Money problems again.

The father of political economy, William Petty might have had a few retorts to this fixation on the image, this love of surface, rather than the thing itself. His concern, in ‘Quantumlumcunque concerning money’ (1682) was only that money be equal to itself – ‘Because all must be like...’, and so it must be re-minted, made of equal weight. That is to say, money’s symbolic value, its fine designs and pictures, should not enter the picture. Indeed, he insists, this symbolism must not enter the picture, for he notes a large problem of hoarding on the part of those who become too attached to the image of their money, and desire not to exchange it. The aesthetic value of money might exceed its exchange value: ‘...bad and unequal Money may prevent hoarding, whereas weighty, fine, and beautiful Money doth encourage it in some few timorous persons.’ In 1672 it had been the case that the attractive new milled coinage with the image of Britannia tended to disappear from circulation, though not as quickly as new silver coins do. Existing worn, unattractive hammered coins and tokens continue to circulate, thus leading to a debasement of the state of money itself.

And so Petty sets off awareness of money’s existence as the thing exchanged, rather than a symbol of it, rebuking those ‘few such fools as take money by its name, and not by its weight and fineness’. Money must not be loved for its images, its symbols, but for it solidity, reliability, its setting of standards. Coins cause many of the problems – the small coins get lost and wear away, the metal slipping through the fingers, chipping or wearing down. Money becomes less than equal to itself. As Marx puts it later in Capital, vol. 1, describing the coin’s journey to the ‘melting-pot’:

Circulation, notes Marx, has a natural tendency to convert coins into a mere semblance of what they profess to be, into a symbol: ‘Goldsein’ becomes ‘Goldschein’.

William Petty’s urgent notes on money and its unequalness to itself were a part of his campaign for a Bank of England. In France, the Paris Mint was fully mechanized in 1645 and had started the production of milled coins. Such edges made clipping and cutting and counterfeiting quite blatant, and so the milling was an attempt to entwine the nominal and the real in some way. But in England around 1660 goldsmith’s receipts had turned effectively into banknotes. Things were moving in the world of money. Coins’ tendency to wear away suggests the possibility of a fully symbolic material. It underlines a separation of value, metallic value, monetary value and weight. Perhaps banknotes would settle the problems of money’s potential non-identity to itself, by making the medium itself quite fully symbolic, actual discrepancies of the symbolic could be rendered insignificant.

By 1725 printed denomination notes came into existence, though it was not until the middle of the next century that the first fully printed notes appeared, and released the cashier from the personal touch of furnishing the bearer’s name and signing every single note. Mass reproduction had set in. Far from being tokenistic, notes had proved durable – for they had survived a tremendous crisis in 1797 when the long years of war with France so drained gold reserves that the bank suspended the convertibility of note to coin. Moneymen found out then that the bank’s credit did not depend on convertibility of notes into gold, but on the more illusive factor of confidence. If confidence in the bank was maintained, then business could occur, conducted on a foundation of inconvertible paper money. ‘Payable on demand’ became the lie that underpinned actuality

This shift to notes might have knock-on effects in epistemology, or at least in the metaphors used. That notions of truth were shifting along with the coinage’s vaporizing into symbol is evidenced in Hegel’s preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Lockean sense perception, with its dull empiricism, its mind-embossing objectivism, is mocked by the master of historically and dialectically determined knowledge:

His jibe is surely conscious of Locke’s recommendation in ‘Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money’ [1695] to counter the age-old royal debasement of the unit of money: ‘the unit was and should be a definite weight of bullion, which must not be altered.’ Locke had access to Newton’s ear, and in the following year Newton was made the Warden of the Royal Mint and in 1699 its Master. In the 1690s he undertook the recoinage and nothing concerned him as much as nailing counterfeiters. Hegel, on the other hand, has a rather more complicated view of true and false. Truth was historical and maybe then more flexible, like the note that has worked free of its metallic equal, invading the realm of the symbolic. Hegel’s emphasis shifts to the concept of illusory being or semblance, in German, Schein, which is also the word for banknote. This introduces a negative dialectical moment.

