RETHINKING MONEY AND FINANCE CAPITAL by Richard A. Walker Department of Geography University of California Berkeley, CA 94720
[email protected] WORKING PAPER prepared for Rethinking Capitalism Bruce Initiative Conference UC Santa Cruz, April 7-9, 2011 Thanks to Shaina Potts, Sarah Knuth and Albert Velasquez for discussions of finance and special thanks to Erica Schoenberger for reading & commenting on an earlier draft. Money is a mysterious thing. One good result of the recent financial crisis is that it has forced us all to look harder at the realm of money and finance, and to catch up with events that had been steaming ahead for the last forty years. Everyone now has at least a passing familiarity with investment banking, derivatives, secondary markets and hedge funds. But simply describing the bubble and meltdown or denouncing the bankers and subprime mortgages won't do; we need to understand what money and finance do, what part they play in the capitalist system. Sadly, leftist and Marxist theorizing about money has always been thin - money has been too repulsive, too ethereal or too far from the point of production to grab our attention – so we on the left are ill-prepared to explain what just happened or what is likely in store for the future. Moreover, faced with a financial crisis of the first order, we tend to fall back on our base of operations: Marxian crisis theory. Certainly, no Marxist is ever surprised by the periodic implosions of the capitalist economy; indeed, we positively pray for them, as living proof of the system's contradictions.