Money, Equality and Exploitation: An Interpretation of Marx's Treatment of Money - Werner Bonefeld

Money, Equality and Exploitation: An Interpretation of Marx's Treatment of Money
Werner Bonefeld1

INTRODUCTION

Since the deregulation of the international money markets in 1971 and 1973, money has emerged as a central axis of class conflict. Throughout the world, governments have responded to the shift from fixed to flexible exchange rates with policies of tight money. However, beginning with the recession of the early 1980s, developing through the 'debt crisis' of the 1980s, the recession of the early 1990s signals the failure of a politics of state austerity. Although the crash of 1987 and the recession of the early 1990s bear comparison with the inter-war period, it does not necessarily follow that the outcome of this crisis will match that of the 1930s. But can parallells be dismissed so easily?

One of the major difficulties in analysing the current capitalist crisis lies in seeing how changes in the international monetary system fit in with the capitalist imposition of work. To approach this question we must grasp the self-contradictory mode of existence of 'money'. The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to this under standing by reworking Marx's writing on money. Marx offers many remarkable insights which need to be made productive. The aim is to interpret Marx's conceptualisation of money with a view to theorising money as a self-contradictory phenomenon of human relations.

The understanding of money as a self-contradictory form of human relations raises the fundamental theoretical question of the constitution of social existence and thus the constitution of categories. As indicated by Reichelt (1993, p. 74), 'if one wishes to treat dialectics seriously as a method of the critique of political economy, one has to put the idea of constitution into the context of value as a permanently moving form of existence'. In other words, the category of money cannot be grasped simply in terms of 'economic theory' - whether 'Marxist' or not (cf. Marazzi's 'Money in the World Crisis', Chapter 4 in this volume). The constitutive contradiction of capitalist social reproduction is not that between financial and productive capital, but between capital and labour. Most of Marxist writing on 'money' is remarkably sterile, particularly when contrasted with Marx's own writings. This is because it has focused on a merely formal understanding of 'money', neglecting the fundamental question posed by Marx, namely, why do human relations exist in the form of a relationship amongst things.2 The conceptualisation of this question supplies an understanding of money as a self-contradictory phenomenon of human relations. Such a view is in contrast to approaches which 'define' money according to its institutionally specified determinations (Aglietta, 1979; Coakley and Harris, 1983) and to those which stress the necessity of money and derive 'money' in merely formal terms from Marx's presentation (De Brunhoff, 1976; Reuten, 1988; Hall, 1992). In all of these approaches social reality is construed in terms of a formal system of rules and laws. Although there are differences between the authors, they share the same problem: they understand capital fetishistically in terms of a logical system.3 Rather than conceptualising the contradictory constitution of a capitalist world, these approaches emphasise the role and contradictions of 'money'. The understanding of labour as the substance, and of the labourer as the creator, of value, and hence of surplus value, is, by implication, seen as something existing outside the contradictory role of money itself.

The chapter starts with Marx's notion of 'value' as a form of human practice. There then follows a conceptualisation of 'money' which interprets the pertinent themes of Marx's treatment of money. Money will then be discussed as the elementary and meaningless form of the existence of labour in capitalism. The next section supplies a conceptualisation of the relationship of the state to money. This section emphasises the 'state' as a political form through which the 'social power of money' subsists. The final section summarises the argument.

VALUE AND HUMAN PRACTICE

Labour was seen by Marx (1973, p. 361) as the 'living, form-giving fire; it is transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time'. Human beings produce themselves through labour. Labour is a general precondition of human existence regardless of the concrete historical form of social existence. Labour is under stood, by Marx, as the appropriation of nature, as social, sensual, critical – purposive activity. 'But the so-called general preconditions of all production are nothing more than these abstract moments with which no real historical state of production can be grasped' (Marx, 1973, p. 88). The determination of labour as human activity in general needs to be specified in its historically specific form.4 The labour process is the production of human relations in and through the 'appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society' (Marx. 1973, p. 87).

While in every society human beings play the role of producers, the simplest category, i.e. labour, transforms, in capitalist society, into a mystifying character because the material elements of wealth transform from products of labour into properties of commodities and still more pronouncedly they transform the production relation itself into a thing. The productive power of social labour appears in the 'perverted' form of value.5 The 'objective', or factual, existence of 'capital' can thus not be taken as a conceptual starting point, as in those approaches mentioned above. This is because that which asserts itself to the economic mind as 'objectivity', or 'objective logic', or 'objective being' is, in Marx, understood as 'alienated subjectivity' (as specified by Backhaus, 1992). Any conceptualisation of money which focuses on its institutional determination or its formal logic or functional role, disregards the distinctiveness of Marx's theory and tends to espouse, instead, the reified world of capitalism as the object and purpose of theory. The distinctiveness of Marx's theory lay in the understanding of the essential social relation, of the 'movement of labour in capitalist society' (Psychopedis, 1984).

According to Marx, the best points in his critique of political economy are: '(1) the twofold character of labour, according to whether it is expressed in use-value or exchange-value. (All under standing of the facts depends upon this.) It is emphasised immediately, in the first chapter; (2) the treatment of surplus value independently of its particular forms as profit, interest, ground rent, etc.' ( Marx, 1867, quoted in McLellan, 1977, p. 525). Marx thus determined (bestimmte) the concept of 'value' qualitatively: as a general equivalent (exchange value) it must be a use value and vice versa. The Marxian revolution is the critique of value as a fetish which seems to possess extra human powers. The critique of political economy shows 'value' as a social relation, as a mode of existence of labour in capitalism. The critique of fetishism supplies an understanding of 'value' ad hominem.6 That is, it shows that the so-called 'economic forms' are, in fact, forms of human practice. Thus, the critique of political economy amounts to a 'conceptualised practice' (begriffene Praxis, cf. Schmidt, 1974), that is, an understanding of the totality of human practice which constitutes, suffuses and contradicts the perverted world of capitalism.

Marx understood labour, in capitalist society, as specified by abstract labour. Individual labour is abstract labour in the sense that it is part of the labour of the whole society and, moreover, derives its significance from this fact. The category of abstract labour exists through the exchange of commodities. The historical specificity of labour concerns the contradictory unity of exchange and production, that is, the exchange of commodities through which concrete labours are reduced to their common substance as abstract labour. The 'surplus-value extorted by capital in the actual production process ... must first be realised in the circulation process' (Marx, 1966, p. 827). Capitalist social relations are distinguished by the 'integration of the value form with abstract labour as the substance of value, and of the labour process with the valorisation of capital, as the appropriation and distribution of surplus labour is achieved through the exchange of commodities' (Clarke, 1989, p. 136; see also Clarke, 1980; Elson, 1979). The substance of value is living labour commanded by capital for the purpose of exploitation. Labour is the presupposition of social existence as a whole, a presupposition from which capital cannot autonomise itself. Capital is dependent upon labour. Capital lives by turning labour against itself on the basis of the fetishistic existence of wage labour, that is of a value-creating commodity.

