Special Section: Eurocrisis, Neoliberalism and the Common Theory, Culture & Society 2015, Vol. 32(7–8) 39–50 ! The Author(s) 2015 and Financial Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276415598213 tcs.sagepub.com Christian Marazzi University of Applied Sciences of Italian Switzerland

Abstract The current post-workerist analyses of the crisis of financial are rooted in the declaration of inconvertibility of the Dollar in 1971 and the consequent collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system. The experience of ‘Primo Maggio’, the magazine on militant history directed by Sergio Bologna, was determinant in devel- oping a consistent explanation of the relationship between ‘money as capital’ and working class struggles. The transition from Fordism to Post-fordism, which begun in those years, coincides on the one hand with the crisis of the labour value theory and, on the other, with the emergence of the of capital. The advent of the debt economy, which led to the present crisis, reflects the destruction of the wage relationship and the de-substantialization of money. Beyond any objective measure of value, what is necessary is something that points to the subjectivity of struggles and to the forms of life that give them substance.

Keywords debt economy, financialization, inconvertibility of money, money as capital, workerism

In order to address the topic at hand, I will start from a historical recon- struction of the analysis, the reflection and the elaboration carried out by workerism and ‘post-workerism’ (I do not know if it is correct to call it this but, in any case, it is what we all share) on money and financializa- tion. There is a paper by Stefano Lucarelli titled ‘Sentieri Interrotti’ [Broken Paths] (published in an edited book on the experience of ‘Primo Maggio’ [May Day], the magazine on militant history edited by Sergio Bologna) which allows anyone interested in the origins of work- erism to understand how, in the 1970s, it took its first steps in that direction. It was titled ‘Broken Paths’ because, in effect, the experience of ‘Primo Maggio’ and, in particular, of the so-called group on money, terminated at the end of that decade, to then re-emerge in the 1990s under new guises and along different paths (some of which were only individual), spurred by the stimuli of the 1997 crisis in South-East Asia

Corresponding author: Christian Marazzi. Email: [email protected] Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/ 40 Theory, Culture & Society 32(7–8) and later in Russia, by the internet bubble, and, from 2007 onward, by the great structural crisis of financial capitalism. Let us go back to the 1970s and to the questions addressed and developed by the ‘Primo Maggio’ group, of which I was a member too. Reading Lucarelli’s account, it is clear how important was the declar- ation of 15 August 1971 on the inconvertibility of the dollar. That well- known declaration was the end of the Bretton Woods period, designed by White and Keynes in 1944, which was called, in fact, the Bretton Woods monetary system. The Americans were the winners in those heady days, by virtue of the fact that in the 1930s and during the war they had hoarded two-thirds of the world stock of monetary gold and, thanks to both this metallic power and the power of their military, they had pro- posed a system based on the equivalence between dollar and gold (the well-known 35 dollars per ounce of gold). Hence, a parity was fixed between the dollar and other , which thus came to be ‘indirectly’ related to this gold-standard: it was a mixed system – the ‘gold-dollar exchange standard’. During the 1960s, it became clear that this relation to gold was extremely loose: the Americans, in fact, had considerably increased the quantity of dollars in circulation around the world, to enable the of multinational companies and in order to pay for their imports. In those years, the French president Charles de Gaulle insistently protested against this invasion of dollars – a massive influx in the form of payments for imported from Europe and the rest of the world – demanding to verify how much gold was actually behind this money. It was a method of payment that increas- ingly appeared to everyone as a mere sign, rather than a value, a general equivalent. De Gaulle referred to the work of economist Jacques Rueff, who had even proposed to increase fourfold the price of gold in order to somehow re-establish the proportion between circulating money and the gold base. This preamble is necessary to grasp what happened in the 1970s. Especially as a consequence of the workers’ struggles for wages after 1968, the French considerably reduced their rigidity: in order to cope with these struggles, it was more convenient for them to loosen the inflex- ibility of exchange rates (the exchange rate between the French franc and the dollar was fixed, as was established by the Bretton Woods agree- ments). Giovanni Arrighi notes this in his last book, where he affirms that the French – while arguing for the stability of the monetary referent – partially gave up on this claim after the struggles for wages in 1968–9, as they realized that flexible and non-fixed exchange rates were more convenient in