Fabio Vighi, Professor of Critical Theory and Italian at Cardiff University, discusses dominant themes from latest books, Emergency Capitalism: Financial Hubris, Economic Collapse, and Systemic Manipulation (2024) and Unworkable: Delusions of an Imploding Civilization (2022), that address the “age of crisis capitalism” and the post-productive hyper-financialised stage of capitalism that is driven by debt and the loss of work society. Relating how the acceleration of the emergency paradigm is maintained by a constant flux of “states of exception” that exclude people while also allowing for the creation of credit and debt which have become the prime motors of capitalism today, Vighi narrates how just before the pandemic in 2019, we were already approaching a gigantic financial crisis, observing, “The system needed what then Covid allowed the system to have, which means massive injections of credit.” Vighi historicises the acceleration of the emergency paradigm over the past decade, which is fundamentally connected to debt and the creation of credit “out of thin air” to balance a system that is both inherently inflationary and increasingly “imbalanced and out of control.” Noting how the release of emergencies has become the mechanism to balance the economy—first with the pandemic in 2020 and then immediately thereafter with the war in Ukraine—Vighi characterises what is happening today as an “apocalyptic, eschatological type of mood where war is always immanent…and therefore that justifies the rearmament of entire continents like Europe,” while underscoring how modern wars have always been mechanisms for creating credit while also the vehicles for connecting the arms and financial sectors. Criticising the perception management systems that are more focused on the personalisation of struggles rather than critiquing systemic structures, Vighi scrutinises how, as a result, we are incentivised into very simplistic polarisations and conflicts that are, in themselves, ideological forms of destruction, distracting us from examining the deeper causes of conflict.

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