MONEY AND LABOUR

Money is treated, by Marx, as premise and result of the social process of value, integrating value and money theory as moments which presuppose and which are the result of each other (Backhaus, 1974, 1986). Individual labour attains its social character through the exchange with money in circulation. Money is the 'physical medium into which exchange values are dipped' (Marx, 1973, p. 167). In its role of universal equivalent, money shows that all commodities do in fact have a common property: they are all products of 'labour's social productive force' (Marx, 1966, p. 827). As the medium of circulation, money acts as this common property. It is in and through money that the particular individual concrete labour asserts itself as social, as abstract, labour. 'That is to say it is the medium through which concrete labour becomes abstract labour. In a word it is money that is the form of existence of abstract labour' (Kay, 1979, p. 58). The difference-in-unity of production and circulation is achieved through money at the same time as it is obscured by money. It is obscured because, in money, labour's productive force confronts labour as an independent 'thing'. In money, the social presupposition of 'value', i.e. purposive human activity, is displaced7 to abstract labour sans phrase. 'Considered as value, all commodities are qualitatively equal and differ only quantitatively' (Marx, 1973, p. 141). In sum, in money, labour's social productive force asserts itself against itself inasmuch as the 'interchange with nature' (Marx, 1966, p. 815) exists in the form of seemingly extra-human system properties: The 'direct coalescence of the material production relations with their historical and social determination ... is an enchanted, perverted, topsy turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things' (Marx, 1966, p. 830). The substance of value confronts its formal existence in the form of the monetary authority of capital. However, this authority exists only through labour, this latter being the substance of value. In sum, labour's social productive power asserts itself against itself inasmuch as labour's productive activity means nothing for as long as it is not expressed in money.

Money is the 'elementary' form of the capitalist organisation of exchange and, within exchange, of exploitation. It is an expression of 'capital's ability to impose work (abstract labour) through the commodity form (exchange value)' (cf. Marazzi's 'Money in the World Crisis', Chapter 4 in this volume). The imposition of work through the commodity form entails a constitution of labour in the form of 'wage labour', defined primarily by the source of its income and as an equal and free exchange relation on the market (Marx, 1983, Chap. 6; Marx, 1966, Chap. 48). Labour assumes an existence in terms of wage labour, an existence upon which exploitation rests while it, at the same time, 'eliminates' (Marx, 1966, p. 814) the specific character of surplus value production. The constitution of social relations on the basis of formal equality, liberty and private property treats social relations and the power of money as equal. Money is the form in and through which liberty, equality, property and Bentham obtain. As a relation of formal liberty, money signals non-coerced exchanges between equals on the market. As a relation of formal equality, money signals the inequality of property relations. It does so, however, by representing exploitative relations as relations of formal equality: everybody is equal before money. As a relation of property, money signals the relationship of each individual to society. As a relation of Bentham, money signals the pursuit of individual happiness. Monetary equivalence in circulation denies a content which is a content of inequality, a content of social reproduction as domination. The relations of exploitation are the content of equality expressed in 'money' as the form through which the contradiction, between formal equality and exploitation, moves. However, the displacement of labour to wage labour does not 'sweep away' the contradictory mode of existence of capital. Rather than being an accomplished fact, the displacement of labour to wage labour presupposes 'labour as value creating' (Marx, 1966, p. 823). As indicated by Psychopedis (1991), taking 'wage labour' as the starting point (as, for example, in the Regulation Approach and the Profit Squeeze8 ) entails conceptualising 'capital' as a fetishised form, i.e. as an economic relation. Such a conceptualisation does not permit an understanding of the social constitution of this form. This is because labour is merely seen as a value-producing commodity which capital sets to work.

As was reported above, 'labour's social productive force' (Marx, 1966, p. 827) becomes a very mystical being in the form of capital. As the 'universal form of labour' ( Marx, 1971, p. 98), money negates social relations as human relations and affirms, instead, social relations as relations of things. Money, thus, negates its own contents, that is labour's purposive productive activity. 'Capital' assumes thus an existence as an 'automatic subject' (see Marx, 1979 p. 169).9 This characterisation does not mean that capital has a logic independent of labour.10 Such an understanding would fail to raise the fundamental question of the social constitution of value and thus of the critique of fetishism. The productive power of labour exists in the form of abstract labour within the circuit of social capital as a whole. The circuit of social capital is the movement of abstract labour. In other words, that which proceeds behind the back of the subjects is the movement of the social totality of value (see Backhaus, 1992) or, in other words, the abstract category of labour in action. Capitalist reproduction is social reproduction in perverted form: private production in a social context. Since the social character of private production is not a matter of the conscious decision of society, and since the latter exists only in the inverted form of private fragmentation (commodity production), the social existence of private production confronts individual producers as an external and independent thing which, as argued by Marx (1974, p. 909), is their condition of existing as private individuals in a social context. The perversion of social labour into capital as an 'automatic subject' connotes the existence of labour as an abstraction in action which capital needs to contain within the limits of its form.11

Capitalist production is not just use-value production, but value production which, in turn, is surplus-value production (Negri, 1984), and not only surplus-value production but the social reproduction of the social relations of production (Clarke, 1982). Living labour attains social form as abstract labour within the circuit of social capital as a whole.12 'Capital extorts surplus labour by compulsion exerted upon labour-power and realises the products of labour as abstract value in the sphere of circulation' (Marx, 1966, p. 823). This sphere mediates the restless appropriation of labour:

If we take all three forms [money, commodity, productive capital] together, then all the premises of the process appear as its result, as premises produced by the process itself. Each moment appears as a point of departure, of transit, and of return. The total process presents itself as the unity of the process of production and the process of circulation; the production process is the mediator of the circulation process, and vice versa (Marx, 1978, p. 180).

The displacement of exploitation into circulation, and conversely, the displacement of circulation into exploitation entails that the movement of a particular form of capital is itself only a moment of the generality of its form. Capital 'circulates in the shape of a constant change of form, its existence is process, it is the unity of its form, it is the constant change between the form of generality and the form of particularity, of money and of commodity' (Reichelt, 1978, p. 48). The self-contradictory unity of surplus-value production comprises different forms of capital which exist only as distinct-in-unity, i.e. the continuum of forms of abstract labour in action. Money and commodity 'represent only different modes of existence of value itself, the money its general mode, and the commodity its particular, or, so to say, disguised form' (Marx, 1983, p. 152). Value cannot be grasped as a static thing. Considering value as a mere abstraction, is to 'forget that the movement of industrial capital is this abstraction in action' (Marx, 1978, p. 185). This abstraction in action connotes labour's constitutive power: the interchange with nature exists, contradictorily, in the form of a relationship between the things themselves. 'Circulation is the movement in which the general alienation appears as general appropriation and general appropriation as general alienation' (Marx, 1973, p. 196). The general alienation of human relations as relations between things is the general appropriation of labour's social productive force measured in money.