such a system. In this way, by devaluing the French franc or any other national , it was possible to recover what had been lost in terms of labour costs. In the circumstances created during the course of the 1960s, the United States declared the inconvertibility of dollar to gold. This was described Marazzi 41 as a ‘top-down revolution’. After the 15th of August, Toni Negri, with his usual swiftness, wrote an article in Potere Operaio [Workers’ Power] (a monthly magazine that was also distributed in the factories), replete with references to the Grundrisse, in which he interpreted this epochal event from the point of view of the famous ‘Fragment on Machines’, where Marx foresaw the end of the law of labour-value as a consequence of the development of productive forces and the science incorporated in machinery. At that point, labour only represents the least part of value and, therefore, there is no need for a general equivalent, be it gold or any other type of fiduciary money that functions as a general equivalent. The article tried to link the end of convertibility to the non-measurability of value. It was no longer possible to think of the general equivalent in classical Marxist terms, that is, to think of money as the sovereign good, to which all other goods referred and into which they could be translated. Negri’s interpretation thus pointed to a break in the relation between the measurability of value and its monetary representation, i.e. the general equivalent. The following year, Sergio Bologna wrote an article – entitled ‘Moneta e Crisi’ [Money and Crisis] – which was to prove foundational to the establishment of both ‘Primo Maggio’, in 1973, and the work of the group on money. In this work, militant historian Bologna read Marx’s articles for the New York Daily Tribune, on the crisis which broke out in France in the mid-18th century, as a consequence of the great socializa- tion of carried out by the Pereire brothers’ Cre´dit Mobilier, and which allowed Napoleon III to exit the crisis produced by the class strug- gles of 1848. In these writings, Marx had already utilized the category of ‘top-down revolution’, which Engels would take up again some 20 years later when talking about Bismarck. It was the revolution of a capital in confrontation with a working class capable of fighting and destabilizing the system. The response to this crisis, which was linked to a specific type of class composition and subjectivity, was a grandiose operation, which was at one and the same time capitalist and state-led. It was capitalist in that the Pereire brothers’ Cre´dit Mobilier began to buy shares across the whole of France, thus multiplying the funds for other purchases. In other words, this was a sort of precursor of the subprime credit system, with the support of the state and of Napoleon III, who together provided the funds. This great operation of socialization, a sort of ‘communism of capital’ through banking credit, consisted of the creation of money by the state and the , through which the working class was co-opted and returned to work. Obviously, Marx analysed this operation from the point of view of its internal contradictions too. This is what he would develop later in the third book of Capital: the capacity of capital to expand and promote growth through the forced socialization of credit. However, the growth of capital contains within itself its own 42 Theory, Culture & Society 32(7–8) contradictions, i.e. crises and over-production; the fact that, at some point, it must face the impossibility of extracting surplus value beyond a certain level, due to the rigidity imposed by the labour necessary to the operation. Therefore, behind the crisis and over-production there is the rigidity of necessary labour: this is a point that will define the workerist theories of the crisis, and which, by the way, had already been empha- sized by various Marxists like, for example, Lenin and Grossman, the latter of whom was possibly the one theorist who best brought this dynamic into focus. At stake is the impossibility of carrying on accumu- lating due to the lack of capitalist : since the rate of profit does not increase, what can they do? This question comes up in all Marxist inter- pretations of the 20th century. Instead of investing in the productive processes, Grossman maintains, there are two alternatives: either invest- ing abroad, thus starting accumulating again in Africa or China, for example, or moving into the and producing money by means of money, with that part of profit that one cannot create through directly productive processes, since accumulation is blocked. This, in , is the theme emphasized by Sergio Bologna in the above-mentioned essay, where the idea of the top-down revolution, which characterizes the debates of those years, is recovered from a his- torical point of view. In the context of the declaration of inconvertibility of dollar to gold, the theme was timely in the extreme. Another import- ant element is the state and monetary dimensions of the operation: there is a profoundly institutional dimension to the banking system resorting to, creating and manipulating money. There is, moreover, a reference to class composition, which is probably the one thing