6 The Alien World of Money and Beyond . . .

6 The Alien World of Money and Beyond . . .

The magical qualities of money transfixed the philosophers of the ancient and medieval eras. The quest to turn base metals into gold eluded the greatest of ancient minds. It was the modern bourgeoisie which was to discover the secrets of the philosopher's stone. The class that laid naked the superstitions and chauvinism of the ancient world established themselves as the first great sorcerers in history: a class apparently able to conjure money out of itself through the self-expansion of money. The bourgeoisie solved the mysteries of money and this resulted in the abandonment of philosophical explanations of money. The intellectual representatives of the new magicians established money as an essential component of the natural order and thereby made the philosophical enquiry into its origins and expansion an irrelevant endeavour. Through the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and J. S. Mill, money was subsequently reduced to a mere derivative of a rational process of exchange, and the apparent power of money reduced to the powerful rationality of a system based on exchange and mutual equivalence. These writers could not, however, adequately account for the process of accumulation which was a central feature of the emergent capitalist system. The problem was that the working class began to understand and puncture the magical veils behind which the secrets of money were concealed; as the substantive irrationalities and inequalities of capitalist development increasingly undermined the formal rationality of commodity production and exchange. The bourgeoisie perceived the threat and reformulated the magic through the arcane and exotic incantations of marginalist economics and Weberian sociology.

Whilst for classical political economy money emerged as a natural derivative of a rational system, for economists such as Karl Menger and Stanley Jeavons, and sociologists such as Max Weber and Georg Simmel, money was a derivative of individual action and subjectively interpreted values. The magical separation of the rational (economics) and the irrational (sociology) aspects of this formulation could not, however, withstand the deeply contradictory tendencies contained within money itself. The modern magicians of capital had created a monster that they could no longer control: a monster whose constant transmogrification into ever-greater and more grotesque forms threatened to expose the secret agent lying behind the self-expansion of money: labour. As Marx and Engels noted in the Communist Manifesto:

Modern bourgeois society, a society that has conjured up such mighty means of production and exchange, is like a sorcerer who can no longer control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells.
(Marx and Engels, 1965: 39; emphasis added)

This threat was the basis on which Keynes was to emerge as 'the last great magician of number'. Keynes recognised the social subjectivity of money through the way in which money evacuated the exchange process in order to maintain itself as a store of value, and the way that this resulted in money being a motive force in determining the crisis-ridden form of capitalist development. The genius of Keynes was his recognition that modern development (modernisation) was premised upon the simultaneous self-expansion of dead labour (objectified in money) and living labour (as subject, personality, as human capital: money). The problem was that Keynes did not recognise the deeply contradictory nature of the form of capital accumulation his work was attempting to understand and rationalise. As Berman (1983) notes, capitalist modernisation is the harnessing of the development (self-expansion) of money-capital and the development (self-expansion) of human individuality and personality. However, the working class exist in, against and through money. Keynesianism had harnessed rather than destroyed the autonomy of labour within the institutions of capital. Capital imbued the working class with its own psychological neuroses and irrationalities and called forth the therapy which has become known as monetarism. If we are adequately to understand monetarism, we need to explore the intimate connections between the spatial and temporal configurations of capital and the moral and ethical configurations of the self. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall explore the way in which such a project might proceed. I approach this through the concept of ontology: an exploration of the relationship between the ontology of capital and the ontology of the self.

Ontologies Of Capital And The Self

I need to begin with an exploration of the ontological status of capital and the implications of this for the determination of individual identity and subjectivity. I will approach this through an exploration of capital's most ab-stract form – money. Sociology argues that modern money emerged as a consequence of modernity — a tautology which fails to address the specific form of money in post-traditional societies (Giddens, 1990, 1991; Dodd, 1994). This is presented as part of the process of time—space distanciation which required the emergence of 'abstract tokens' to mediate social relations ruptured by time and space. The impact of these developments on individual identity was the development of an intensified reflexivity: a formulation which stresses the ontological differentiation between the self and the forms of social being (i.e. money) through which the self is produced and reproduced. As we have seen, the analysis of money developed by Simmel marks the most developed example of this approach. And yet Simmel also anticipates the postmodern critique of Kantian dualism: the way in which individuals exist through money and define their identities through monetary codes and symbols (Lash and Urry, 1994). In other words, money and the self both have a discursive ontological status: the meaning of money defined through processes of intertextuality.

Postmodern writers are right to criticise neo-Kantian analyses of money and usefully highlight the way in which we exist through money as a form of social being. The mistake of this approach is to abstract from the abstract qualities of money in order to produce an abstract theory of money. We must begin with the proposition that money is real: money exists as a real social form. As I have shown in the preceding chapters, money developed historically through a real social process of abstraction: money is a real abstraction (rather than an abstract abstraction) and the abstract qualities of money are real. Our own ontological status is also defined by these real abstract qualities: we can only exist through money and our own abstract qualities (our identity and personality) are determined through the same real abstract process. Whilst our subjectivity appears as an abstract categorisation of traits, these are real abstract characteristics because they too are determined through the same real abstract process. Therefore, money and the self share the same ontological status: as a form of social being: an existential categorisation determined through a real abstract historical process.

