Martin 2015 Money After Decolonization

The South Atlantic Quarterly 114:2, April 2015 doi 10.1215/00382876-2862762 2015 Duke University Press

Randy Martin

Money after Decolonization

The transformation of money from a fixed anchor to something altogether more fluid is typically told as the story of a center that could not hold. Bretton Woods breaks up, and finance trium-phantly colonizes the world. The fable launches a thousand ships of neoliberalism where markets leave the safe harbor of the state, and privatization and deregulation reign. Money unmoored loses its port of call and is adrift on an immaterial and ephemeral sea. Such a charting does little service to the material currents and currencies in which money and finance swirl. Regulation continues to expand in scope and sweep the deep imbrications of the state in financial flows (witness the 2008 bailout), rendering the public a derivative of pri-vate values. Regulation and the government-spon-sored public sphere are hardly neutral grounds from which to return us to real values. Rather, we may get further in our critical analysis by revising the emergence of finance in the present conjunc-ture as a process of decolonization. The notion that a derivative ruptures the enclosure of its established value is not simply a feature of finance but goes to the etymology of the term derive, which means to flood over the banks and create flows or drifts of generative volatility. If Black-Scholes, the

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1973 mathematical model for pricing options, augurs a new regime of mea-sure by which the pricing of risk assumes a certain moneyness, the energies unleashed by ruptures of sovereignty, whether in political, monetary, or ontological terms, yield opportunities not only for realizing surplus but for generating vast oceans of excess that are not readily absorbed.1

Surplus and excess reference two dimensions of the social: one leaves a measurable remainder, as in social surplus, and the other does not, as in social excess. A generative line of investigation would be to align the opera-tions of money with those of the derivative, in which information flows can be priced and knowledge valued for its contingencies of decision. The new economy anticipated by Friedrich Hayek and other neoclassicals makes infor-mation central and articulates it as thing, index, and computation, a counter-part to moneys trinity of token, medium of exchange, and store of value. This in turn suggests a reimagination of marginalist accounts of knowledge-based public goods based on the demand side of increments of utility and devoid of the supply side of the labor of making knowledge. Accordingly, the trajectory that moves from knowledge to price delinks finance from the material values of a production-centered commodity-based economy.

This familiar monetary triptych might itself be overlain upon the future, option, and swap, as three modalities of derivatives that move the emplotment of new spheres of circulation and realization of value through an arc of analogy, synecdoche, and irony (each of these a figuration of the relation between part and whole that derivatives measure and reimagine as instantiations of the social). As a value scheme, derivative logics that rupture extant enclosures of economy, polity, and culture generate an amalgamation of self-production, self-representation, and self-dissemination. This in turn illuminates risk-based emergent forms of creative, DIY, and maker expres-sions of labor that emerge from the decolonized ruins of the hitherto autono-mous knowledge monopolies of the credentialized professional managerial class (PMC) (Martin 2011). In this respect, derivative money can generate a rethinking of the capital-labor relation in the aftermath of economys decolo-nization. Grounding these trajectories in key political formations affords a reaffiliation and perhaps reconception of what are conventionally taken to be mutually exclusive alternative routes of commonalism, socialism, and communism.

Decolonization as a Derivative Condition

For those populations excluded from the dream of growth, progress, and development from the get-go, or those eligible for its rewards but unwilling to



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submit to its discipline, normal life was confronted by a counterculture driven by various decolonizing mobilizations. These countertendencies operated along two fronts, effectively reversing the colonial logics by which culture had been rendered in the hundred years up to that point (the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries). Fredric Jameson (1984) has understood the colo-nial processes in the developing or Third World and the industrial First World as a means of incorporation or enclosure of nature and the unconscious, respectively. The Third World, a realm of raw materials and cheap labor, would enter development, with economic growth enabling the childlike primitives to develop into the adulthood that characterized their masters. The landgrabs that late nineteenth-century imperialism and the subsequent decades of war visited upon the bulk of the worlds peoples figured as a mas-sive colonization of nature, the state in which the discoverers found their charges. First World consumerism, by comparison, rested on a colonization of the Arnoldian sublime, where excellence would be transvalued as acquisi-tion of cultural commodities. Driving desire to market would be a no less forceful endeavor, requiring the sciences of persuasion and communication to do their work of publicity and, ultimately, colonizing the unconscious.