that is hardly ever addressed in the now immense literature on the contemporary crisis. Everybody has become an expert in explaining financial terms such as ‘spread’ and ‘interest rates’: they have attended crash courses on how finance works, but, in this effort of acculturation, they have lost sight of the relation to what we used to – and still do – call ‘class composition’. Recalling this requires some effort because it is not so easy to use this category to analyse a situation that is increasingly characterized by the fragmentation of the subjects constituted in the world of employment and non-employment [mondo del lavoro e del non lavoro]. After the first works of the group on money, Lapo Berti published an article, ‘Denaro come Capitale’ [Money as Capital], which is one of the best things he wrote in that period. It refers to the typically Marxist category of ‘money as capital’, i.e. money which commands living labour, money created ex nihilo in order to produce, extract and accu- mulate surplus value. One of the people with whom the workerist move- ment entertains a dialogue is Suzanne de Brunhoff, a famous theorist of money in Marx, an exquisite person, former partisan and member of the French Communist Party. De Brunhoff advances a univocal, rigid and orthodox interpretation: money, which comprises its different forms Marazzi 43

(cheques, bills of exchange, etc.) is, for Marx, the universal equivalent. The dialogue with Suzanne de Brunhoff revolved around the possibility (or lack thereof) of continuing to rely on that Marx, because, according to this very theory, the inconvertibility of the dollar amounted to the inconvertibility into the general equivalent. Lapo Berti maintains that, in the moment money became money-sign, i.e. it was unpegged from gold, Marx’s theory of money collapses because what had always been con- sidered as the essence of money – i.e. its capacity to function as the equivalent of goods exchanged – goes missing. Insisting on the category of ‘money as capital’ thus meant maintaining that, even when money is disconnected from the general equivalent, it still keeps functioning, in the capitalist regime, as command over living labour, and therefore as an instrument for the production of surplus value. On the other hand, in the same years, the theory of the ‘economic circuit’ – the ‘circuitists’, as they will be called later – is established at the international level. The father of this theory is Bernand Schmitt, who, until recently, was professor at Freiburg (and was also invited to Padua in 1977). In Italy there were also other theorists: Augusto Graziani, Riccardo Bellofiore, Roberto Convenevole, Marcello Messori. Their starting point was the circuit of capital in Marx, as expressed by the formula M-C-M’: money sets the economic circuit in motion and then closes it down through the realization of profit. This theory, at least in its pure form, is entirely grounded in the concept of money created ex nihilo: the latter is integrated into the economic circuit through the payment of wages. Capitalists pay the wages with the money that they borrow from the banking system, which, in turn, borrows its money from the central bank. Hence, the money that lubricates and monetizes the economic circuit through the payment of wages is created ex nihilo, because, when it is deposited, the product has already been made. This is a crucial point, which can be found in Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value too: there is no need for money to pre-exist the payment of wages; it can also be a money-sign, because there is a temporal dis- tance between the contract, i.e. the fixation of wages, and their payment; during this time lapse, the product that will ‘support’ this money will be created. Money, in other words, is not created on the basis of nothing, but rather on the basis of the separation between capital and labour – but this is a different question. One of the merits of the theory of the economic circuit is to allow the rereading of Marx in light of the func- tioning of the monetary system and of the capitalist process of produc- tion. Marx says it time and again: money, in actual fact, does not pre-exist the process of valorization. It is easily possible to pay with a promise of payment, an IOU (I owe you), because when the wage earners are paid, they have already produced both the part that will be remun- erated as necessary labour and the part that is surplus value. Hence, there is a material support that transforms money into the ‘general equivalent’, 44 Theory, Culture & Society 32(7–8) which means that there is no need for the reference to gold. In actual fact, in the theory of money created ex nihilo, the relation between money as command and money as capital and substance is inverted: command comes first and money second. When the capitalist remunerates living labour, it is possible to determine value in terms of substance, because the product is already there. This allows us to reread the first book of Capital, and in particular its first chapters, which have created so many problems in the history of . Here Marx starts from the simple circulation C-M-C’, which, however, is only one phase in the circulation of capital. The