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Money and Financial Capital Special Section: Eurocrisis, Neoliberalism and the Common Theory, Culture & Society 2015, Vol. 32(7–8) 39–50 ! The Author(s) 2015 Money and Financial Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Capital 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 capitalism 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 financialization 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 currencies, 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 investments 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 goods and services 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 currency, 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 credit 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 central bank, 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 interest: 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.
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