In Jamesons elegant formulation, the break with these twinned colo-nizing processes of modernity, of anthropological nature and esthetic uncon-scious that align with the two meanings of culture as a hierarchy of excel-lence and parallel whole ways of life, usher a broader decolonization that he understands to be constitutive of the postmodern. For the Third World, decolonization would be figured in terms of national liberation, both a free-dom to form a nation-state independently in the image of the colonial fathers and a freedom from the bond of natio- (birth) or geopolitical boundary that colonialism had imposed. As Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride put it suc-cinctly, decolonization is the dream of self-rule, which emerges from the divide of colonial subjects who both internalize and resist their subordina-tion. Self-determination remains a horizon, and decolonization is unreal-ized, but not necessarily unrealizable (Kohn and McBride 2011: 3). This relation between an interior and exterior, a desire to rule and be ruled, and a formalization and informality of what makes for popular sovereignty have been features of decolonization since it became a part of the brief of the United Nations, with the establishment of the Special Committee on Decolo-nization in 1961. Fifty years later, eighty former colonies comprising 750 million people have achieved formal self-rule, while there are still sixteen entities designated as non-self-governing territories.2 Formal recognition has jostled with what remains unrecognizable, since capacities for rule do not neatly align with the conferral of the rights to self-representation. In




broader cultural terms, these movements opened to what Ngg wa Thiongo (1986: 3) referred to as decolonizing the mind, where upon imperialism acted as a cultural bomb that compelled Africans to view their own past and traditions as a wasteland from which they must flee.

Needless to say, these emancipations of decolonization have been full of promise and peril, of peoples who could assert their voices and move-ments on the world stage and who would just as often receive not applause but the cruel slap of states still in the grip of neocolonial authority. Concomi-tantly, in decolonizing the unconscious, making legible and audible the secreted spheres of domesticity and the private, a politics of race, gender, sexuality, consumption, and other entailments of the cultural would prolif-erate under the banner of new social movements. Yet these too now look to be subject to a tragic divide, relinquishing an older strategy of universal power based on class, political economy, and the state to the particularizing and fragmenting appeals to identity. In both cases radical impulses were said to be recaptured or reincorporated either into the authoritarian appara-tus of nominally independent states or into a lifestyle, intellectual property, and financialized late-cultural capitalism.

And yet, as was the case with economy and polity, what might appear to be a failure of contemporary response to the magnitude of crisis may turn out to be more a failure of evaluation, of the integrity of older concepts and of the means to make sense of what is in our midst, than of the present circum-stances as such. If culture too has lost its autonomy, then how do we under-stand cultural processes in the present conjuncture? Here, as well as with respect to the loss of a centered sovereign currency in the early 1970s, the derivative may prove to be of some value. Further, if decolonization threatens to reinscribe the colonial boundaries it was meant to efface, with culture fig-ured as either a recidivist fundamentalism or an ineffective diversion, then we may need to take a different approach to what gets opened, how processes are set into motion, and hence whether the body too might be a candidate for decolonization.

The road that leads back to the autonomy of culture, as well as techni-cal expertise directing a knowledge society, may already be closed, while the approaches to articulate it more closely with economy are also freighted. Culture has suffered analytically from being a mere superstructural reflec-tion of an economic base in radical political economy, just as it has been devalued as peripheral to the fundamental industries that index collective social well-being in neoclassical conceptions. Modernity, for all its differen-tiated spheres, was an escape from these primitive mysteries of the cultural.