conception of money created ex nihilo allows seeing how the question of substance follows that of command, i.e. the wage-goods do not exist before the worker is put to work. They do certainly exist in supermarkets, but from the point of view of the analysis of value, the labour-force that becomes living labour comes first and this happens, in fact, through the [la leva] of money created ex nihilo. Hence, are put into circulation that refer to money as the general equivalent, precisely because value has been created somewhere. Now, we can reinterpret all of this in the light of what has happened, especially since financial scrip has been strikingly unpegged from fiduciary scrip. The latter is a sort of equivalent of what gold used to be in Marx’s times: monetary reserves have now replaced gold. To put it bluntly, the fiduciary currency is now the Euros or any other currency that we keep in our pockets, and rep- resents less than 10 per cent of all circulating money, while the rest is all financial scrip, money-sign. This is by definition debt-money, which means that more than 90 per cent of the circulating money is the sign of a debt, even though, as long as commodities are exchanged and remain commensurable, this is not a problem in Marx’s terms. The crisis hap- pens when this movement stops and commensurability turns into meas- urability: here, all these signs of value must be compared with the fiduciary currency. In this situation, people want to get hold of real money [dura moneta] again, of the real representative of value. In the 19th and 20th centuries, and still in London in 2008, what is the repre- sentation of this crisis? The queues outside the banks. People want to recover and withdraw, at all costs, all the fiduciary currency that is recov- erable, thus sparking off a crisis of solvency. We can reread that debate through an operation that was already familiar to Marx, that is, by ceasing to consider money as the universal equivalent. In Marx, in fact, money is the form that value takes up in the different phases of the circuit of capital. The general equivalent is only a function among others, just like money is a measure of value, means of exchange and therefore credit. These functions define, are subjected to, and are articulated around the form that value takes up historically, starting from a given organic composition of capital and class. There was a period when the function of general equivalent was the most Marazzi 45 important, while there are other periods – like the one we are immersed in today – in which money primarily functions as a means of payment and financial scrip. For this reason, we must view the coexistence of these functions as a historically mutable relation, in which different functions become predominant at different times, even though they all reproduce the form of value. I believe that financial scrip (i.e. debit-money) is by far the dominant one: within the form of value, this function has pushed that of the general equivalent to the background, which once appeared as the main one. When we speak of the general equivalent we refer to the labour contained in the commodities and, therefore, to substance. The monetary revolution that started with the inconvertibility of dollar to gold has thus dematerialized [desostanzializzato] money. Yet this does not mean neces- sarily that this is final. This is a question that needs to be posed. From the 1970s onwards – and precisely because money has been unpegged from any material referent – there have been around 160 finan- cial crises and 50 monetary crises, while in the ‘Glorious Thirty’, the years of mass employment and Fordism, i.e. in the period of the worker ‘as substance’, there had been none. Here, I am following Tronti’s interpretation of substance: class is substance opposed to cap- ital. When Tronti wrote that the workers come before capital, he meant that crises are determined by class struggles. Today, in the age of finan- cial capitalism, using Tronti’s analysis is highly problematic: we could describe the crisis as the outcome of a struggle of the multitude, but still, this is a crisis in which we are all involved and which, to a large extent, we all experience. On the other hand, it would be possible to say that, since the time when capital freed itself from substance in order to destroy the working class, it has not known any peace. This is an interpretative hypothesis: in order to take the distance from the category of substance, thus rendering the working class flexible and precarious, financial capital had to create a monetary system which has withdrawn into itself and has imploded. In fact, we can also say that the substance and, thus, the measurability of the quantity of labour appear again in the form of the crisis; the cycle – as the relation between expansion, growth, bubbles and recession – has considerably shrunk. Just to use a recent example, we thought that the ECB’s injection of 1000 billion Euros (end of 2011–beginning of 2012) would have made the financial markets breathe again, but this has not lasted very long: in the meantime France has entered into recession, Italy and Spain have been in a recession for a long time, the United States grows with difficulty, while