Modern social science is thus premised on a particular ontological assumption concerning a cognitively grounded conceptualisation of self. Whilst postmodernism is concerned with the decentring and fragmentation of this self, it nevertheless assumes the pre-existence of an ontologically secure self. This is problematic owing to the ambiguity of human existence in time—space. We are simultaneously objectified (alienated) by money and constituted subjectively through money. In a society dominated by money, I am money. I am an embodied manifestation of money in all its contradictory manifestations. Money exists simultaneously as C-M-C and M-C-M' and I exist as C-M-C and M-C-M'. True subjectivity is denied by the inner essence of money. Money is the denial of self and the denial of society. In fact, money is society and money is the self. There is no reality (objective or subjective) outside the reality of money. Human society is constituted as the alien power which infests and colonises the inner-life of man and which denies the possibility of society except through the alien society of money. Money is the universal whore through which I prostitute my humanity. Humanity, however, is no more than an abstraction created by the abstract power of money. Money simultaneously invented humanity and denied humanity. Humanity becomes a cyborg: an automaton denied existence by the alien which infests her life-world.

The Land Of The Cyborgs: Beyond The Alien Planet Of Labour

In Marxist science the notion of the relation between man and machine (cybernetics) is investigated through the concept of alienated labour. Whilst the process through which alienation occurs is the subject of much debate, the category labour is not addressed. Incredibly, labour is the last great unexplored region of Marxist scholarship. Whilst the category of labour is taken on uncritically in liberal social science, e.g. economics, industrial relations and management studies, the focus within Marxism has tended to be on the activity of workers forming collective associations at work: trade unions. But labour demands attention. Now more than ever. The programme that identified labour with worker has been corrupted by an anti-virus: desire.

This anti-virus appeared in a virulent form in the worker struggles of the early 1960s throughout Europe and most articulately in the 'Autonomia' movement in Northern Italy. Autonomia was both an intensely practical and a theoretical project, concerned with the organisation of worker resistance and the position of theory (intellectuals) within that process. Through a science of subersion it sought, by focusing on the capital/labour dynamic, (the capital relation) to invert the class perspective and so examine the capital relation from the position of labour. Autonomist intellectuals (Negri, Tronti) argued that changes in the organic composition of capital, the replacement of variable capital (labour) by constant capital (machines), were not motivated by the logic of capital but were the result of the inability of capital to subordinate labour to the imperatives of valorisation. The changes imposed by labour forced capital to recompose itself and decompose labour. This recomposition does not resolve anything, but rather, provides the basis for further struggles. As these struggles develop they move outside the workplace to contaminate the whole of human life. Civilisation is organised as 'one vast labour camp — the global Gulag' (Cleaver, 1992: 116). But despite this real subsumption of labour by capital, resistance continues as 'self-valorisation': the creative use of time and space as multiple counter-cultures leading to the creation of autonomous subjectivities.

Now that the class struggle is over the whole social working day and is being waged by a fully socialised proletariat, it is impossible to see relations of production merely as a by-product or 'result' of production relations: the contemporary crisis of capitalism requires a further social dimension beyond the workerist analysis of the 60s and 70s — the crisis is both a crisis of production and of the reproduction of wage work relations as a whole.
(Negri, 1988: 177)

Despite the importance of this exposition the Autonomists failed to explain labour in terms of the crisis of work relations as a whole. Capital is presented as if it were an extra-human thing and labour a human thing, rather than labour as an extra-human thing and capital as what humans are. The Autonomists presented labour as a form of existence that was independent of capital, rather than as a form of social existence that has been formed, or perverted, by capital as alienated labour. Whilst they understood the process of alienation, the real existence of labour had not been explained. If capital is alienated labour, then labour cannot be independent. It can only be understood as labour's constitutive power in a mode of being denied in the capitalist form of social reproduction (Bonefeld, 1994: 49–50).

This immanence suggests a more intimate relation between man and machine than has formally been acknowledged in Marxist scholarship. As the distinction between body and machine becomes indistinguishable, the importance of a communist science of the cyborg becomes more compelling (Hardt and Negri, 1995). At the present moment technical and intellectual labour is tending towards abstract and immaterial, complex and cooperative processes. All this is intensified by the appearance of the computer in its digital and DNA (human) form. The machine is now integral to the subject and not just an appendage, as it was for Marx. The subject is both human and machine throughout its core, its nature: there is a new human nature coursing through our bodies. Postmodernism is right, the subject has disappeared; postmodernism is wrong, the subject has been replaced by a new subject, the cyborg, who as subjectivity is the affirmation of life who is communism:

The contradiction of exploitation is thus displaced onto a very high level, where the subject who is principally exploited is recognized in its creative subjectivity but controlled in the management of the power that it expresses. It is from this very high point of command that the contradiction spills over into the entire society. And it is therefore with respect to this very high point of command that the entire social horizon of exploitation tends to unify, situating within the antagonistic relationship all the elements of self-valorisation at whichever level they arise.
(Hardt and Negri, 1995: 281)

Man is not simply the bearer of a relation or an appendage to the machine. Man is the relation. He is the machine. There is nothing else. In this cybernetic universe machines and the logic of machines (production) have replaced man and nature. Nothing else has any meaning, everything is production, everything has the same essential reality, with desire (antivirus) as its immanent principle; its divine energy dissolving all idealistic and normative categories.

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking machine or a breathing machine (asthma attacks) . . .
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 1)

The machine will not take over the world in the immediate future. It already has. Human labour is not an appendage to the machine, it is the machine. The world is labour. The world is a machine. There is, then, a connection between the empirical reality described by liberal social science and this cyborg science: labour is invisible because labour is everything. In order to avoid this overwhelming abstraction, we need to become travellers in time and space. The space and time we need to explore is not, however, the inter-galactic world of outer-space but the hidden and alien inner-spaces infested by the grotesque and perverted forms of money-capital. There is another world concealed within the world: i.e. the world of sustainable life, communism — the science of the future.