A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
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The relationship of moneys to socially necessary labor-time, which was problematic even in the case of gold, has become even more remote and elusive. But to say it is hidden, remote and elusive is not to say it does not exist. Turmoil in international currency markets has something to do with differences in material productivity in different national economies. The problematic relationship between the existing money-forms and commodity-values that Marx outlines is still with us and very much open to the line of analysis that he pioneered, even though its contemporary form of appearance is quite different.
Section 3: Money
Marx has examined money as a measure of value and revealed some of its contradictions, particularly with respect to its “ideal” functions as price and the consequent “incongruities” in the relationship between prices and values. He has looked at money from the standpoint of circulation and revealed another set of contradictions (including the possibility of general crises). Now—typical Marx—he comes back to us and says, well, at the end of the day, there is only one money. This means that somehow the contradictions between money as a measure of value and money as a medium of circulation have to have “room to move” or perhaps even be resolved.
He thus begins by reiterating the foundational idea of money as “the commodity which functions as a measure of value and therefore also as the medium of circulation, either in its own body or through a representative” (227). So we are back to the unitary concept, but we must examine how the contradictions earlier identified can operate within it. The loosening of the connection between value and its expression provides room for maneuver, but it does so at the expense of contact with a real and solid monetary base. From this point, Marx probes deeper into the contradictions that characterize this evolved form of the money system. He begins by considering the phenomenon of hoarding:
When the circulation of commodities first develops, there also develops the necessity and the passionate desire to hold fast to the product of the first metamorphosis. This product is the transformed shape of the commodity, or its gold chrysalis. Commodities are thus sold not in order to buy commodities, but in order to replace their commodity-form by their money-form. Instead of being merely a way of mediating the metabolic process, this change of form becomes an end in itself … The money is petrified into a hoard, and the seller of commodities becomes a hoarder of money. (227–8, emphasis added)
(This passage foreshadows another kind of circulation process, as we’ll see, in which C-M-C is viewed as M-C-M with the procurement of money as an end in itself.)
But why would people do this? Marx offers an interesting twofold answer. On the one hand there is a passionate desire for money-power, but on the other there also exists a social necessity. Why is hoarding socially necessary for commodity exchange? Here he invokes the temporal problem of coordinating the sales and purchases of different commodities that take very different times to produce and bring to market. A farmer produces on an annual basis but also buys on a daily basis; he therefore needs to hoard reserves from one harvest to the next. Anyone wishing to purchase a big-ticket item (like a house or a car) needs to hoard money first—unless there is a credit system. “In this way hoards of gold and silver of the most various sizes are piled up at all the points of commercial intercourse” (229).
But the ability to hold the means of exchange (in defiance of Say’s law) also awakens a passion, a “lust for gold.” “The hoarding drive,” he says, “is boundless in its nature.” Witness Christopher Columbus: “Gold is a wonderful thing! Its owner is master of all he desires. Gold can even enable souls to enter Paradise” (229–30). Here Marx, quoting Columbus, returns to the idea that once you can hang a price tag on something, you can hang it on anything—even a person’s soul, as his allusion to the Catholic Church’s infamous medieval practice of selling indulgences (i.e., papal pardons that promised entry into heaven) suggests:
Circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as the money crystal. Nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of the saints cannot withstand it. (229)
The sale of indulgences is sometimes regarded as one of the first major waves of capitalist commodification. It certainly laid the basis for all that hoarded wealth in the Vatican. Talk about the commodification of conscience and honor!
So there is nothing that is not commensurable with money; in the circulation of commodities, it is “a radical leveller, it extinguishes all distinctions” (229). This idea of money as a radical leveler is very important. It indicates a certain democracy of money, an egalitarianism in it: a dollar in my pocket has the same value as one in yours. With enough money, you could buy your way into heaven no matter your sins!
But money is also “itself a commodity, an external object capable of becoming the private property of any individual. Thus the social power becomes the private power of private persons” (229–30). This is a vital step in Marx’s argument. Notice how it echoes the third “peculiarity” of the money-form revealed in the section on relative and equivalent values—i.e., money’s tendency to render private labor a means of expression for social labor. With this step, though, Marx reverses that initial formulation of the logical relation between money and labor. There, the problem was that private activities were involved in the production of the universal equivalent. Now, he is describing the way in which private persons can appropriate the universal equivalent for their own private purpose—and we begin to see the possibility for the concentration of private and, eventually, class power in monetary form.
This does not always go down well. “Ancient society … denounced it as tending to destroy the economic and moral order” (230). This is a theme that Marx explored at some length in the Grundrisse, where he writes on how money destroyed the ancient community by becoming the community itself, the community of money.2 This is the kind of world in which we ourselves now live. We may have fantasies of belonging to this or that cultural community, but in practice, Marx argues, our primary community is given by the community of money—the universal circulatory system that puts breakfast on our tables—whether we like it or not:
Modern society, which already in its infancy had pulled Pluto by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of its innermost principle of life. (230)
The social power that attaches to money has no limit. But boundless though the hoarding drive may be, there is a quantitative limitation on the hoarder: the amount of money he has at any given time. “This contradiction between the quantitative limitation and the qualitative lack of limitation of money keeps driving the hoarder back to his Sisyphean task: accumulation” (231, emphasis added). This is the first mention of accumulation in Capital, and it is important to notice that Marx arrives at it by uncovering the contradiction inherent in the act of hoarding money.
The limitless potentialities for monetary accumulation are fascinating to reflect on. There is a physical limit to the accumulation of use-values. Imelda Marcos is reported to have had some two thousand pairs of shoes, but this enormous quantity is still a finite amount. How many Ferraris or McMansions can you own? With money-power, the sky seems to be the limit. No matter how much money they earn, all CEOs and billionaires want, and can get, more. In 2005 the leading hedge fund managers in the United States received around $250 million in personal remuneration, but by 2008 several of them, including George Soros, gained nearly $3 billion. The accumulation of money as unlimited social power is an essential feature of a capitalist mode of production. When people seek to accumulate that social power, they start to behave in a very different way. Once the universal equivalent becomes a representation of all socially necessary labor-time, the potentialities for further accumulation are limitless.
The consequences of this are legion. A capitalist mode of production is essentially based on infinite accumulation and limitless growth. Other social formations at some historical or geographical point reach a limit, and when they do, they collapse. But the experience of capitalism, with some obvious phases of interruption, has been characterized by constant and seemingly limitless growth. The mathematical growth curves illustrating the history of capitalism in terms of total output, total wealth and total money in circulation are astonishing to contemplate (along with the radical social, political and environmental consequences