Different forms of capital relate differently to labour. The movement of value exists in the form of a dialectical continuum as production sans phrase (i.e. the objectification of capital in machinery and hence as immobilised) and, at the same time, as mobility sans phrase (i.e. capital in the form of money as social incarnation of abstract wealth). This dialectical continuum exists as a process of contradiction within which different forms of value coexist and within which particular capitals transform in a successive movement from one to the other value form. Productive, commodity, and money capital are forms that value assumes in its restless process of expansion. Their distinctiveness exists only as unity-in-difference, and hence as a contradictory movement. This contradictory movement is not constituted by the competition between different capital fractions or capital 'logics'13 but, rather, by the contradictory integration of abstract labour with the value form. 'The money relation is itself a relation of production if production is looked at in its totality' (Marx, 1973, p. 214). Capitalist exploitation of labour is not external to the money relation. Rather, it is constitutive of the money relation itself. The social character of labour appears as the money existence of commodities, and thus as a thing external to actual production. This 'externality' is a mode of existence of labour in capitalism. 'Money does not create these antitheses and contradictions; it is, rather, the development of these contradictions and antitheses which creates the seemingly transcendental power of money' (Marx, 1973, p. 146). The notion that 'money is labour time in the form of a general object' (Marx, 1973, p. 168) entails labour as the constitutive power of wealth. That is to say that the reified generality of money exists only in and through labour. The integration of social production with capitalist reproduction is thus not achieved by money as a mere economic measure but, rather, by money as a form of social command which constitutes the unity between production and circulation 'by force' (Marx, 1973, p. 150). The inner nature between sale and purchase is 'established through a violent explosion' (Marx, 1973 p. 198), an explosion which shows the contradictory character of capitalist appropriation of labour's products 'through and by means of divestiture [Entäusserung] and alienation [Veräusserung]' (Marx, 1973, p. 196). Money is not external to production because circulation manifests itself as a 'process of production, as a real metabolism. And thus money is itself stamped as a particular moment of this process of production' (Marx, 1973, p. 217). The productive existence of money is the imposition of work through the commodity form. Money is a universal in movement – it is in 'constant flux, proceeding more or less over the entire surface of society; a system of acts of exchange' (Marx, 1973, p. 188), and, thus, a system of imposed work.

The transformation of value from one form to the other integrates production and circulation as different moments of one process. Each moment is a result and a presupposition of the other in and through the exploitation of labour. Circulation and production are distinct in unity, the common interest of which is the 'valorization of value as the determining purpose, the driving motive' (Marx, 1978, p. 180). The social validation of appropriated labour in circulation implies the social comparison (Vergleichung) of particular capitals in terms of socially necessary labour time as expressed in money. Socially necessary labour time constrains individual capitals in the form of an average rate of profit. The 'equalisation process of capitals ... divorces the relative average price of the commodities from their values, as well as the average profits in the various spheres of production ... from the actual exploitation of labour by the particular capitals' (Marx, 1966, p. 828). As 'profit seems to be determined only secondarily by the direct exploitation of labour ... , normal average profits themselves seem immanent in capital and independent of exploitation' (Marx, 1966, p. 829). In sum, capital appears as a value-creating thing. This relationship 'between the things amongst themselves' (Marx, 1976, p. 145) obscures the internal connection between 'value' and its social constitution. The sphere of circulation, in which the products of labour are realised as abstract value, is 'dominated by chance' where the 'inner law' of the class struggle over exploitation prevails in an 'invisible and unintelligible' form concerning 'the individual agents in production' (Marx, 1966, p. 828). Everything appears to be contingent. The production relations appear independent of one another and profits 'seem to issue from the womb of capital itself' (Marx, 1966, p. 827). Profit manifests itself in circulation as a source of the revenue of capital, a source in which the category of surplus labour is eliminated. 'Still more does all connection vanish no sooner the formula is transformed into “capital-interest” ' (Marx, 1966, p. 823). While the connection might have vanished, the reified generality of money exists only in and through the abstract category of labour.

Capital exists as individual capital only within the historically dynamic and changing composition of the social process of value. Particular capitals are only moments of this process, the mobility of which is imposed upon them through the fluidity of money capital. The circuit of money capital is, according to Marx (1978, p. 140), the 'most striking and characteristic form of appearance of the circuit of industrial capital'. Money is the material representative of general abstract wealth, of general labour, i.e. of the labour of all individuals (see Marx, 1973, p. 224). As the representative of abstract labour, money is the universal power: it is a means 'for creating the true generality' (Marx, 1973, p. 225) of a social existence in which 'capital pumps the surplus-labour, which is represented by surplus value and surplus-product, directly out of the labourers' (Marx, 1966, p. 821). The social character of individual labour is manifested to particular capitals through the money form.

Money capital is the rational expression of equality, productivity, repression and thinghood (Dinglichkeit) that characterises the determination of wealth as a social process of abstract labour. It is not only the true generality of abstract labour, it is, also, and because of this, the elementary form of capitalist social command. The 'money subject' (Marx, 1973, p. 144) entails the imposition of work through the commodity form, that is through the formal equality and the formal freedom which characterise capitalist exchange relations. 'The general interest is precisely the generality of self-seeking interests. Therefore, when the economic form, exchange, posits the all-sided equality of its subjects, then the content, the individual as well as the objective material which strives towards the exchange, is freedom. Equality and freedom are thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange values, but, also, the exchange of exchange values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom' (Marx, 1973, p. 245). Money represents the standardisation of individuals as abstract citizens. Money treats exploitative relations and citizenry as equal. All individual market agents are equal before money. As 'reification, reified relation, reified exchange value' (Marx, 1973, p. 160), money 'represents the universal terrain within which all subjects are reduced to subjects of exchange' (Bologna, 1993b, p. 67). Money is thus the incarnation of liberty, of private property. It represents the liberty of individualised property owners, their equality and freedom. As an expression of equality, money serves as a moment of exchange that perverts human activity into a commodity: wage labour. 'If money is an equivalent, if it has the nature of an equivalent, it is above all the equivalence of a social inequality' (Negri, 1984, p. 26). The abstract citizen of bourgeois society, and the suppression of human emancipation in favour of political emancipation (see Bonefeld, 1992), is the other side of money as the reified generality of human activity, if liberty, freedom and equality are looked at in their totality. The 'republic of the market' (Pashukanis, 1979) is the other side of the imposition of work through 'non-coerced', and hence free and equal, market relations. Money expresses the abstract average and formal equality of capitalist domination as it measures capital's capacity to impose work in a repressive and oppressive, but nevertheless contradictory, way.

The separation-in-unity of formal equality and exploitation indicates the contradictory power of money, expressing equality as a mode of existence of domination.14 'Money has the advantage of presenting me immediately the lurid face of social relations of value; it shows me value right away as exchange, commanded and organised for exploitation' (Negri, 1984, p. 23).15 Whether money serves as measure, medium of exchange or capital, it presents exploitative social relations in the form of equality and freedom. The concept of money, displaced from the contradictions of surplus-value production and, at the same time, the ultimate expression and suppression of these contradictions, is a concrete representation of the social reality of class antagonism. Money is the elementary form of the self-contradictory existence of the category of abstract labour. 'The precondition of commodity circulation is that they (commodities) be produced as exchange values, not as immediate use values, but as mediated through exchange value' (Marx, 1973, p. 196). In the circuit of money capital, value assumes a form which disregards labour as concrete labour inasmuch as money is disconnected from the production of use value and becomes a distinct thing. 'Money has a power which no right, no positive norm, can touch' (Bologna, 1993b, p. 67). It does not know a right to employment, housing, welfare, and education, etc. It is a disinterested power which only acknowledges its own 'rule': accumulate, accumulate! It negates social reproduction in and through the representation of capital as a value-creating thing: money presents itself as 'the' form of property. The contradictory character of 'capital' lies in its negation of labour's purposive productive activity at the same time as capital exists only through it. 'Money' is collective and abstract. It is collective because of the generality of its form. It is abstract because it represents 'form' without 'content'. Money is the 'meaningless' and most 'elementary' form (cf. Marx, 1966, Chap. 24) of the abstract category of labour, its incarnation and its self-contradictory negation.

