Finance, Accumulation and Monetary Power by Daniel Woodley;

Author:Daniel Woodley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2020-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Subsumption of commodity society to interest-bearing capital

The dialectic of fiat and commodity money thus underlies a dynamic in contemporary capitalism towards financial market socialism, which – through the scale and power of financial markets – necessarily transcends territorially bounded state money as a unit of account, means of exchange or store of value. The transnational state form of capital is thus integral to the reproduction of total social capital where exchange value determines the emergence of money as a universal equivalent mediating and aligning incommensurable leveraged values. It is here the conditions of possibility for the emergence of fungible forms of global commodity money take shape, that is, for the prolific global expansion of interest-bearing capital as a self-valorizing value distinct from state-issued fiat money and the contingency of commodity circulation mediated by territorially bounded currencies. Marx indicated what capital might become if it existed unconstrained in accordance with its own immanent principles – namely pure quantitative structure without substance as ‘finite’ forms of capital (wealth) cease to exist as barriers to ‘capital’s drive towards infinity, its telos as absolute wealth’ (McNally 2003: 6). As the real subject of modern monetary economies, interest-bearing capital rationalizes inchoate social, economic and cultural forms to appropriate the results of human labour, yet this appropriation is unstable in the absence of corporate organization and defenceless in the absence of its state form. In this sense, the dialectical relation between global disembodied money and its national-state form as a means of payment and unit of account is only one component in the global reproduction of total social capital as a self-constitutive dynamic mode of power in which all aspects of human society and culture become structurally embedded. This reciprocal relation between corporate and state power is a generic feature of contemporary postliberal capitalism as oligopoly replaces competition and derivative market values overshadow state circuits of money capital yet paradoxically remain dependent, in periods of extreme turbulence, on state-issued fiat to sustain liquidity in the financial system through public acquisition of distressed private bank assets.

Before proceeding to examine the evolution of monetary power in financial socialism as a logical extension of postliberal capitalism, it is worth considering the broader social implications of the growth of financial market money and the unprecedented expansion of credit markets in commodity-determined society. The power of capital, argue Bryan and Rafferty, derives

not just from the extraction of a surplus, but also from the capacity to shift financial and other risks onto other people. Perhaps people’s subordination to capital comes not just from the extraction of a surplus in the workplace, but also from holding illiquid assets (jobs, houses, health) in a world of liquid assets, leaving workers (households) as systemic ‘shock absorbers’ in global financial markets, itself a variation on ‘surplus’ extraction. (2014: 891)

An essential feature of neoliberal financialization is the transfer of risk, not merely within the financial system in the form of speculative trades, but disproportionately across society as a whole. This is no more apparent than in the

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