The postmodern would seem to augur a certain return, an intimacy of rep-resentational and material value, an entanglement of cultural and economic form. This conceptual opening appeared despite the influential formula-tions from Jean-Franois Lyotard, Jameson, and David Harvey that reiter-ated a base-superstructure relation while, at least for the latter two, referenc-ing the economic cycles that Ernest Mandel had deployed to describe the movements of capitalism itself. Lyotards (1984) postmodernism followed from the advent of a knowledge economy, Harveys (1991) reflected frag-mentation in capitalism more broadly, and Jamesons (1991) followed the third major economic cycle or stage in capitalist development that Mandel (1975) had outlined: the competitive (from the eighteenth to the mid-nine-teenth century), monopoly capitalism that held sway until World War II, and the postwar boom period of late capitalism that foregrounded finance and generalized industrialization. While postmodernism is taken to be the cultural dominant of late capitalism, the cycles are out of phase and the cul-tural itself would seem to be belated, coming in the aftermath of what Man-del would term the second slump of the mid-1970s. Perhaps more germane than whether culture aptly reflects certain arrangements of capital accumu-lation is whether cultural processes are best understood cyclically or in terms of periodization.

Recall that crisis in the economists formulation, even of a critical cast like Nouriel Roubinis, is an enactment of the business cycle at a larger scale (Roubini and Mihm 2010). Here economics is to establish its bona fides by showing that its own movements follow natural laws. What goes up must come down. The materiality of a cycle is a nettlesome problem (what after all are they made of, what makes for their regularities, why the closure and rep-etition of a cycle, etc.?). Yet the materiality of a cultural style drawn into a period would seem more so, since the movement of time would seem just as inexplicably to produce changes in expression and affiliation. The point here is not to lose sight of the relation between the cultural and other social rela-tions and processes or to jettison the historical dimensions of particular sen-sibilities. On the contrary, if these relations are not predetermined by a given resemblance or reflection, or by a preestablished duration or cycle, then the burden of explanation falls on the credibility of connections that can be drawn. To suggest therefore that a derivative logic is present across cultural and financial practices is not to assign particular places in an architectural order (which was what the idea of structure was based on) but to identify principles of movement that associate an array of activities, and flows of peo-ple, without forcing them to conform to a singular idea.




Seen from the perspective of the aftermath of Bretton Woodss fall, the derivative is a financial instrument that colonizes cultural experience, as the economic reasserts its epistemological priority even as it is undone as an autonomous realm. Yet if we are in a condition after economy as an enclosure from the interventions of a commanding polity and of national population, then the predicates of this situation need to be located not only in the internal limitations of market mechanisms but in a wider array of social processes through which people craft various associations and entanglements from which capital continues to seek emancipation. The move here will be to treat the social logic of the derivative as a consequence of these various decoloniza-tions, an undoing of imposed unities and alignments of persons and places meant to gather wealth for others and subordinate interdependence as a soci-ality in its own right, to a dependency on forces of subordination. Decoloniza-tion is about the unmaking of the naturalness of dominating principles of rule, of an unconscious embrace of terms of exchange that are uneven and unequal, where desire is traded for a depreciating debt. Decolonization is a movement away from these encapsulating forms of nation, selfhood, and mass that pose as terms of autonomy and freedom but that alienate these very concepts of liberation to an impregnable authority. This movement away is therefore not simply an escape from some intolerable power but a capacity of assembly, affinity, and associationa value-giving circulation that capital in general and finance in particular always claims as its own.

Financial risk is concerned with the measurable departure from an expected magnitude of return, but it cannot trace its own path of how it achieved this appreciation. The inability to discern illiquidity from insol-vency speaks to the paucity of understanding of how to evaluate its own internal movement and therefore being condemned to persistent crisis when the movement and the music stop and the feigned shock that it had hap-pened again. This indifference to what circulation creates, to what moves value, but also to what values movement cannot be divined from finance itself but requires exploring the principle of association for itself; this is why it is important to grasp the historical process of decolonization as reorienting the principles of sovereignty by which people might rule their own move-ments, and of how to value these associations from within, on their own terms. This bundling of attributes to generate value can now be applied to the scene of the cultural, where sense is made of the world, where value shifts between what gets made for others and what is constitutive of selves. The derivative operates on these dispersed and distributed moments through which people have learned to move together, to act on certain sensi-