Money’s symbolic excess slips into Marx’s delineation of money’s powers. The human personality is formed through the magic of money: ugliness is turned into beauty, base becomes noble, old made young. It changes fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, stupidity into intelligence and intelligence into stupidity. But through all this wild activity of transformation it is not men and women but money itself that experiences all this – money eats, it drinks, it goes dancing and to the theatre, it appropriates art and political power. It can buy everything. It can do all of that, but really, left to its own devices, money just likes to reproduce itself, it likes to buy itself. And money as capital transforms money itself, making it at least seem to be an all-powerful self-expanding entity.

Marx cites Goethe’s Faust for its poetic push: ‘money is now pregnant’ – ‘Geld hat Lieb’ im Leib’. Money begets money, so it would seem, when it turns into interest-bearing capital. And in the ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ of 1844, he reflects on a passage in Faust part I in order to explicate the nature of money. Marx quotes Mephistopheles:

Marx analyses the passage:

Marx could have looked to Faust part II, for here is the devil’s accomplice attempt to prove that wealth is endless, just not seen. The tale is one that involves money’s power to bestow omnipotence upon the individual. At least that is the promise:

Herewith Mephistopheles begins his plan to convert the clapped out imperial land where he and Faust are guests from gold currency to a paper-money based system. Once this is done they will be able to develop productive forces in the coastal area, mobilizing the workforce and exploiting them massively. The paper money plan will give them real power. (Goethe knew his stuff. In the autumn of 1775 he had left Frankfurt to visit Weimar at the invitation of the young duke Karl August. He became the duke’s close personal friend and organised court theatricals. In 1776 he was given rights of citizenship and assigned administrative responsibilities in the tiny duchy. These included financial affairs, and building works.) Mephistopheles’s solution is so simple. He convinces the emperor of the validity of the plan purely by evoking the phantom of all the wealth that may be hidden in nature’s core. So surely a promissory note can be made for the value of such gold, this natural resource. The world itself is turned into the quintessence of money. Mephistopheles promises indefinite growth. There is no limit that can be reached. The fluid of exchange is all, the material that backs it is nothing but a fantasy. The terms reverse. Money is fetishised. The basis of the empire will shift from the solidity of metallic gold to insubstantial promises on paper. Wealth lies dormant, and the production power of labour is disregarded as part of the valorization process. His case is won, as is revealed later in the Emperor’s Garden:

Mephistopheles reveals how these scraps of paper can buy sex, and they can buy it far quicker than can wit or eloquence. Lethargic wealth hid under the ground has become animate, released by the dynamism of capitalist development. And all know where they stand – for value is stamped on each paper note, making bargaining and haggling redundant. Fixing value, pinning down the symbol, the flighty presence of money, was underway elsewhere. At this same time, the British were devising ways of fixing value internationally through the gold standard. The Gold Standard was adopted in Britain in 1816, linking the pound sterling to a fixed quantity of gold, and it set the terms for British capital’s leadership in international trade, what might be called its Faustian bargain. It was to last until it was blown to smithereens in war, and the symbolic accord shattered, sending money into crisis and crisis into money.

The Great War dissolved the Gold Standard. It was abandoned effectively in 1914, as the national debt soared. As the gold standard collapsed, the government recalled gold coinage known as sovereigns and half-sovereigns, and issued new notes. For the first time, the sovereign’s head appeared on British notes. The tangibility of gold is exchanged for the cheap symbolism of the head of state. A partial return to the Gold Standard in 1925 – with convertibility guaranteed for bars of 400 ounces or more – collapsed in the Depression in 1931. Any remaining certitude about the fact that what is stamped on a note means anything fixed in terms of value was overturned with excessive drama in the famous runaway inflation of Germany after the First World War. The inflation began in the war, because the German government launched a borrowing programme, hopeful of swift military victory and favourable repayment conditions. Victory did not come, and defeat came slowly. The government printed more and more notes. Prices doubled in the war years. This quick-fix solution of mass reproducing notes continued after the war. In 1922 a great inflation kicked in. The inflation reached its peak by the late summer of 1923. One-dollar cost 31 700 marks on the 1 May. On the 1 July it cost 160 400 and on the 1 August it was 1 103 000. From then on, every few hours prices doubled. Workers rushed out to spend all their money before it bought only half as much again. Million mark notes were used more usefully as wallpaper. This episode in German history coincided – not coincidentally – with Walter Benjamin’s turn to Marxism. The book that Benjamin wrote as his turn was taking place was One Way Street. One of its key sections was a piece that he had begun during the inflation, called ‘A Tour of German Inflation’. The tract was a cry against the way in which money had taken over, and had become the only theme – a situation that was far worse probably than anything that the money-critic Georg Simmel, who died just before the war’s end, might have imagined were possible.

