It is true that of all the desires it harnesses, capitalism begins with money or rather with bare life, life in need of reproduc- tion. For, in a decentralised economy with a division of labour, material reproduction passes through the gateway of money. Tis mediation is not purely a capitalist invention: the division of labour, and the monetary market exchange that accompa- nies it as it deepens beyond a certain threshold, have developed slowly over centuries. Capitalism inherited this layering of markets that evolved over the long term. But it could only truly take form by closing of the last avenues of independent indi- vidual or (small-scale) collective production, thus raising material heteronomy to an unprecedented level. Te full dependence on the market division of labour is its condition of possibility. Marx and Polanyi among others have amply shown how the conditions for proletarianisation emerged, notably through the enclosure of the commons. In the wake of that act of the most complete, organised immiseration, people were lef with only one option, the sale of their undiferentiated labour-power. It is tedious to have to repeat such trivial and obvious facts, yet necessary inasmuch as contemporary fctions, built on work enrichment, participative management, employee em power ment and other programmes of self-realisation are successfully erasing the memory of that original truth about the employment relation: that it is a relation of dependence, a rela- tion between agents in which one holds the conditions for the material reproduction of the other, and that this is the perma- nent backdrop and the immoveable foundation for anything that unfolds on top of it. Without being reducible to it, the employment relation is only possible when the mediation of money becomes the obligatory gateway, the exclusive gateway, through which the basal desire for material reproduction must 9781781681602 Willing Slaves of Capital (013i) final pass.indd 7 11/03/2014 09:29:01 8 willing slaves of capital pass. As employees repeatedly discover, all the incentives that the capitalist employment relation successively put on stage in order to enrich its scenery and elicit more refned interests in the workplace interests such as advancement, socialising, fulflment can collapse at any moment, leaving only the inde- structible foundation of material dependence, a stark backdrop of menace hanging over life newly made bare. Since the mediation of money functions as an obligatory gateway, the dependence on the provider of money is inscribed in the strategies of material reproduction from the outset, and as its most fundamental fact. Yet in a capitalist economy there are only two providers of money: the employer and the fnan- cier. For the employee, it is the employer; later it will also be the banker, but only marginally and on condition of a repayment capacity backed by pre-existing remuneration. Pushed to its limit, material heteronomy namely, the inability to indepen- dently supply the necessities of ones reproduction as labour- power (and simply as life), and therefore the need to participate in the market division of labour makes access to money imperative and money the cardinal object of desire, the desire that conditions all or almost all others. Money, writes Spinoza in one of the rare passages in which he addresses economics, has become a digest of everything, and that is why its image usually occupies the mind of the multitude more than anything else. For they can imagine hardly any species of joy without the accompanying idea of money as its cause. 4 Spinoza by no means excluded himself from the common lot with this sharp observation. 5 Before engaging in philosophy, 4 Ethics, IV, Appendix 28. [Te translation here follows the French trans- lation of Ethics. (Trans.)] 5 And a distinction should be made between the common lot that is unable to escape the necessities of material reproduction through the exchange of money, and the multitude, defned by the fact that its spirit is occupied by the image of money more than anything else. 9781781681602 Willing Slaves of Capital (013i) final pass.indd 8 11/03/2014 09:29:01 making others do something 9 he had to polish lenses. A citizen of the United Provinces at the height of their economic power, he was well placed to identify the mutations that the deepening of the division of labour and the market-based organisation of material reproduction induced in the order of desires and collective afects: money, as the almost exclusive mediation of material strategies, the digest of every- thing, became the object of meta-desire the obligatory gateway through which all other (market) desires must pass. currency-relation, money-desire Incidentally, this is the moment to make a conceptual distinc- tion between two terms, currency and money, that are intui- tively grasped as interchangeable and which few see the utility of disentangling. Why then have two words for a single thing? Pepita Ould-Ahmed, one of the frst to properly examine this lexical diference, very correctly sees in it the efect of distinc- tive disciplinary appropriations money for the anthropolo- gists (and sociologists), currency for the economists and ulti- mately a mere variation in perspective relative to what remains fundamentally one and the same object. 