bilities and interdependencies. The derivative references that movement, because it abstracts only those attributes that can flow together, entangles them in relations that operate beyond their local manifestations, and allows us to notice the rhythms that animate seemingly separate domains while still recognizing how differences continue to course through our social veins. Seen from this perspective, monetary flows and the production in cir-culation of the derivative are no longer analogies or metaphors but assume the materiality of social bodies in motion. These have tangible effects of assemblage, partition, and capacities for knowledge making and consequen-tial decision that both rank preferences in the manner of price and assign value in terms of worth and relative preciousness. Derivatives can assume operations of money when they expand a universe of global exchange by cre-ating equivalence, stores of account, and priceable volatility. But moneyness is an attribute of something that is not made to be money and therefore is itself a derivative property of something that after the fact appears as an underlying value, even as it bears the operations of a price token, medium of exchange, and store of value.

Knowledge as Price and Value

It is not simply that the axiom of finance, the law of one price, assumes that all information can be gathered together to yield a true equilibrium that set-tles what price must be but that information taken as knowledge is at once the basis of economy and what ill fits the commodity form. Like the law of one price and the no-arbitrage principle (in which price gaps of the same commodity in different markets close themselves) that is its correlate, knowl-edge is at once the foundation of economy in the neoclassical account and what is most difficult to suborn to the laws of price, as made explicit in the case of public goods. The good referred to in public goods is at the end of the day a rather slippery concept. Ultimately, what is conceived of as eluding commodification turns out to be the very pathway by which knowledge would be brought to market and professional expertise rendered into a form of labor, although it is the supply side of the public good that is most under-theorized. In the neoclassical or marginalist framework, a private good is defined through a measure of utility, or unit cost of additional use. When one person uses it another cannot (what is termed rivalrous), and when someone owns a private good they can keep others from accessing it (what is called excludability). Public goods are defined as nonrivalrous and nonex-cludable; consumption by one does not interfere with others enjoyment of




or access to the good, nor does it cost more to provide it to additional users. Conventional examples are airspace and national defense, which during the Cold War were held in common or provided by the government (both puta-tively outside the market), but knowledge was also said to defy rivalry and excludability because the more who used it, the more it would be worth, like a mathematical formula that was freely available. While there is a downside to public goods where unpriced access leads to overuse, or what is called a negative externality, these were thought of as underscoring the disciplinary corrective of the market.

Public goods, then, were conceived to foretell their own extinction and justify their irrationality so that what was an aberrant form of consumption could be rectified as a priceable and circulating stream of revenue. Rivalry and excludability could then be applied as circumstances that came to pass where air rights were sold, where costs were shouldered to fund war machin-ery that precluded other public expenditure, and where knowledge was pro-duced as a form of intellectual property (Samuelson 1954, 1955; Stiglitz 1999). Focusing on the demand side of public goods omitted consideration of the labor, politics, and cultural forces that would bear on their production, dissemination, pricing, and valuationforces that would translate former public goods like education, health care, housing, and military expenditure not simply into discrete commodities but into the generative assets that would become the bases of extensive circuits of credit and debt. Specifically, derivatives were a means for pricing risk and thereby placing knowledge of how credit and debt on various productive activities could be managed and mingled into a global economy and could be placed in ongoing circulation (LiPuma and Lee 2004).