growth in China is slowing down. It is hard to envision a temporal horizon that extends beyond one and a half or two years. Meanwhile, however, the real crisis is the way in which they are empting out, privatizing and destroying welfare. All in all, in financial capitalism, the crisis manifests the way in which the eternal question of measure resurfaces. It resurfaces in an opposite way though, negatively: it is not the class, which, through its 46 Theory, Culture & Society 32(7–8) growth and its struggles, imposes a measure; it is capital to do so, by turning the measure on itself, in the form of austerity. In my opinion, there are some problems with the question of sub- stance, and I do not believe that we should fully subscribe to the great interpretation of financialization offered by a certain strand of economic thought starting from the 1980s. My view on the origins of financializa- tion is still classically Marxist: it is the symptom of a crisis in the accumulation of capital; the crisis, in other words, is in the real economy. It is not true that financialization is the cause of the economic crisis. The latter, in the 1970s, manifested itself as the combined effect of the fall of the rate of profit, the crisis of overproduction and the decrease in the rate of in the Fordist economy. Through financialization, there- fore, they have tried to stop the fall of the rate of profit in the 1970s – so much so that in the Fordist sector, the rate of profit has not gone beyond 13–14 per cent, as opposed to the ‘glorious’ 30 years, when it reached 22 per cent. Financialization has thus stemmed the decline of profits by turning the latter into a source of income, i.e. by increasing financial profits. We should recall, in fact, that financialization was born in the real economy, in the big American : starting from the 1980s, General Electric, General Motors and Fiat developed financial divisions that, today, are even larger than their directly productive activities. In the car sector, in fact, it was the credit (i.e. the lease) system that sustained the financial sector, aiming to facilitate the clearance of the surplus that could not be sold otherwise. Hence, financialization was born in the very heart of the real economy. It has allowed capital to safely kill two birds with one stone: on the one hand, it has destroyed the working class by rendering it flexible and precarious and by freezing salaries (which have not contributed to increasing demand, since they have not grown); on the other hand, it has stalled investments – it is 20 years, in fact, that the capitalists have not invested in the Keynesian sense, i.e. in order to increase employment; if anything, in these years they have invested in the emerging countries and, of course, in the stock market. The rate of accumulation (of investments in machinery and salaries) has not increased in the last 30 years and, if it were not for China and the emerging economies, it would have even decreased globally. At the same time, however, profits have gone through the roof. To be sure, it is possible to say that profits are essentially financial, since non-financial profits have remained at the same level to which they fell in the mid-1970s. But – we ask ourselves – is it really possible to distinguish industrial from financial profits, when the latter are part of the same logic? I do not think so, and this is because I believe that we have to abandon the famous dichotomy between real economy and finan- cial economy. In the third book of Capital, in the chapters on the ten- dency of the rate of profit to fall, Marx says something that is never taken Marazzi 47 into consideration: from the point of view of the analysis of the rate of profit, it is not possible to distinguish between commercial (i.e. financial) and industrial profits. There is no need to maintain that capitalism must always be industrial, it may well become something different and new. This is what financial capitalism is, at least as it has developed in the West. If anything, the bifurcation can be explained as a consequence of the creation of financial profits and a new elite: the financial . The new rich all come from the financial and insurance sectors, they are managers: this makes us regret, a little, the figure of the engineer- manager! Today, these people have no clue to what a factory really is: they only think in terms of value for the shareholders, because they are shareholders too. As a matter of fact, profits have increased by virtue of the expenditure of financial profits, which have increased massively. Note that I am saying ‘expenditure’, because the problem is to realize, to sell surplus value and to convert it into money. In fact, if profits have increased, this is because they have been realized monetarily through the increase of financial profits and, increasingly, of private debt, of the debt of companies and families. This, as is well known, has happened first in the United States and then in the rest of the world. To think of the creation of additional demand as the result of finan- cialization has a series of implications: first of all, that in the capitalist circuit, surplus value cannot be realized through the creation of add- itional