Security Capital

Download or read book Security/Capital written by George S. Rigakos and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-18 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is security, and what is its relationship to capitalism? George S. Rigakos' explosive treatise charts the rise of the security-industrial complex. Starting from a critical appraisal of 'productive labour' in the works of Karl Marx and Adam Smith, Rigakos builds a conceptual model of pacification based on practices of dispossession, exploitation and the fetish of security commodities. Rigakos argues that a defining characteristic of the global economic system is its ability to productively sell (in)security to those it makes insecure. Materially and ideologically, the security-industrial complex is the blast furnace of global capitalism, fuelling the perpetuation of the system while feeding relentlessly on the surpluses it has exacted.