More fluid than the partition between mass and elite, and refusing the rigidities of owners and employees, those who could manage risk through the metrics and measures of accountability would generate their own capital, even if this meant undoing the distinction between economic, cultural, and symbolic forms thought to secure credentialized self-governance (Bourdieu 1986). However, as the rewards of disequilibrium prevailed over security-inducing distributions, those who failed to embrace risk, and this could be anyone at any time, would slide into the abyss of the at-risk, the failed state of being whose contagion needed to be targeted and contained (Mitropoulos 2012). A technics of knowing, the translation of all human relations into information-driven decision making of a profit-taking market, now described as neoliberalism, would combine with a moralizing sense of being associated with a neoconservative temperament, in which the anointed




deserved salvation or at least rescue in the form of moral hazard, and those incapable of marking risks to market engendered a contagion or moral panic that had to be combated preemptively as a series of wars on crime, drugs, culture, and eventually terror (Martin 2002; Baker and Simon 2002).

Yet this social compact posed around an ideal of meritocracy was not potent enough to overcome the antinomy of knowledge as a public good that would be achieved through the opening of new profit-taking markets. This, as with past expansions of the horizons of capital accumulation, would require massive state intervention. Expanded governmental and regulatory engagement would be needed to construct the physical and fiscal access to what had been a privilege of the elite to higher education and of the global regimes of finance, technoscience, and culture that would industrialize knowledge through various expansions and elaborations of intellectual prop-erty. The notion of human capital disseminated in the 1970s rendered edu-cation a private good that took the form of a debt-driven investment, just as much as the mastery of information over noise meant that a few could ben-efit from the knowledge generated by all.

The brief for the economy itself as a knowledge machinery is articu-lated forcefully in Hayeks 1945 address, The Use of Knowledge in Society. Retracing these roots of PMC formation provides clues to what may be emerging from its conditions of decomposition and links the emergence of this particular class to a larger claim on what society might become under the predominance of finance capital, which makes wealth by pricing infor-mation regarding the future in the form of derivatives. The utility of knowl-edge is to optimize the use of resources through variations in their price, which becomes its own information signal to coordinate among individuals where that good is best distributed. The decisions that make for these alloca-tions Hayek terms planning and economic systems can be distinguished by whether planning is undertaken by a single entity (centralized in the state), by industrial organizations (monopoly), or by individuals (competition). His concern is to counter the logic of socialism by a usurpation of its claim to achieve rational allocation through planning. In this respect the market is the sum of all knowledge that individuals provide but that they cannot mas-ter because it is incomplete, dispersed, contradictory:

The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allo-cate given resourcesif given is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these data. It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to




put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality. (Hayek 1945: 520)

Knowledge here is of two kinds, a formal and abstract kind that experts pos-sess that can be aggregated statistically and another, unorganized type based on circumstances of the moment. Expert knowledge on which state plan-ning depends can be unreliable insofar as it lumps together the local varia-tions based on direct observation and therefore misses the rapid adaptation to change available only to those directly confronting the circumstances at hand. Hence state planning is destined to fail, and competition is fated to succeed in translating by means of the market the collective intelligence of this direct decision making aggregated as price. When knowledge is equally dispersed, the market operates as a noncoercive expression of the totality of the best that can be known. The result is order without command as each individual submits to rules of reason by which his or her knowledge is best applied. The problem is precisely how to extend the span of our utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control, and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things with-out anyone having to tell them what to do (Hayek 1945: 525).

Hayek (1945: 524) calls his nonexpert the man on the spot, but what he has in mind is the distinction between economists and managers, for it is, after all, the latter who are making the decisions of allocation that are being described. The totality named by the market selects out most kinds of labor and much of the tacit knowledge that is not oriented toward or regis-tered in price-making activity. But even among the industrial managers who constitute individuals that count in an economy, it is their proximity to varia-tion that affects the equality of knowledge particularity that is reflected in the Gods-eye capacity for decision that lends the market its integrative force. That the market is the answer to the problem of consensually based order and the states involvement in planning only yields inefficiency became a staple of the very assumptions in which finance became ascendant. Finan-cial markets would seem to be the exercise of the universe of knowledge in its purest form, a mechanism for prices to oscillate continuously in response to the information inputs of men on the spot without interference by non-market agents. The ascent of finance would itself be a key signal that knowl-edge had triumphed in society.

