The Subversion of Money-as-Command in the Current Crisis

Over a period of two decades money has emerged as a central axis of class conflict in much of the world. Beginning in the early 1970s with the shift from fixed to flexible exchange rates, developing through the rise of monetarism and ‘tight money’ policies to the ‘debt crisis’ of the 1980s, money has been used by capital against the insurgent power of the working classes. During this period, it has become impossible to continue to treat money technically as ‘standard of price’, ‘means of circulation’, ‘means of payment’ or ‘store of value’. It has become a weapon of command in new and unusually brutal ways. Yet, at the same time, as we will see, in comparison to the earlier Keynesian use of money, monetarist money has proven to be, at best, a blunt and crude instrument. It has been useful for hammering down real wages and standards of living, for creating massive unemployment and widespread suffering. But its ability to transform itself into truly productive capital has been limited. It has been, so far, unable to organise a new cycle of accumulation. This inability, we will see, has been due to two processes of subversion: one from within capital, where money has been used for the redistribution rather than generation of surplus value and one from the working class, where money has been subverted into non-capitalist uses in ways which undermine the foundations of accumulation.