Capital in general, as distinct from the particular real capitals, is itself a real existence ... For example, capital in this general form, although belonging to individual capitalists, in its elementary form as capital, forms the capital which accumulates in the banks or is distributed through them, and, as Ricardo says, so admirably distributes in accordance with the needs of production (Marx, 1973, p. 449).

Money expresses the abstract average and formal equality of capitalist domination as it measures capital's capacity to impose work in a repressive and oppressive way. Nevertheless, the existence of money as command over labour is contradictory, as each of the world's debtor crises shows.

Money is the meaningless16 and elementary form of capital because it asserts itself as a thing which has the capacity to expand abstract wealth independently of exploitation. The capacity of money to dissociate itself from exploitation involves money in the form of credit. Credit exists as a lever for expanded reproduction as it realises the internal relation of production and circulation without this internal relation having been performed in real terms. Credit-sustained accumulation, rather than eliminating the contradictory unity of surplus value production, constitutes a mode of existence through which this contradiction can temporarily move without, however, sweeping away the contradiction. The contradiction involved in the coexistence and sequence of different value forms within the circuit of social capital is the potential autonomisation (Verselbständigung) of monetary from productive accumulation. Money is thus in danger of losing its capacity of commanding the labour of others. Hence, it becomes meaning less (begriffslos) because it loses its grip on labour: it is deprived of meaning. However, the autonomisation of money emphasises also its elementary power as command over labour. The autonomisation of money means that the contradictory unity of surplus-value production is displaced to the constitution of a contradiction between productive and loanable capital or, in other words, of a contradiction 'between the factory and the credit system' (cf. Marazzi in this volume).17

In the credit system money functions as capital, 'though not in the hands of its proprietors, but rather of other capitalists at whose disposal it is put' (Marx, 1978, p. 261). In the form of credit, capital accumulates independently from its parent stock. 'The antithetical character of capital assumes an independent form' (Marx, 1966, p. 382) inasmuch as 'capital appears as a mysterious and self-creating source of interest – the source of its own increase' (Marx, 1966, p. 392). Interest bearing capital is capital par excellence (Marx, 1976, p. 447) as it manifests the pure form of capital (M ... M') and, as such, is an 'obscure thing' ('Dunkelding': Marx, 1976). Interest-bearing capital expresses capital as 'the subjectification of objects, the objectification of subjects' (Marx, 1976, p. 484) because it exists as an 'alienated form of the conditions of labour, it is realised in interest' (Marx, 1976). Hence money is the elementary and meaningless form of capital: capital assumes the form of an 'undifferentiated homogeneous form of independent value – money' (Marx, 1966, p. 368). The contradictory unity of surplus value production finds its most elementary mode of existence in the accentuation of abstract labour as money sans phrase: money is identified with money. In this 'mystification of capital in its most flagrant form' (Marx, 1966, p. 392), the process of production and the process of circulation appears directly as if it were 'unassisted by the process of production and circulation' (Marx, 1966, p. 392). 'Money' obtains here as an independent category of value in general inasmuch as 'capital assumes its pure fetish form, M ... M' being the subject, the saleable thing' (Marx, 1966, p. 393). The productive generality of social labour obtains as money's presupposition, a presupposition which is denied by the money form. 'Capital is now a thing, but as a thing it is capital' (Marx, 1966. p. 393). This displacement of abstract labour reduces capital 'to a meaningless condensation' (Marx, 1966, p. 391) without, however, dissolving the existence of particular capitals. Rather, it imposes upon them the social character of their own existence, while 'eliminating the relation to labour' (Marx, 1976, p. 456). However, money capital exists only in and through labour (M ... P ... M'). The value of money capital is not determined through the value it represents in relation to commodities or, more pronouncedly, in relation to itself, but through the surplus value which it produces for its owner (Marx, 1976). The contradictory unity of surplus value production makes itself felt through money capital's apparently self-valorising capacity. The productive power of labour exists qua contradiction in-and-against the form of money.

Capital assumes an apparently 'independent form' in interest as a relation between the owner of money capital and the manager of production. Profit splits into enterprise profit and interest 'as though they generate from essentially different sources' (Marx, 1966, p. 375). In these two forms of profit, the relation to surplus value is eliminated since they are concepts relating to each other as opposites. The differentiation between enterprise profit and interest disguises profit as a property of capital as such, a profit which would have been yielded even if capital had not been applied productively. The choice of investing reproductively or in monetary terms is, however, dependent on labour as substance of value, the contradiction between productive and financial engagement being determined by the class struggle over capitalist command in production. 'Labour must directly produce exchange value. i.e. money' (Marx, 1973, p. 224). The contradictory relation between production and circulation is transformed into a movement in which the contradictory unity of surplus value production reasserts itself in M ... M' – 'the meaningless form of capital, the perversion and objectification of production relations in their highest degree, the interest-bearing form, the simple form of capital, in which it antecedes its own process of reproduction' (Marx, 1966, p. 392). While the 'social relation is consummated in the relation of a thing, of money, to itself' (Marx, 1966, p. 392), 'interest is only a portion of the profit, i.e. of the surplus-value, which the functioning capitalist squeezes out of the labourer' (Marx, 1966, p. 392). In sum, while capital, in the form of money, assumes the form of an 'automatic fetish' (Marx, 1966, p. 392), it appropriates unpaid labour; and it is such power because it 'commands the labour of others be stowing a claim to appropriate the labour of others, and therefore represents self-expanding values' (Marx, 1966, p. 355). Although we see, in interest-bearing capital, 'only form without content' (Marx, 1966, p. 392), money must command labour so as to sustain itself as the universal of abstract labour. It cannot forget 'the slow pace, the daily struggle for the extortion of surplus value' (Bologna, 1993b, p. 83). And yet, it is this 'forgetfulness' which characterises money as the elementary and meaningless form of capital.

Credit-sustained exploitation of lahour is more than just a lever for expanded reproduction of capital. The contradiction involved here is that credit posits itself as the incarnation of wealth: value in process, money in process, and, as such capital' (Marx, 1983, p. 153). Although, in credit, the relation to labour as substance of value is seemingly eliminated, credit asserts itself as 'claim of ownership upon labour' (Marx, 1966, p. 476), i.e. as a claim on a portion of future surplus value. Credit represents abstract labour in the form of a claim on the future exploitation of labour. This claim exists in the form of the elementary and meaningless form of money. Credit attains social existence as command to exploit labour effectively. The constitution of the circuit of social capital on the basis of a crisis-ridden autonomisation of money capital from exploitation involves the assertion of 'private property' in its most abstract form. Credit-sustained accumulation implies a gamble with the future. The exploitation of labour presents itself as a mortgage on the future. This is because, in money, the abstract category of labour attains its most rational and at the same time meaningless mode of existence (M ... M'). While money asserts itself as the source of its own self-valorisation, M ... M' exists only in and through the ability of capital to harness labour as the variable component of exploitation. M ... M' exists only in and through the ability of capital to exploit labour effectively, i.e. to harness labour as the variable component of capitalist command for exploitation.