This separation of finance where knowledge is priced from econom-ics, which conceived it as a public good, was already anticipated by one of the key architects of derivatives pricing, Fischer Black, in his conception of




noise. Noise is what prevents knowledge from becoming visible and keeps observations imperfect and expectations arbitrary rather than rational. Financial exchanges rely on trades on noise as if it were information; other-wise, awaiting certainty of what others know would prevent transactions from taking place. Conversely, the presence of traders acting as if they pos-sess information they actually dont have renders prices noisy and increases volume and liquidity, as those with what turns out to be accurate informa-tion profit from their relative advantage. Finance is based on those with observable information profiting from the bulk of those who, lacking it, cre-ate an environment of noise.

Yet economy is distinguished from finance precisely because its vari-ables seem generally less observable than financial variables (Black 1986: 536). Black asserts that those economic variables that can be made legible, such as the money stock, are of little practical value for understanding the workings of money in the economy. Economic theory has little purchase on empirical verification and scant capacity for prediction. Rather, models come to have influence because others are persuaded to use them, an approach that has utility for financial trading but not for economic forecasting that has no means of rendering uncertainty productive. Economists are unaware that noise clouds their vision, while finance profits from the arbitrage opportuni-ties that uncertainty yields. The former will therefore not notice that their explanations account for less and less of what goes on in the world.

Certainly, there remains much nostalgia for what economy was, and it is difficult to argue with calls from various quarters for more equitable dis-tribution of prosperity and recovery that might be reclaimed from finances good fortunes. Such backward glances can leave the impression that there is some natural or correct balance between finance and industrial capital and that diminishing the former will restore the sanctity and integrity of the lat-ter. Financialization is most commonly defined as a shift in profits from industrial to financial firms, as if the distinction between productive and nonproductive business sectors held over time as did the measures of profits as such.3 A more discerning view of financialization, as Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty (2006) suggest, undercuts this sectoral distinction, some-times making it one between real and fictitious capital, or a world of purely utilitarian functional objects and another replete with symbols, meanings, sensibility, and affect somehow deemed inessential to life necessities. Beyond the question of which commodities should be considered most authentic, which runs against Marxs (1967: 1) point that it matters not for capitalism whether use values emerge from the stomach or from fancy,




industrial production and financial circulation are now increasingly internal to each other.

Factoring inputs from multiple sources precedes manufacture, as say when a garment is cut from cloth in Vietnam, is stitched together in China, and has its buttons sewn on in Haiti, and piece rates for each of these opera-tions are set in advance and pegged to currency exchange rates, which can in turn be bundled with other futures, options, and swaps as derivative instru-ments. The afterlife of the commodity is also extended beyond manufacture by the same firms as credit for purchase through financial services divisions of corporations following the point of sale, which in turn renders productive capacity an asset for further financialization. Through securitization and derivative instruments, potentials for revenue streams are created all along the way and assets and debts can be taken off book, thereby making the ques-tion of sources and accounts for profits increasingly complex and multiple.

Neither Hayek nor Black names as forms of labor the aggregation of bits of information to create price, or the sorting out of noise that is a conse-quence of so many crowded into the market from information by those few able to yield prices from the myriad spreads on the data before them. Yet on closer inspection, they could indeed be describing the labor process of the knowledge economy that connects waged and unwaged creation and collec-tion of information. Finance enables profit from the information gathered by many where knowledge is something made useful in the course of its circula-tion. This inverts the separation between the private realm of production and the public acts of the market that marks a Victorian divide in Marx between volumes 1 and 3 of Capital. The labor process is referred to as the hidden abode of production, and his account of anticipating the risk of failure of real-ization in the public setting of the market he adumbrates as the counteracting influences to the tendency of profit to fall in volume 3. Derivatives are specific productions of knowledge that are themselves priced in order to hedge future volatility in the present and maintain liquidity of capital in circulation. Hedg-ing contrary and simultaneous tendencies for prices to go up and down, the foundation of portfolio theory, also refers to the work of making knowledge from the swirls and surfeits of information from the vast pools of social media, consumer ranking, performance assessment, security surveillance, and mobile marketing that we move through and are suspended in.

