Probably the most profound aspect of money is the way it can be both a valuable object and an index or token of otherwise absent or virtual value, for the potential use-value of the material it commands. Money represents the absolute deferential abstraction of value. This false or fictitious deferral is not concerned with the immediate social, material present, but always exists in a state of potential, based on an imagined future. The typical left-liberal critique of the recent ‘global economic crisis’ locates the folly in the fictional creation of money, they blame the behavior of some, but not the system; 'crisis' is conceived as an incidental mishap, deficiency or danger while it is in fact endemic to an investment-dominated money system. This view sees money as an otherwise objective, material reality, and misses the fundamental point: money is inherently fictitious or bound to a fictitious horizon. Speculation and abstraction are not a matter of good or bad practices, of the use or treatment of money: they characterize the existence of money, they constitute its true character. Money is never more itself than when it is without a rational object or guaranteed referent other than itself. This picture of money is implied by the paradoxical, absurd but accurate definition of money as the ‘prime commodity’: the prime commodity isn’t really a commodity.
Money, as value, as soon as it comes into existence, ceases to be differentiated into either object or concept. It is both and neither. It is its own fluidity. Money’s positive being, its presence, is its mobility, its abstraction; it is identified by the constant unresolved movement of value. In capitalism, money often begins its life as an exchange for labor; it begins with an exchange, but its value will inevitably rest upon labor or collapse in its absence. The theft of wealth through the capitalist exploitation of labor is no ordinary theft or exploitation: capitalism achieves the profound feat of stealing what cannot be seen or touched.
Money may be the center piece of crisis. As the Invisible Committee has said, capitalism IS crisis; the notion of a crisis of capitalism is silly in this regard. It is instead clarity that we apprehend at such moments. Nonetheless, the fictional speculation of imagined future value eventually comes into conflict with the tangible. Money, as a force set out to realize its full, inherent contradiction, its oblivion, represents the syndrome of crisis that is the life and spirit of capital.
In some ways it seems money is coming into its own. The current ‘crisis’, seen as resulting purely from deregulation and greed, is like a parody of itself for an unwitting audience. Well into said global financial crisis, Canada releases the new, partly transparent one-hundred dollar bill: money comes into its stride as manifest abstraction, by being present in representing absence. The absurdity of dominant ideas about material values is expressed as an echo: the sound of our production relations rebounding off our products; the force of our ideas resonating in our material lives.
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled
to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
(Marx)
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