During a crisis,18 the expansion of credit increasingly spills over into unproductive and speculative channels. This spill-over appears as a disproportionte relation between the production of goods and market relations. In turn, this disproportion appears to be determined by contingent factors (e.g. erratic monetary policies), the eradication of which looks like a simple readjusting exercise so as to restore proportionality between supply and demand on the market. According to monetarist ideology, all that is here required is a consistent monetary and fiscal policy, which curtails economic activity. The notion that, if there is inflation, then the money supply needs to be deflated, is basically correct. However, it is correct only in terms of the monetary decomposition of class relations through the subordination of social relations to the abstract equality of money.19 This is because of the inner connection between different value forms. The disproportion between production and circulation cannot be explained by reference to the autonomisation of one form from the other, an autonomisation which can be resolved through a simple exercise of economic readjustment. A policy of state austerity does not relate directly to the crisis of surplus value production, but to the constitution of this same crisis in the form of money capital accumulating independently of the exploitation of labour while, at the same time, existing only in and through it.

The contradiction is not that between production and circulation; it is between capital and labour. The contradictory relation between the unfettered development of labour's productive power and the limits of the capitalist form of social reproduction imposes the compression of necessary labour so as to multiply the productive power of labour. The compulsion upon each individual capital not only to produce, but to increase relative surplus value in the course of accumulation, forces each capital to decrease necessary labour to the utmost. This process relates to the 'relation between necessary labour and surplus labour that is ... the relation between the constitutive parts of the working day and the class relation which constitutes it' (Negri, 1984, p. 72). Capital exists only in antithesis to living labour at the same time as capital exists only in and through the imposition of necessary labour. Capital depends on labour. Capital cannot autonomise itself from labour. Living labour is the substance of value. Individual capitals exist only as a moment of social capital and, as such, only in and through each other, and not only in and through each other, but only in and through the exploitation of labour. The strength of the link between money and exploitation depends on the imposition of work through the form of this imposition, that is exchange.

The capitalist crisis asserts itself in the form of unemployed capital. Unemployed capital does not simply cease to perform as capital. Unlike excess capital in production, unemployed capital exists in the general form of capital and, at the same time, in its elementary form; that is, money:

The so-called plethora of capital always applies essentially to a plethora of the capital for which the fall in the rate of profit is not compensated through the mass of profit – this is always true of newly developing fresh offshoots of capital – or to a plethora which places capitals incapable of action on their own at the disposal of the managers of large enterprises in the form of credit (Marx, 1966, p. 251).

This development is a moment of the overaccumulation of capital as money capital itself can no longer be converted into reproductive activity. In other words, money capital cannot be converted into expanded command over living labour. Hence, 'unemployed capital at one pole and unemployed workers at the other' (Marx, 1966, p. 251) - different poles of a continuum constituted by the existence of labour in-and-against capital. The sustaining of overaccumulation through credit constitutes the circuit of social capital on the basis of a speculative deferral of mass devaluation of capital. This deferral entails the possibility of an accumulation of debt. Money accumulates in the form of a potentially worthless claim on surplus value. The solidity and very existence of money capital is endangered insofar as a progressive deterioration of the relation between credit and exploitation renders capital, in its elementary form of money, increasingly meaningless. At the same time all social relations rest on the maintenance of formal exchange equality. All social relations depend thus on the stability of credit as a claim on future exploitation. The safeguarding of 'credit' or, in other words, of the formal exchange equality of the 'transcendental power of money', depends on how effectively capital can exploit labour, and of how effectively labour resists exploitation (see Holloway, 1990).

The sustaining of the exploitation of labour through unemployed capital is fictitious. This is because the exploitation of labour is sustained through an accumulation of claims on surplus value still to be pumped out of the worker. Unemployed capital has to be transformed into 'employed capital' if a general devaluation of social capital through hyperinflation and an accumulation of worthless debt and, ultimately, general bankruptcy of capital through the default of money, is to be avoided. The only way for this to happen is through the transformation of money into truly productive capital, a transformation which presupposes the recomposition of the relation between necessary and surplus labour. In order to keep up with interest payments and to transform credit into means of payment, capital needs to exploit labour more effectively so as to increase the surplus value already represented in the money supply but not yet produced by the workers. The stability of money divorced from productive accumulation is feasible only on the expectation of some future surplus value. This would require future profits that must not only be adequate to the further demands of accumulation but, in addition, large enough to replace the money capital which sustained accumulation through, in fact, unemployed capital. The more accumulation is sustained by credit, the more effectively capital needs to exploit labour so as to increase profitability, which is the only way of keeping up with debt. However, this is easier said than done since money is unemployed because it failed to impose expanded exploitation on labour. Further, the development of labour's productive power makes the exploitation of labour more and more expensive. The investment required to set labour in motion in production increases the cost price of production which, even under conditions of a rising rate of exploitation, tends to decrease the rate of profit. This is so because of the rising value of constant capital (means of production) relative to variable capital (labour power).20 Overaccumulation is thus 'the false name which is given to overexploitation' (Bologna, 1993a, p. 51). Additionally, capital has to overcome the disruptive power of labour which resists an exploitation beyond certain limits and below a certain wage. In other words, money is unemployed because it cannot command labour in the present and seeks, instead, to invest in the future exploitation of labour. It seeks redemption in the future. However, without a mass devaluation of money, the destruction of productive capacity, the scrapping of labour power, the liquidation of excess capital, widespread bankruptcy, worsening conditions, and intensification of work, this future remains fictitious. But capital has to prolong the present into the future in order to avoid a breakdown. The sustaining of production through debt, and its recycling, only intensifies the speculative dimension of capitalist command over labour, and with it, the fictitious integration of labour into the capital relation itself: capital's inability to exploit labour effectively threatens insolvency and liquidation for productive and money capital alike through the failure of one of the extreme poles of the contradictory unity of productive and money capital. Monetary panic and industrial crash are two sides of the same coin.

In the course of a crisis, which is itself stimulated by credit, reproductive capital's demand for means of payment increases. This demand can only be satisfied by credit. Consequently, credit becomes more expensive as demand rises, while depressed 'economic activity' and the effects of 'deflationary inflation' (cf. Mattick, 1980) threaten to turn debt into insolvency and bankruptcy of reproductive capital. Banks themselves face the threat of insolvency as credit defaults, threatening a collapse of the circuit of social capital based on speculation and debt-financing of reproduction. The tension between different value forms is signposted by the autonomisation of the meaningless, but elementary, form of value from exploitation. The safeguarding of the elementary form of money depends on exploitation which, itself, is sustained by 'unemployed' capital. In order to sustain the most elementary, and meaningless, form of capital, labour and productive capital need to be sacrificed so as to make it possible for banks to absorb heavy losses without default. However, the sacrificing of surplus value production on the altar of money destroys the basis through which the 'meaningless' form of capital exists. The default of productive activity threatens to bring about a collapse of the credit relations upon which all social relations rest. The sacrificing of surplus value production on the altar of money destroys the basis through which the money power of capital subsists. The unity of monetary and productive accumulation asserts itself in and through its destructive separation. The supremacy of money displaces, as a form of class struggle, the contradictory existence of the production process into a contradiction between credit and functioning capital. This displacement of the contradictory unity of surplus value production is abstract in terms of social command as its form of wealth is meaningless in content in terms of use-value production; it is none other than the dissociation of the valorisation from the labour process (see Marx, 1983, p. 48). All depends on the strength of the relation between money and exploitation. Credit has to command labour. It has to do so by integrating labour into the capital relation on the basis of the supremacy of the valorisation process rather than an accumulation of monetary claims upon the future exploitation of labour. Productive accumulation has to succeed in order for money capital to be sustained. Failure to turn credit into effective command over labour involves insolvency and bankruptcy for capital as a whole. Crisis shows what money is.