If the decomposed PMC is to be reconstituted now as a political poten-tiality because of the sociality it makes legible, we would need to follow the road that Marx took in analytically privileging emergent tendencies and to recognize what can rise from the ruins of decolonization. He thus focused




his attention on the forms of commensurable abstract labor that the indus-trial proletariat made legible in his day without manufacturing employees being the predominant expression of labor. The two most intriguing tenden-cies to emerge from the ruins of the PMC today would be the hackers of big data and the makers, not simply the arbitragers of financial markets (self-designated market makers) but of all manner of creatives who leverage small differences in comparable products to make a contingent claim on the supe-riority of their own efforts. Far from being contentless aggregates from which one city can be ranked against another on a scale of creative utility, this is the critical labor from which small differences come to matter, con-nect, and spread. This labor of assembling attributes from which derivatives are made augurs a more general mutual indebtedness and capacity for exchange much as the money form did in Marxs day as a then unrealized promise of universal exchange. It may be possible to say that the mining of information by the free labor that makes it available as capital, and the mak-ing of small differences in exchange matter along the supply chains that bond producers and consumers, displays a certain moneyness of labor to tri-ple as a circulating token, store, and medium of value when it is no longer anchored to the enclosure of employment (Moulier Boutang 2011).

Toward Politics

Where money could sustain its colonizing enclosure of a single anchor, as was the case for the financial architecture that followed Bretton Woods, the operations of token, store of value, and medium of exchange could nestle inside one another, as the bedroom of the sovereign would at the core of the castle keep. That derivatives affect moneyness while dispersing these attri-butes of monetary sovereignty can now be thought along the lines of their political ramifications. Without claiming to be exhaustive, but merely sug-gestive, let us consider an overlay between monetary functions, derivative forms, and political expressions.

The first of these alignments would be between the monetary token as a stabilizing reference and the first order of derivatives contracts, the future. Futures, like tokens, work on the principle of the literalization of metaphor that one token is just like another and that the future will be just like the present when a contract is made to trade a derivative at some fixed point at an agreed-on price. This analogic equivalence could be said to apply not only to the future but to the past as well. When a resource previously held in com-mon like land is enclosed, what was once a shared resource becomes a basis




for accumulable rent. The decolonization of the commons, sometimes referred to as commonalism, is a basis for contemporary movements of debt refusal and the rolling jubilee of forgiveness and repossession of what was once a source of sustenance of populations and communities.4 Crushing debt of this sort is the consequence of dispossession not simply of land as means of subsistence but of a whole series of entitlements from employ-ment, to pensions, to education and other free resources treated as public goods whose withdrawal is the basis for a widening precarity. Thinking the commons in this way makes it possible to consider impoverished communi-ties as generating revenues, as, for example, in what are called million-dol-lar blocks in Brooklyn, New York, where the absence of a half dozen incar-cerated African American men is monetized to support a deindustrialized upstate prison economy, but nothing is returned.5

The second trajectory of money as a store of value with derivatives would be in the options contracts that operate synecdochally to integrate an equivalence between gains and losses to socially created wealth. Optionality serves as a store of value by making, in Robert Meisters (2011) terms, past injustices that cannot be escaped commensurable with future obligations that must be drawn upon to fund present contingent claims.6 To speak of a store of value as optional in this way invokes a project for convening and deciding together, not simply how to accumulate and disperse wealth but what kind of social body will be formed in this process. This means of making the social itself a contingency of the mutuality and interdependence of decision making could give new meaning to socialism, as the society of the social and not only a more equitable and just way of distributing the store of wealth.