demand. In Keynes, the additional demand was the public deficit spending with which the state used to build public schools or motorway networks. In finance, it is no longer the state that operates a deficit. The state has increased its debt, but not because it has created additional demand by creating services or redistributing ; for the past 30 years, in fact, the welfare state has been under attack and gradually dismantled. I worked for 12 years in a welfare department and, already in the 1980s, the one and only thing they used to talk about was savings; I have not seen any single project that has created additional demand. At the beginning of the 1980s, the debt rose because the state reduced the tax on capital and other incomes. These are the reasons for the increase of, for example, Italy’s public debt, which dates back to well before its explosion in 2007 and towards which, obviously, the interest rates also contributed considerably. Who, therefore, takes over the state’s function as the dispositif that creates additional demand through deficit spending? The private sector. When we speak of financial economy we refer pre- cisely to the privatization of deficit spending, as though each of us had become a node of accountability and creation of additional demand, by virtue of the fact that we buy with debt. This, for example, has avoided overproduction in the US housing market, after the internet bubble. The supply of houses was much higher than the demand, but they were sold by co-opting increasingly large sections of the population – including the 48 Theory, Culture & Society 32(7–8)

‘ninja’: no income, no job, no assets – who were thus dragged into this mechanism in order to buy the surplus houses. Hence, in the Marxian theory of the circuit, surplus value refers to the theories of imperialism, i.e. the creation of new market outlets through the debt trap. Today, however, imperialism is inside the empire. I recently read that Portugal is going to need help from Brazil and Angola in order to exit the crisis: this is a proper inversion of the relation between centre and periphery! But the imperialistic logic now appears inside the empire, that is to say, as an attempt to create an ‘outside’ within an enclosed and increasingly restricted space. As far as the current process of accumulation of capital is concerned, I think that it would be worth going back to the analyses made in the 1980s and 1990s concerning the transformations of productive processes in post-Fordism, i.e. the way in which the creation of value has been progressively detached from direct processes of production: we see this at work in outsourcing, in the way linguistic and relational capacities are used for producing value, and even in crowd-sourcing. Think of the ‘Ikea model’ or the ‘Google model’, which capture value through the attention they draw to cooperation and their use of the web. The reference is to cooperation, to language, to relations, to knowledge. It is true that accu- mulation has become flat, but precisely by virtue of these transformations in the modes of production, capital has developed the organizational and strategic capacity to capture value outside of directly productive pro- cesses. This has not required massive investments. Even the investments in fixed capital have noticeably decreased, since it is much cheaper to invest in networked processes than it is in an assembly line. At the same time, however, they have invested in dispositifs for the capture and extraction of value from society. It is true, in fact, that we work for free every moment of the day and that there is a permanent transfer of unpaid work to the consumer. Think of the extent to which the banking and postal systems now rely on payments made from home. Think also of Ikea (which forces you to assemble everything by yourself) or Google. The current situation tends towards the ‘prosumer’, that is to say, the producer-consumer, the consumer who produces at least part of what he consumes. Hence, on the background of the financial profits – which have allowed the realization of ‘downstream’ profits – there is a value which is unpaid work, i.e. absolute surplus value. The expression accord- ing to which ‘profit becomes rent’ is in this sense absolutely apropos. But let us go back to the issue of dematerialization. I was saying that in the 1980s, in France and above all in America, there appeared new reflections on how financial markets work. Recently, in effect, their functioning and the behaviour of have been described in an accurate, even though not entirely satisfactory, way. I am referring to the theory advanced by the school of ‘behavioural finance’ (one of the fathers of which is Robert Shiller). In France there is an even more Marazzi 49 extreme version of this theory, called ‘self-referential finance’, which has been elaborated by Andre´Orle´an and Michel Aglietta. Essentially, the latter is based on the explanation of the way investors act that was proposed by Keynes in his General Theory. It is a form of mimetic action, one in which rationality has nothing to do with the substance of value in the financial markets. This is the point: I do not invest in Microsoft’s shares because I believe that they