MONEY AND THE STATE

Basic to the development of the state is social conflict over the imposition of the value form upon social relations. The state is not an agent of capital. Each capital exists only in and through each other as moments of one process; their difference-in-unity is constituted through the abstract category of labour in action. For capitalist reproduction to take on the form of overaccumulation and crisis, each individual capital must be involved as a moment of the social process of value in terms of negation (devaluation) and affirmation (average rate of profit). The continuous transformation of value between particularity and universality (Reichelt, 1978) is mediated and composed within the circuit of social capital (see Marx, 1978, Chaps 1-4). One cannot derive the historical development of the state from the specific interests served by particular policies.21 Rather the form of the state needs to be seen as a mode of existence of the class relation which constitutes and suffuses the circuit of capital. Consequently, the form of the state attains existence as the political mode of existence of the abstract category of labour in action.22

The most developed form of the category of abstract labour in action is the global relations of exploitation. The world market is a presupposition and a premise of the whole process of capitalist reproduction. The world market 'is directly given in the concept of capital itself' (Marx, 1973, p. 163) as it constitutes the presupposition of capitalist reproduction 'as well as its substratum' (Marx, 1973, p. 228). This is because in the form of the world market 'production is posited as a totality together with all its moments, but within which, at the same time, all contradictions come into play' (Marx, 1973, p. 227). Accordingly, the utmost expansion of the process of abstract wealth founded on exploitation comprises also the expansion of the money form. The global movement of money 'acquires to the full extent the character of the commodity whose bodily form is also the immediate social incarnation of human labour in the abstract' (Marx, 1983, p. 141). Social relations subsist in and through the equality, repression, and thinghood represented by the global 'terrorism of money' (cf. Marazzi's 'Money in the World Crisis', Chapter 4 in this volume). Global relations of exploitation are the premise of the imposition of work within national boundaries. 'Although the state is constituted politically on a national basis, its class character is not defined in national terms, the capitalist law of property and contract transcending national legal systems, and world money transcending national currencies' (Clarke, 1992, p. 136). Nation states are not only in competition with each other, as each tries to divert the flow of money capital into its particular territory. They exist also as particular nodes within the global flow of capital. The nation state exists through the global relations of exploitation and is confined 'within limits imposed by the contradictory form of the accumulation of capital on a world scale' (Clarke, 1992, p. 136)23 .

In a crisis, the overexpansion of credit appears in the form of a growing drain on the reserves of the central banks. The reserve funds of the national banks are pivotal for the functioning of the credit system and, as such, for sustaining the exploitation of labour. The reserves guarantee the existence of credit in terms of the convertibility of bills of exchange to 'real' money. The limit to sustained accumulation appears in the form of a limited supply of official reserves with which to support the exchange rate in the face of a drain on reserves. This limitation appears to be related to the inflationary expansion of money and not to the crisis of containing labour's productive power within the limits of the capitalist form of reproduction. For the state, the drain on reserves manifests itself in the form of balance of payments deficits, over-ridden by a claim on tax revenue by creditors, and in the form of a threat to the convertibility of currency in commodities on the world market. over-ridden by speculative pressure on the exchange rate.24 The integration of national currency on the world market is backed by the ability of the central bank to meet a drain on reserves and to convert bills of exchange into means of payment. This ability of the central bank is supported by the revenue of the state. It is the revenue of the state which supports the reserves through the guarantee of credit as claim on taxation. The convertibility of national currency in commodities on the world market depends on the acceptability of national currency as legal tender on the world market. Such acceptability depends on the acceptance of credit as claim on tax revenue by financial markets, endowed with the ultimate sanction of speculative pressure against currency in case of 'domestic mismanagement'. The convertibility of credit depends on the ability of the state to restrict the expansion of credit as banks will fuel overaccumulation of capital by investing their capital in interest bearing ventures.25 'It is ultimately through the monetary policies of the state, mediated through the banking system, that the "interests" of capital-in-general arc imposed on par ticular capitals, as the expansion of production is confined within the limits of its capitalist form' (Clarke, 1988b, pp. 9-10). Restrictive monetary policies involve not so much a quest for sustaining capital in its most elementary form of money but, rather. a quest to sustain the existence of capital as a social form of reproduction. A default of the global credit relations endangers not only the abstract process of wealth in the meaningless form of money capital but, also, the elementary form of capital upon which all social relations rest. Money is the elementary form of abstract labour.

The speculative character of credit-sustained accumulation comes to the fore when the pseudovalidation of surplus value production through credit expansion asserts itself in an accumulation of (possibly) worthless paper. With the demand for means of payment rising, the ability of the central bank to act as lender of last resort becomes increasingly difficult. In order to maintain formal exchange equality on the world market, the political control of the money supply means a cutback on credit so as to sustain financial stability. In other words, it involves a policy of state austerity. However, an imposition of tight money is fraught with contradictions. Productive accumulation has to succeed in order for money capital to be sustained. The failure to turn credit into effective exploitation of labour reasserts, for productive capital, the crisis of exploiting labour effectively in the form of insolvency and bankruptcy, precipitating a default of credit as a claim on future surplus value.

In order to understand this working of 'money', one has to descend 'from the monetary image of crisis to an analysis of the crisis of social relations, from the crisis of circulation to the crisis of the relation between necessary and surplus labour' (Negri, 1984, p. 25). The substance of money is labour, the acceptability of money as legal tender being guaranteed by the effective exploitation of labour. The 'illusory community' of the formal equality of money subsists only through its command of 'alien labour'. The movement of the contradiction between productive capital and the credit system is determined by the class struggle over the imposition of valorisation upon the labour process. This struggle is constituted in the form of monetary pressures which are mediated through the state. In this crisis ridden process, the state attains generality as a self-contradictory moment of the social power of money. The dissociation of money from exploitation impresses itself upon the state through the money power of capital (M ... M'), a power in which the precondition of its existence, i.e. the expansive reproduction of capitalist exploitation of labour (M ... P ... M'), is seemingly eliminated. The contradictory unity of surplus value production impinges on the state as the contradiction between functioning and money capital. Because of the contradictory unity of surplus value production, the state rather than resolving the contradictions of capital, reproduces these contradictions in a political form.

A Keynesian policy of easy credit does not resolve overaccumulation, nor does the growth of the market which it stimulates (Mattick, 1980). Rather, it tends to fuel overaccumulation through the integration of the working class by guarantees of full employment and through the underwriting of profits by the creation of demand. Increase in the money supply, through the extension of credit and state loans, provides the guarantee that price increases can be realised, permitting accumulation and the maintenance of full employment in an ever-growing inflationary spiral. While depreciation charges might be absorbed through credit expansion and while unemployment is postponed, the tendency to overaccumulation accelerates, expressing itself in the form of price increases, budget difficulties, speculative pressure on currency and growing devaluation of money capital through inflation, erosion of confidence in the domestic organisation of money, threat to formal exchange equality of national currency on the world market, and, ultimately, a possible collapse of global credit relations. Credit-sustained overaccumulation teeters on the edge of collapse, the manifestation of which will be ever the more severe the more accumulation is sustained by credit. Credit expansion and growing state expenditure, domestically and internationally, eventually only exacerbates the very tendencies which these policies sought to regulate in the first place (Mattick, 1980).