The third alignment entails money as a medium of exchange and the derivative form that allows an expansion or diminution of what is taken to be most valued from the entire circulation of wealth when it can be treated as subject to a contingent claim by all. At this point it is no longer enough just to say that derivatives in particular and finance in general constitute new forms of wealth at an expanded scale that moves us beyond the horizons of scarcity in which economy is presently naturalized. How this wealth is made, what it is made for, how making it opens to a particular aspiration for what society could be, of how knowledge could be applied to design the social world, and what such designs leave out or what is still to comeall of these contingencies render wealth into questions of the political and not merely a self-evident axiom from which imitation of the wealthy will proceed. This is what is involved in the swap, the trading in or out of consequential volatility against the grain of the prevailing tendency, which can be considered an




expression of an ironic trope because it is a movement against itself that yields new meaning and association.

This capacity to turn the entirety of wealth against itself, from each according to his or her ability to each according to his or her need, revivifies the classic formulation of communism in the current conjuncture of deriva-tive excess between the strictures of austerity that move toward an accessing of the entirety of the abundance of wealthat once monetary and socialthat is already in our midst. Given the potency of anticommunism, a syn-thetic politics that included it among the attributes of affiliated political endeavor would perhaps need to do so in an ironic key so that the immanent alterities that capitalism yields might be most effectively turned against it in imagining what might come after. In this regard, for capitalism to proclaim its limits and to continue to sound its death knell, communism would need to be audible as the noise in which so much information is captured and in which the hubris of knowledge executing all command and banishing doubt meets its limits. The problem lies in sorting out what of the terms of crisis are a critical juncture for renewed means of accumulation and what of these turns might become hedged and torqued against this very wave of volatility.

The practical political challenge for any organizing efforts to draw from these potentialities would be how they could be mutually entangled rather than sorted into the exclusionary and enclosed spatial and temporal options of reform versus revolution. Here moneyness with derivatives could open a commensurability among political sensibilities thought to be seques-tered by demands for unifying and unitary commitments without reference to their underlying circulation of material entailments. Commonalism poses the question of how to scale up from local seizure of repossessed and occupied shared endowments. Socialism, conceived as a politics of optional-ity, treats the constitution of the social and its means and ends and therefore poses the challenge of how to scale down from sociality in its entirety to mutually recognizable instances of decision. Communism might be taken as the intersection between these vertical vectors of wealth-making and wealth-taking contingent claims where the horizontalism at different scales that derivatives make possible allows token, medium, and store to be placed in circulation separate from the dull accumulation of rights or entitlements to a more active and self-critical means by which equivalences and differ-ences of value can create the space and time of their contingent possibility. If the future is now and a we capable of exercising these options is already nonexclusively and exhaustively everywhere, such prospects may be closer at hand than could previously have been conceived.




Notes

1 For this synethetic conjunctural account of neoliberalism as consolidating a dominant ideology, an institutional operation, and a popular embrace, see Harvey 1991. For an explanation of derivatives as an emergent form of moneyness after loss of an anchor in Bretton Woods, see Bryan and Rafferty 2007, 2011.

2 For a standard institutional accounting of this process in the aspirational framework of universal mutual recognition, see United Nations, n.d.

3 The most thorough conception along these lines is Greta R. Krippners (2011). Krippner (2011: 27, 28) defines financialization as growing importance of financial activities as a source of profits in the economy and notes that such profits, which ranged around 1015 percent in the 1950s and 1960s, had grown to 40 percent by 2001. But her argu-ment is that this growth of financial sector profits was a product not of economic evolu-tion but of a failure of political will.

4 The politics of debt refusal to emerge from the Occupy movement has been well articu-lated by Andrew Ross in his Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal (2014).

5 The legibility of communities as sources of expropriated wealth is part of a turn to map-ping among artists. For specific graphic documentation of these million-dollar blocks, see Kurgan 2013.

6 Meister (2011: 23259) provides a framework for a politics of optionality centered on questions of justice and reparations. He combines two principles: liquidation, which entails a short put of compelling beneficiaries of injustice to give up their benefits, and enforcement, which uses a long call to hold wealth so that it can keep generating reve-nue streams. Combining the two amounts to a portfolio approach that creates an inter-temporal grammar of past, present, and future from which a more robust social entan-glement is generated.

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