“Afraid for our money!”: The tabloid headlines once again speak from the commodity souls of the people. Yesterday, it was the shock of the real estate crash and the subsequent global financial crisis; today, it is the shock of the imminent bankruptcy of the Greek state that is increasing general insecurity. With each new case, the chain of bad loans proves to be so far-reaching that there are still victims far away. It is no coincidence that the intensification of contradictions is concentrated on money as the medium and end in itself of capitalist “abstract wealth” (Marx). This once again raises the long-suppressed question of the substance and institutional anchoring of money itself. Until World War I, this was not an issue because of all central currencies were pegged to gold. In the war economies and the Great Depression, this peg had to be broken. Necessity was made a virtue; Keynes called gold a “barbarian relic.”
After World War II, the Bretton Woods monetary system was initially anchored to the dollar as the world’s money, which was the only currency still convertible into gold. After this last peg was removed in 1973, the global monetary system shifted to floating exchange rates with increasing uncertainty. Keynesianism collapsed in the face of inflation, which until then had only been known as a consequence of the war economies. The monetarist doctrine of neoliberalism still promised strict limits on the money supply, but even this purely formal commitment was abandoned in the wake of the bursting of financial bubbles since the turn of the century and replaced by a de facto “zero interest rate policy” of the central banks. Now, the money glut that fueled the deficit booms is culminating in a nascent crisis of financial markets and state finances. A growing number of economists are flirting with a “re-monetization” of gold in order to restore monetary stability in a kind of deliverance.
But the clock cannot be turned back. As Marx already showed in the second volume of Capital, gold production as the basis of the monetary system is an unproductive burden, which today would amount to about 5 percent of gross domestic product; roughly the size of the military-industrial complex, which is also capitalistically unproductive. But the problem goes deeper. The decoupling of money from its value substance corresponds to the decoupling of commodities from their labor substance. The price system is only formal and hangs in the air, so to speak. This is just another expression of the fact that the productive forces can no longer be represented in the form of value, as Marx had predicted. After a long period of incubation since 1973, this state of affairs is now breaking through to the surface as a burgeoning crisis of the money medium itself. It is no coincidence that the crisis of the financial markets has rapidly shifted to the state guarantors of money. As always, the weakest links break first, but the problem is a general one. Since socialism beyond the logic of valorization and its medium currently appears unthinkable in the public consciousness, the emergency measures will only open up new contradictions that will assert themselves with increasing speed. The return of the “barbarian relic” could not gild the crisis period, but only bring the fetish character of the ruling mode of production to final recognition.
Originally published in Neues Deutschland on 04/30/2010
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