A monetarist credit policy seeks to rectify overaccumulation through a restrictive monetary policy, politically reinforcing devaluation and liquidation of capital as well as unemployment. A policy of tight money and high interest rates makes it expensive for reproductive capital to draw additional means of payment required to sustain productive activity and employment, while high interest rates accelerate capital insolvency and liquidation. Although high interest rates make it possible for banks to absorb heavy losses without defaulting, a policy of tight money threatens to undermine the whole process upon which accumulation rests. Productive activity cannot be sacrificed because money exists only in and through labour as the substance of value. The attempt to impose the capitalist form of social reproduction through high interest rate policies reinforces the slump in productive activity as credit for outside financing gets scarce and costly and as debt service becomes more expensive. The credit system teeters on the edge of collapse as the claim on future surplus value defaults, precipitated by the inconvertibility of money into command over labour for the purpose of exploitation.

Both monetarism and Keynesianism are political phenomena of the contradictory unity of the abstract category of labour and the value form, that is to say, they are distinct moments of the dialectical continuum of the unity-in-separation of production and circulation. Keynesianism seeks to sustain unity by establishing demand which sustains overaccumulation through debt and inflationary pressure on profits, discriminating against the elementary form of money capital. Monetarism seeks to rectify disunity between production and circulation by sacrificing reproductive accumulation and labour on the altar of money. Such a restriction on the ambitions of reproductive capital threatens expansive production of surplus value and the credit system itself. Although Keynesian and monetarist policies can, to a certain degree, moderate the disunity between production and circulation, neither offers a resolution of the contradictions of capitalist reproduction. They seek to rectify the disruptive tension between distinct moments of social capital (i.e. productive and money capital) from different extremes, threatening to intensify the tension by sacrificing one moment in favour of the other.

The difference between monetarism and Keynesianism is political by virtue of the way in which the productive power of labour is subordinated to value production. Containment of social relations on the basis of tight monetary control entails the guarantee of credit through deteriorating living standards, and thus through the enforcement of debt on social relations. For example, during the 1980s, the monetarist attempt to re-tie money to work through a control of the money supply was abandoned shortly after this policy's inception. However, monetarism's short-lived political achievement was the decomposition of class relations on the basis of the individualising and fragmenting form of debt.26 The state attained generality as the political form of money-in-command: i.e. the organisation of labour power on the basis of the planning and control of social conflict and of the anticipation of the political behaviour of the working class. The 'enforcement of debt' or, in other words, monetarism's aim at making social relations pay capital's gamble with the the future, went hand-in-hand with a state prepared to resort to provocation and the use of force. The assertion of the face of equality in the form of debt amounts to the disciplining of labour to the power of money through the state. The political imposition of the disinterested rule of money involved the imposition of formal equality and formal freedom, an imposition which treated citizenry and debt as equal. In other words, the 'republic of the market' transformed into a 'republic of debt'. It is debt enforcement which holds the system together. This involved the recognition of the working class so far as property ownership was concerned.

The imposition of money involves the imposition of market equality on the basis of law and money. For example, the monetarist ideology of the New Right articulated the crisis of surplus value production in terms of the relationship between money and the state. It rejected the conception of the Keynesian interventionist state which was criticised as creating dependency and as sapping responsibility and self-respect. The monetarist attempt to regain financial stability through the imposition of non-coerced exchanges on the market aimed, thus, at reducing people's dependence on the state in favour of their subordination to the unfettered rule of exchange relations, of money. This subordination entails the imposition upon social relations of the abstract equality of money. According to monetarist ideology, the imposition of 'self-responsibility' is identical with the unfettered market freedom. This freedom restrains those who are not alert to the messages of the market: an attachment to any values other than those of material gain is ruthlessly penalised. As was reported above, in capitalism, money reduces all 'subjects to subjects of exchange' (Bologna, 1993b, p. 67). Every individual is equal before money. For those who possess money, it is a means to freedom and prosperity. For those who do not have it, their lack of money defines not only their poverty, but also their existence as a labouring commodity. 'The power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange values, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket' (Marx, 1973, pp. 156-7). The monetarist articulation of the limits of the market involved not only the monetary decomposition of class relations on the basis of the individual market agent. It involved, also, the attempt to impose work on the basis of the use of force: accommodate to market forces – or else! The coercive use of power manifests the right of property to secure private property against debt default. Monetarism's 'preemptive counterrevolution' (cf. Agnoli, 1975) entailed the use of force to secure debt as a claim on future exploitation in the present.

By imposing upon social relations the elementary form of capital, i.e. money, the state is involved in safeguarding the guarantee of money through coercion, binding the present to the future in an attempt to make certain the turn over of monetary claims on the future exploitation of labour. In this process, the self-contradictory form of the state attains generality as the 'harmonies' last refuge' (Marx, 1973, p. 886) – harmonies of formal equality and formal freedom upon which exploitation rests. The state as the harmonies' last refuge represents thus 'communal interest' (cf. Marx and Engels, 1982 ), imposing formal exchange equality through the sacrificing of social relations to the meaningless form of money. The imposition of money involves the political safeguarding of economic freedom as the abstract average of equality, the incarnation of which is money. The state attains existence as the collective representative of money in command: i.e. the subordination of social relations to monetary scarcity, involving law and order control as its preconditions, premise and result. The imposition of the value form involves not only the subordination of social relations to monetary scarcity but, more fundamentally, the monetary decomposition of class relations on the basis of the wage relation. Capital has to contain labour as the condition of its own existence. The antagonistic tendency of abstract labour involves, as already reported, the contradiction that labour must directly produce exchange value, i.e. money, at the same time as abstract labour, in the form of money, contradicts its capitalist form. The other side of labour's productive power is the potentially irredeemable accumulation of unemployed capital, of debt. Marx (1966, p. 438) characterised this situation as 'the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself'. Within capitalist society, this contradiction can be contained only through force (Gewalt) including not only the destruction of productive capacities, unemployment, worsening conditions, and widespread poverty, but also the destruction of human life through war and starvation.27 'Force' is as meaningless and elementary as money. Labour's antagonism to capital is the other side of money's 'transcendental power'. 'Money is now pregnant' (Marx, 1966, p. 393) with a future which threatens to push it into the museum of history. Money is the circuit of happiness which goes forward as total horror. 'One must entice the ossified social relations to dance by singing their own melody to them' (Marx).

CONCLUSION

This chapter has argued that the category of money is a self-contradictory form of labour's constituting power. It is neither a regulative mechanism for capitalist production nor does it exist merely as the incarnation of abstract wealth. And yet it is both. However, the question is not that of the function of money, but that of the explanation of its contradictory existence as a social power. As indicated by Clarke (1988a, pp. 13-14) money is 'the most abstract form of capitalist property' and so is 'the supreme social power through which social reproduction is subordinated to capitalist reproduction'. As this supreme social power, money asserts in meaningless and elementary form the dependence of capital upon labour. In money, the social usefulness of production appears as a mere thing (interest), inasmuch as the connection of money to labour is seemingly eliminated.