6 We can however extend this analysis, and qualify this variation in perspective conceptually by making currency the name of a certain social relation, and money the name of the desire to which this rela- tion gives birth. Michel Aglietta and Andr Orlan made the decisive contribution of refuting the substantial (intrinsic value) and the functional (convenient means of exchange) approaches to understanding currency, seeing it rather as a social relation, buttressed in institutions, and as complex as the social 6 Pepita Ould-Ahmed, Monnaie des anthropologues, argent des conomistes : chacun le sien?, in E. Baumann, L. Bazin, P. Ould-Ahmed, P. Phlinas, M. Selim, R. Sobel (eds), Largent des anthropologues, la monnaie des conomistes, LHarmattan, 2008. 9781781681602 Willing Slaves of Capital (013i) final pass.indd 9 11/03/2014 09:29:01 10 willing slaves of capital relation of capital. 7 Currency is thus not a value in itself but the operator of value. Above all, it is fundamentally the efect of a collective belief in its ef cacy as a means of repayment, since everyone justifes accepting the monetary sign by the fact that everyone else is equally and reciprocally willing to accept it. Te production of this common acceptance of a sign, which is ultimately perfectly arbitrary since it lacks any intrinsic value, is the monetary question par excellence. Tis essentially fduciary nature of currency, long occluded by the illusions of metallic fetishism, must be brought to light if one is to grasp that it has no substantial character and is funda- mentally interpersonal in other words, that at the scale of the whole society it is a social relation. Monetary institutions have no other function than to produce and reproduce that social relation of shared recognition and trust which, attached to some sign, establish it as a universally accepted means of payment. 8 Currency is only (re-)produced, or destroyed, together with this relation. Tat is why, far from being reduc- ible to dyadic interactions, money imposes itself (when it imposes itself ) with a sovereign force, and at the level of the whole community whose collective power it in some way expresses. 9 If currency is the means of payment as a social relation, 7 Michel Aglietta and Andr Orlan, La violence de la monnaie, PUF, 1982; (eds), La monnaie entre violence et confance, Odile Jacob, 2002; (eds), La monnaie souveraine, Odile Jacob, 1998. 8 On the forms of monetary confdence and their institutional arma- tures, see Bruno Tret, La monnaie au prisme de ses crises dhier et dau- jourdhui, in B. Tret (ed.), La monnaie dvoile par ses crises, ditions de lEHESS, 2007. 9 On the idea of the sovereignty of the currency as manifestation of the power of the community, see Frdric Lordon and Andr Orlan, Gense de ltat et gense de la monnaie: le modle de la potentia multitudinis, in Y. Citton and F. Lordon, Spinoza et les sciences sociales. De la puissance de la multitude lconomie des afects, ditions Amsterdam, 2008. 9781781681602 Willing Slaves of Capital (013i) final pass.indd 10 11/03/2014 09:29:01 making others do something 11 money is currency grasped from the standpoint of the subjects, namely, currency as object of desire this digest of everything without whose accompanying idea as cause no joy exists. Money is the subjective expression, in the form of desire, of the monetary social relation. Tis social relation produces the common acceptance of the monetary sign and therefore turns it from the perspective of individuals into an object of desire, or meta-desire, since this particular object is the general equiv- alent that gives access to all (material) objects of desire. Tis relation and its institutional framework is thus responsible for producing one of the most powerful attractors of an economy of desire structured by the commodity. We can clearly see here both the diference between, and the complementary nature of, the respective analytical registers of currency and money: on the one hand, the institutional and social mechanisms that produce a collective belief-trust, and on the other, the mystif- cation of individual desire. What is undoubtedly needed is not to disqualify one perspective with the help of the other, but rather to use both together in order to take full stock of the monetary object, exactly in the manner of Bourdieus objection to the false antinomy between objectivism and subjectivism. 10
Te former is only interested in structures, dismissing agents as their merely passive bearers, whereas the latter ignores struc- tures on the ground that nothing exists except the lived experi- ence of individuals; both are thus equally incapable of thinking the expression of structures in and through the individual psyche, namely, the presence of structures inside the subjects themselves, but in the form of dispositions, desires, beliefs and afects. 10 Pierre Bourdieu, Choses dites, Minuit, 1987. 9781781681602 Willing Slaves of Capital (013i) final pass.indd 11 11/03/2014 09:29:01