Part I of our analysis flows from grass roots community praxis with women/women-identified involved in illegal economies (sex workers, youth exploited in the domestic sex industry, and drug traffickers). Following Bhattacharyya (2005), we argue that financialization has facilitiated global consolidation of illegal economies, which in turn are constitutive of ‘legal’ economies. Materially, this occurs through the proliferation of unregulated trading venues, dark pools, and global laundromats. Laundered money is a source of primary accumulation organized through white supremacy (including the international banking systems), and like primary accumulation in earlier phases of capitalism, represent perniciously violent, gendered, and racialized forms of accumulation. Within the financialized economy, the city itself is a source of accumulation, the speculative real estate market requiring enclosures of public infrastructure, including public housing, and expulsions of the most marginalized communities from prime property that trade on the speculative real estate market (which is itself a site of money laundering). This is accomplished via militarized policing, racialized surveillance, imperialist borders and mass incarceration, inspiring the term militarized financialization (Magnusson, 2015).
Amidst the dystopic urban landscapes of militarized financialization springs hope. Part II of our paper outlines strategies that prefigure alternative futures organized through urban anarchist tactics that reclaim urban spaces from global financialized imaginaries. In times of crises, community self-defense programs are initiated by the very people against whom the capitalist state has waged a war. Our paper outlines key strategies of anarchist communities/social movements and how they negotiate access to health care, organize food sovereignty, negotiate police state violence, and actively dismantle hierarchies organizing subjugation. Our paper is grounded in our own grass roots work.
Battacharyya, G. (2005). Traffick: The Illicit Movement of People and Things. London: Pluto Press.
Magnusson, J. (2015). Financialization. In S. Mojab (Ed.), Marxism and Feminism, London: Zed Books.