However, it is the failure to contain labour's productive power within the concept of profitability which lies behind the crisis-ridden dissociation of money from exploitation. At the same time, the stability of credit depends on the capacity of capital to exploit labour effectively. It has to exploit labour effectively because capital has not only to generate surplus value sufficiently to allow accumulation but also to satisfy its creditors. The potential autonomisation of money capital is constituted in and through the productive and disruptive power of labour. Money is the form in which capital flees from working class resistance in the factory. As Bologna (1993a, p. 52) indicates in his commentary on Marx's work between 1856 and 1857, 'the historical significance of monetary speculation resides precisely in the fact that it avoids a direct relationship with the working class'. At the same time, however, capital's attempt to suppress the 'law of value' by making money out of money rather than by exploiting labour, emphasises that capital lives beyond its means in a desperate attempt to prolong the present into the future. For capital, crisis is evidence of 'its loss of control over the working class' (Bell and Cleaver, 1982, p. 258). This loss emphasises the meaningless form of money as an aggressive force which seeks to ensure the alienation of the present to the future.

Against the background of the contemporary crisis, the continued expansion of credit indicates that capital has not succeeded in imposing a restructuring of the relations of exploitation adequate to its needs. Since the late 1960s capital has tried to impose a controlled deflation and has succeeded in a continued and unprecedented expansion of credit on a global scale. The debt crisis is a false name which is given to the crisis of money. Capital cannot redeem itself by making money out of debt. It has to face the working class. It cannot escape the class struggle by avoiding a direct confrontation with labour in production. It can only redeem its command over labour by imposing, with ruthless force, the relation between necessary and surplus labour on a global scale. Contemporary proposals by reformed socialists that 'government must make money its servant, not its master' (Mitchell, 1989, p. 61) are not just a delusion. The understanding of money as a 'medium which must be put to work for growth and jobs rather than the selfish purposes of the merchants of greed' (Mitchell, 1989, p. 61) proposes, in fact, that money must manage and organise the exploitation of labour. This chapter has shown what that means.

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• 1Many people have provided helpful comments on the chapter: my particular thanks to Peter Burnham, John Holloway and Richard Gunn.
• 2See Marx's (1983) critique of commodity fetishism.
• 3For a critique of such an understanding, see Holloway (1992); Bonefeld (1994).
• 4On the dialectics of human presuppositions (general abstractions) and social form (real abstraction) see Psychopedis (1992), Gunn (1992), and Holloway (1991).
• 5In the German edition of Capital,Marx speaks about 'verrückte Formen'. In German, 'verrückt' has two meanings: verrückt (mad) and ver-rückt (displaced). Thus, the notion of 'perverted forms' means that these forms are both mad and displaced. In other words, the forms are the modes of existence of labour, in which 'subject and object do not statically oppose each other, but rather are caught up in an “ongoing process” of the “inversion of subjectivity into objectivity, and vice versa” ' (Backhaus, 1992, p. 60, referring to Kofter).
• 6A similar argument is made by Psychopedis (1992). His reconstruction of dialectical theory shows the contradictory integration of social presuppositions with capitalism's fetishistic and destructive perversion of human relations into relations of 'things'. See also Backhaus ( 1992), Holloway (1992) and Bonefeld (1994), as well as Schmidt (1974) who argues that Marx's critique of political economy is characterised by the primacy of 'practice'.
• 7'Displaced' (ver-rückt) means here, and in the subsequent discussion, the constitution of labour's existence in and through perverted forms. These forms, using our earlier argument, are both mad and displaced. They are forms which are permanently in movement and cannot be presupposed as statically existing forms. In CapitalMarx emphasised this by talking about prozessuale Existenzformen. 'Displaced' thus indicates the constitution, and hence self-contradictory mode of existence, of alienated subjectivity.
• 8The classic expression of these approaches is Aglietta (1979) and Glyn and Sutcliff (1972), respectively.
• 9In the German edition of Capital,Marx uses the phrase 'automatisches Subjekt'. In the English edition. this phrase is translated as 'automatically active character' (Marx, 1983, p. 152).
• 10See, for example, Jessop (1991) whose approach depends on this misunderstanding.
• 11I use the term 'abstraction in action' as indicating the circumstance that value is not static but permanently moving. 'Action' connotes the idea of the transformation of objectivity (the objectivity of labour as purposeful activity) into subjectivity (the subjectivity of things), and conversely, the transformation of subjectivity into objectivity (objectivity of social existence). 'Abstraction' connotes the notion that that which moves is, in fact, a constituted self-contradiction, namely labour's constitutive power which exists against itself in the perverted form of value. 'Abstraction' and 'action' exist as moments of one process, that is, 'alienated subjectivity'.
• 12Were one to adopt the notion of capital having a logic independent from labour, the contradictory unity of surplus value production would only obtain as a conflict between different 'fractions' of capital, i.e. between productive and money capital. What these different fractions of capital are competing about remains unexplored inasmuch as the social constitution of value is not conceptualised.
• 13See Jessop (1985): for a critique see Bonefeld (1993a).
• 14On the term 'mode of existence' see Gunn (1987, 1992).
• 15This is not to endorse Negri's view of value as an economic category.
• 16In the Gennan edition of Capital, Marx talks of 'money' as abegriffslose form. In the English edition of Capital, begriffslos is translated as 'meaningless'. This translation is misleading. I use the term 'meaningless' here and in the subsequent discussion in terms of 'losing its grip' and hence as 'deprived of meaning'. This use of the term is much closer to the German termbegriffslos.
• 17Some authors conceptualise the contradictory relationship between 'credit and the factory' in terms of the banks suppressing productive activity (Fine and Harris, 1985). This view is misleading because it presupposes that capital ought not to make money out of money. The question is not what capital ought to do. Rather, the question is what constitutes the contradictory character of capitalist social relations.
• 18Space forbids a systematic conceptualisation of 'capitalist crisis'. On Marx's crisis theory see Bell and Cleaver (1982) and Clarke (1994); see also Bologna (1993a, 1993b); Holloway (1992) and Bonefeld (1988).
• 19See Clarke (1988a) and Bonefeld (1993b) on the monetary decomposition of class relations in Britain during the 1980s.
• 20On this see Rosdolsky (1977, Chap. 33).
• 21Such an understanding can be found in the work of Poulantzas (1973); Van der Pijl (1984); Ingham (1984); Fine and Harris (1985) and Anderson (1987); for a critique, see Clarke (1978, 1988b).
• 22See Bonefeld (1992) for a systematic conceptualisation of the form of the state as a mode of existence of labour in capitalism.
• 23See also Holloway's 'Global Capital and the National State', Chapter 6 in this volume and Burnham's 'Capital, Crisis and the International State System', Chapter 5 in this volume. Sec also Burnham (1990, 1993) and Bonefeld (1992).
• 24See also Clarke (1988a).
• 25In its historical development the state arrogated to itself powers to restrain the inflationary expansion of money. These powers provide the basis for the state's monetary and financial policies (see Marx, 1966, on the Bank Act of 1844).
• 26See Bonefeld (1993b), Clarke (1988a); and Cleaver's, 'The Subversion of Money-as-Command in the Current Crisis', Chapter 7 in this volume.
• 27See, for example, Barratt Brown (1993) on the war in the former Yugoslavia, Oeaver (1977) on 'Famine and Crisis', Postone (1986) on the political economy of 'Anti-Semitism', as well as Aly and Heim (1991) on 'population policies' under Nazism. See also Boncfeld (1988).