The aleatory moment of finance and the structural production of class-based inequality

This article considers the conceptual role that contingency plays in class-based inequality, by examining financial insecurity UK following 2008 crisis, austerity, and COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on Althusser’s aleatory materialism, I counter postmodern poststructuralist ideas of as a universally disruptive challenge to power stratification, showing instead how pervasive sense uncertainty drives working households into debt diminishes savings, creating ongoing strain or poverty. Using concept ‘encounter’, note emergence consumer finance is historically contingent, but has become normalized wage relation. Financial risk, with its potential yield high rewards for institutional investors firms trading stocks, securities, assets, amplifies face socially reproducing themselves, because it forces those who draw an income their main source wealth manage risk loss untradeable commodity. The encounter between institutions thus unevenly weighted, precarious unable offload unpredictable times. connect this reading inequality earlier work contradiction overdetermination, understand implications stratification crisis change.