Corruption in the procurement process and outsourcing government functions: Issues, cases, case studies, implications. Report Prepared for the Institute of Fraud Prevention, Report to Institute for Northeastern University, Boston February 2007.

  • Passas, N. (2007b). Corruption in the procurement process/outsourcing government functions. Report to the Institute for Fraud Prevention. Shortened version prepared by W. Black. Northeastern University, Boston February 2007.

  • Passas, N., & Nelken, D. (1993). The thin line between legitimate and criminal enterprises: Subsidiary fraud in the European Community. Crime, Law and Social Change, 19, 223–243.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ruggiero, V. (2009). Transnational crime in global illicit economies. In E. Wilson (Ed.), Government of the shadows: Parapolitics and criminal sovereignty (pp. 117–129). London: Pluto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ruggiero, V., & Welch, M. (2009). Power crime. Crime, Law and Social Change, 51, 297–301.

  • Sassen, S. (2006). Territory, authority, rights: From medieval to global assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scheuerman, W. E. (2004). Liberal democracy and the social acceleration of time. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scott, P. D. (1972). The war conspiracy: The secret road to the second Indochina War. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

  • Silver, B. J., & Arrighi, G. (2003). Polyani’s ‘Double Movement’: The Belle Epoques of British and U.S. Hegemony compared. Politics and Society, 3(12), 325–355.

    Google Scholar 

  • Soros, G. (2008). The new paradigm for financial markets: The credit crisis of 2008 and what it means. New York: Public Affairs.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stiglitz, J. E. (2002). Globalization and its discontents. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tillman, R. (2009). Reputations and corporate malfeasance: Collusive networks in financial statement fraud. Crime, Law and Social Change, 51, 365–382.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Turner, G. (2008). The credit crunch: Housing bubbles, globalisation and worldwide economic crisis. London: Pluto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ullman, H. K., & Wade, J. P., Jr. (1998). Rapid dominance—A force for all seasons. Technologies and systems for achieving shock and awe: A real revolution in military affairs. London: Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies.

    Google Scholar 

  • Virilio, P. (1986). Speed and politics (M. Polizotti, Trans.). New York: Semiotext(e).

  • Virilio, P. (1989). War and cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Verso.

  • Virilio, P. (1991a). The aesthetics of disappearance (P. Beitchman, Trans.). New York: Semiotext(e).

  • Virilio, P. (1991b). Lost dimension (D. Moshenberg, Trans.). New York: Semiotext(e).

  • Virilio, P. (1994). The vision machine (J. Rose, Trans.). Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

  • Virilio, P. (1995a). The silence of the lambs: Paul Virilio in conversation: interview with Carlos Oliveria. CTHEORY.

  • Virilio, P. (1995b). Speed and information: Cyberspace alarm! CTHEORY.

  • Virilio, P. (1999). Polar inertia. London: SAGE Publications.

    Google Scholar 

  • Virilio, P. (2000). Strategy of deception Tran. Chris Turner. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Virilio, P. (2005a). City of panic (J. Rose, Trans.). Oxford: Berg.

  • Virilio, P. (2005b). Desert screen: War at the speed of light (M. Degener, Trans.). New York: Continuum.

  • Virilio, P. (2005c). Negative horizon: An essay in dromoscopy (M. Degener, Trans.). New York: Continuum.

  • Virilio, P., & Lotringer, S. (1997). Pure war (M. Polizotti, Trans.). New York: Semiotext(e).

  • Wark, M. (1994). Virtual geography: Living with global media events. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  • Wilson, E. (2009a). Deconstructing the shadows. In E. Wilson (Ed.), Government of the shadows: Parapolitics and criminal sovereignty (pp. 1–55). London: Pluto Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, E. (2009b). Speed/pure war/power crime: Paul Virilio on the criminogenic accident and the virtual disappearance of the suicidal state. Crime, Law and Social Change, 51(3–4), 413–434.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Woods, B. F. (1998). The art and science of money laundering: Inside the commerce of the international narcotics traffickers. Boulder: Paladin Press.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eric Wilson.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Wilson, E. Criminogenic Cyber-Capitalism: Paul Virilio, Simulation, and the Global Financial Crisis. Crit Crim 20, 249–274 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-011-9139-7

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-011-9139-7

Keywords

Navigation