represent a real value. The theoreticians of behavioural finance, and above all those of self-referen- tial finance, always use the example of the ‘beauty contest’, as elaborated by Keynes in the twelfth chapter of the General Theory, where he explains the functioning of the markets as follows: think of a beauty contest in which the winner is the one who chooses the girl who will score the highest; my choice will not be based on what I believe a girl’s actual beauty is, but on what I believe that the others believe. In this case, rationality has nothing to do with an aesthetic or value judgement, but with what I think that the others think and decide to do. The reference is therefore to a collective belief, a rationality that is formed starting from this collective belief: at the end of the day, the winner is the one who has chosen and voted for the person that all the others have chosen as the most beautiful. The same goes with decisions in the financial markets. Rene´Girard used to speak of a ‘lack of being’ [manco d’essere], by virtue of which we rely on the other to fill an information deficit and to find some subjective unanimity in the determination of the value of a thing. I initially need the other, but then the other – who used to be my role model – also becomes my rival, because we will have to compete in order to appropriate the thing that we have chosen as the representative of wealth. As a matter of fact, in the financial markets there is no reference to an underlying value or substance, both in terms of the classical Marxist analysis of value and in terms of the neoclassical interpretation of markets, according to which they provide universal access to the information relative to the ‘value’ underlying a specific financial asset. According to this latter interpret- ation, the price of shares reflects their value, which, in turn, is determined by the relation between demand and supply; it therefore refers to some- thing external to the dynamics of financial markets, to something object- ive. Marx’s law of value does not appear appropriate either, because it relies on the quantity of labour incorporated in the commodities. Andre´ Orle´an’s beautiful book, L’Empire de la Valeur [The Empire of Value]is the apex of more than 20 years of reflection on this way of analysing the functioning of financial markets. According to this theory, we are wit- nessing a complete dematerialization of value. This, however, puzzles me. Effectively, this theory explains, for example, the creation of debt according to Minsky’s theory, or the fact that, in the financial economy, the relation between price and demand of an asset is completely different from that existing in any market for common goods. For example, in the 50 Theory, Culture & Society 32(7–8) market for common goods, given the parity of purchasing power, an increase of price is accompanied by a decrease of the demand. What happens in the financial markets is exactly the opposite: the more the price of an asset increases, the more people want it, thanks in part to access to credit. This gives rise to a spiral motion, which makes prices increase, up to a point where the mechanism becomes fully self- referential, that is, detached from any substantial value. This said, I have doubts as to the possibility of abandoning, definitely, the question of substance. Perhaps, substance comes back, even though it does so in a different form. Earlier, we mentioned a negative form, the form of the crisis, of our being constrained to the measure, that is, in other words, by means of the crisis, we are forced to come to terms [misurarci] with our poverty. But there might be another way too of understanding substance. Let us consider the movements against unlawful debt: when in Greece or in other countries people forcefully demand audits – that is, the examination of the origins of public debt – they actually demand to look into public budgets and debts, in order to see what is right and what is wrong in them. To be sure, it is not easy to distinguish between a just and an odious debt, but it is also absolutely true that there is a considerable difference between falling into debt for having imported armaments from Germany and France (as happened to Greece) and for having built nur- series or other useful social services. But in order to distinguish between them, it is necessary to address the question of value. An objective meas- ure of value is probably no longer possible. What is possible, and in fact necessary, is the subjective measure of value, and this is something that points to the subjectivity of struggles and to the forms of life that give them substance. Translated by Andrea Rossi

Acknowledgement The TCS editors would like to acknowledge the help of Paolo Palladino in the general editorial process for the section and improving the translations.

Christian Marazzi, PhD, is Professor of Socio- at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland. He is the author of numerous studies on post-fordism and the financializa- tion of capital.

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special section, Eurocrisis, Neoliberalism and the Common, edited by Tiziana Terranova, Adalgiso Amendola and Sandro Mezzadra.