Abstract
Holloway calls this book the granddaughter of ‘Change the World’ and the daughter of ‘Crack Capitalism’. It is not simply a theoretical update of his anti-capitalist position. Since Horkheimer’s work in the 1930s, we know that changing historical circumstances have an effect, almost direct, on the critical theory whose aim is to change the world. Thus, the simple fact that ‘capitalism is still with us’ requires a re-thinking of theory-praxis. Capitalism is seen through the metaphor of the train of modernity, of progress, rushing towards a catastrophe: the extinction of human life in this world. The book’s aim is to provide a foundation for docta spes: a rational hope that avoiding the ultimate catastrophe is possible; it is not just wishful thinking. The docta spes is that money is ill and we should abolish money to save humanity.
Holloway writes in a way that is free of jargon; however, nothing is sacrificed to rigour and reasoned argument: this is often achieved using a series of images and metaphors, for example, the mythical Hydra signifying the destructive yet regenerating power of capitalism. More than that Holloway’s language offers the tools to think through fundamental questions such as ‘what is work?’, ‘what is wealth/richness?’, ‘what is money?’ and ‘what is revolution in our historical circumstances?’
The book is divided in eight parts, but it is possible to see three broader clusters: the first cluster discusses the starting point (Rage-Hope-Richness); it discusses ‘who is the subject’ and who can engender change and avoid the catastrophe. The second cluster is dedicated to the ‘object’, that is capital, which is created by human social actions yet escapes human control. The last cluster is dedicated to a brief history of capitalist crises and to understanding the logic of money, thus proposing again that ‘we are the crisis of capital’. The book tries to reach a conclusion, where Holloway rejects any form of identitarian thinking-practice, but more importantly advances the ‘scandalous’ proposition that humanity must abolish money. Let’s say a few words about each cluster.
The starting point is ‘Rage-Hope-Richness’: anti-capitalist thought is borne out of the indignation for the injustices and even atrocities of this world, but this rage contains in negative an idea that another world is possible, the hope of a better world. There is the idea that rage-hope ‘overflows’, that human creativity incessantly creates richness: the subject of an alienated capitalist world is still a human subject producing richness – a richness though that can only manifest itself in the commodity form (following his interpretation of the first sentence of Das Kapital). Richness, the subject, comes from human practice, a practice that can transform the world, but within modern conditions human practice, creativity, is captured by ‘abstract labour’. With abstract labour, Holloway refers to Marx’s understanding of capitalism as commodity production whose aim is not fulfilment of social needs but valorisation of the products of labour. Within this dynamic, within the commodity form, ‘subjectivity disappears, the subjects are replaced by objects’ (47).
In the cluster dedicated to ‘The Object (Money)’, Holloway shows that the subject (we as human beings) must exist as the object (as relations between commodities and ultimately money). In capitalism, social relations are relations so profoundly mediated by money, that this external force assumes power of its own. It is the power of ‘binding’ people together, tying us together through an alien power, and Holloways contrasts this alien social force to that of ‘communising’ (84) not because one is at the antipode of the other, but because the push from below to communise, to share our creative capabilities can mainly be expressed through the logic of money. ‘Money is the most public face of a complex of social forms’. This second cluster is dedicated to retrace the roots of money and its social power: following the analysis of Marx’s Capital, Holloways shows this dynamic through a series of if x, then y. If commodity, then value; if commodity-value, then labour; if commodity-value-labour, then money; if money, then capital and exploitation. However, showing how the capitalist mechanism works is not enough: the aim is also to point to the source of this alienating logic: ‘the containment of richness in the commodity form’ (87), that is the imprisonment of human creative capabilities within the logic of exchange, of profit. Nonetheless, these capabilities are ‘over-flowing’. Even if the subject (human beings, creative capabilities, richness) and the object (the commodity, capital, money) are in mutually constitutive antagonism (29), richness (our creative capability and practice) tends to overflow the commodity form which is constraining us.
The third cluster centres on how this power over our life, money, is actually in crisis: ‘capital today is increasingly fictitious and money is ill’. It presents a brief history of money (and credit) to show that in order to control the classes that produce value (and life), the representatives of capital had to expand credit and state expenditures. This history is illustrated through the Marxian ‘law of value’ to show that the conflict between capital and labour can only escalate: capital needs always a greater amount of return over its investments (M – M′); however, labour is both insubordinate and non-subordinate. The states’ solution has historically been to avoid conflict and to postpone the crisis of realisation of profit. One of the mechanisms was and is through the ‘flexibilization’ of money (credit, etc.) and through assets inflation. Holloway re-traces this history, in particular the last 100 years, which includes key points of the ‘economic’ crisis, from the financial crash of 1929 to the abandonment of the gold standard, from the crisis of 2007–2008 to the Corona-virus pandemic. This story shows that as money necessarily became de-linked from gold and becomes just a number in banks’ electronic datasets, we now have an increasingly tenuous relation between the value produced and the monetary symbols for this value. The vast amount of money circulating in the system today represents value that will be realised in the future: pure speculation, but at least it creates the illusion of a functioning capitalist system and keeps parts of the population pacified through credit. However, finance cannot be completely independent of production: the lag between money and value creation produces crises that are then postponed again through spiralling of global debt. Because of this spiralling, there is fear in the capitalist system: people will say no to further exploitation of their labour. So we are in a crisis of money, concludes Holloway.
Despite capitalism seeming infinitely resilient and adaptable, Holloway’s framing of our ‘hopeless times’ suggests a different reality: money, and capital, is fragile. Ultimately, it is fragile because the system (the commodity-value form) cannot contain us, cannot contain the richness-subject, our creative potentials and our practice. ‘Abolish money before it abolishes us’ (253).