Criticism of capitalism: Money is only real when it has disappeared

Money is being abolished, I already know someone who doesn’t have any anymore,” Karl Marx, the chronically cash-strapped father of value criticism, once remarked. This is by no means intended to be a bitter joke from a thinker who, although he thought a lot about money throughout his life, had little at his disposal. Rather – if you follow the authors Frank Engster, Aldo Haesler and Oliver Schlaudt – it is supposed to be about the even more bitter reality of our thoroughly capitalized late modernity. “Small philosophy of money at the moment of its disappearance” is the title of their joint work, which promises to explain nothing less than the “objective meaning of money”. »An objectivity that we have neither in theory nor in practice, but which certainly has us and determines our thoughts and actions.«

So what is a philosophy of money? And what distinguishes it from a history, a micro-sociology or even an economic theory of money? In order to understand this, we must first dispel an assertion that apologists for capitalism from Friedrich von Hayek to Javier Milei stubbornly spread: money is (only) a neutral means of simplifying the exchange of goods within society.

Money, as we have already known since the aforementioned Karl Marx, is only the material expression of a social value relationship that amounts to transforming concrete (and therefore different) labor into abstract (i.e. exchangeable) labor. However, money is not metaphysically neutral.

This is where the book starts: a certain way of relating to the world is already inscribed in money. It presupposes a certain type of society, temporality, objectivity and thus a certain idea of ​​justice, wealth and rationality. But – and this is the metaphysical difficulty we are dealing with here – it is not these specific ideas and relationships that produce money, but the other way around: the money relationship produces a specific form of objectivity, which, in retrospect, is the origin of money makes money seem like a logical process. Like a Möbius strip, the two sides of the historical and logical reconstruction of money are identical.

But wait! If money (and who would deny that?) plays such a central role, then what is the reason for its disappearance? The authors themselves provide information about this: “This book was written at the historical moment when money is disappearing. The disappearance of money does not only mean cash, which is increasingly being used in electronic payment transactions; In cash we only observe the most visible and obvious disappearance of money. This disappearance is rather a symptom of a much more fundamental development, which can be seen as a coming into its own through his disappearance can be understood.

This expresses the central thesis of the book, which at the same time distinguishes it from other publications that announce histories or sociologies of money: Money is only real, that is, money in the full sense, when it has disappeared as money, because it is the whole of society has penetrated. Like the fish in David Foster Wallace’s essay “This is Water,” which doesn’t know what water is because it’s all around him, we – as inhabitants of capitalism – don’t know what money is. The authors call this hyperfetishism.

For Marx, the fetish character of the commodity is the strange “social natural property” that things assume as commodities in capitalist societies, namely that they have a value. This property is objective like other natural properties – gravity, extension, etc. But it is an expression of a social relationship, namely the labor expended in production. The fetish character is based on the famous division into goods and money that circulate in capitalism.

The central thesis of the book is that in today’s hypercapitalism the former is increasingly being pushed out of circulation. As the model of capital accumulation shifts from ownership of the means of production to control over capital flows, the commodity (W) increasingly disappears from the model of capital circulation of money and commodities (GWG). This means that money is increasingly losing its definition, namely being an expression of a certain quantity of (commodity) value. What remains is pure, non-objective quantity. »In this context, we refer to the fact that a fact is neither perceived nor can be perceived as hyperfetishism. You can only describe it externally…”

With the “Small Philosophy of Money” Engster, Haesler and Schlaudt have by no means presented a small intellectual achievement. Rather, it is an extremely dense reconstruction of the role that money plays in our society. Although the book is largely based on the old master Marx, it by no means reads as an orthodox Marxist criticism of financial capitalism. On the contrary: through the knowledgeable recourse to the Marxist tradition, the authors have managed to provide an exciting – albeit not entirely simple – look at contemporary capitalism. An external description “… close enough to draw the appropriate conclusions from it.”

Frank Engster/Aldo Haesler/Oliver Schlaudt: A short philosophy of money at the moment of his disappearance. Matthes & Seitz, 318 pages, hardcover, €28.