But money is not untrue – that is to say this circulating medium really does hook people into actuality. Elsewhere in One Way Street Benjamin makes the comparison between books and harlots – ‘footnotes in one are as banknotes in the stockings of the other’ – that is to say they expose the actuality and objectivity of the exchange. People are joined together by paper chains. These links – more reinforced for some than others – must, notes Benjamin, have an impact on morality. Shame marks the bearing of those who have money, and they hand out tokens in order to both mask their guilt and conceal the sight of inequality:

Hyperinflation exacerbates the centrality of money, and as numbers of zeros multiply, life itself seems to become more and more insignificant. ‘Tax Advice’ notes the following connection between money and lived life:

If money is the link between people, then its inflation is of moral import. For Benjamin, money relates to lies. In notes for ‘A Tour of German Inflation’ Benjamin records an extraordinarily swift inflation.

The loss of the war separates the two events. Later, in 1933, in the essay ‘Experience and Poverty’, Benjamin draws the inflation into a complex of disappointments that led to his definitive break with Wilhelmine rule and his recognition of the basic illegitimacy of the rule of the bourgeois class. The fundamentally moral-political meaning of inflation is asserted once more. The ruling class is immoral.

One Way Street, a book to which Benjamin added material over several years, also records a similarly political reading of the significance of inflation, with inflation credited as a portent of the bourgeoisie’s demise. The abolition of the bourgeoisie, Benjamin contends, must be accomplished before an ‘almost calculable’ moment of economic and technical development, signalled by inflation and gas warfare. Inflation is the wake-up call.

Benjamin’s most famous, most reproduced essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935- 1939), mentions money in its first thesis:

A coin is a coin and so is not unique, and therefore cannot be art. It is the ‘original’ mass reproduced. This was the flip side of an earlier half-mooted project: to consider currency as art. With a keen eye for deciphering the hieroglyphs of mass reproduced culture, Benjamin calls for an analysis of the tokens that pass between people, so often unseen. What might this most visible but seldom seen paperwork reveal about the state of things?

Surely Benjamin is correct. These little works of culture, themselves symbols of wealth, are also symbols of capitalism’s self-image: self-aggrandizing, born to rule in perpetuity, as the backward glance at antiquity should prove. Yet it is also not inconceivable that capitalism might tear up this symbology and start again, in desperate circumstances. Hence Herbert Bayer’s million mark, two million marks and one billion mark notes for the inflationary coffers of the Thuringian State government, designed at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1923. They have no pictorial elements, no cupids and Greek goddesses or sovereigns, but just a blockish, characteristically Bauhaus script and a dominating row of zeros, plus the standard legal refrains. Put into circulation on the 1 September 1923, they were not as serviceable as hoped, for higher denominations were already necessary. Was it the case that a certain antipathy was visible in his non-aggrandizing aesthetic choices? Was too much exposed by the hyper-rationalist money design as legal tender in an irrational system? In any case Bayer’s efforts for capitalism in Weimar did no favours for the Bauhaus. The following February a right-wing government was put in power and it contained members who had long been keen to close down the ‘Bolshevist’ institute. They cut its grant by half, and slowly asphyxiated the Weimar institute to death through money withdrawal.

Benjamin’s experiences in the inflation era came back to him when he visited Moscow in December 1927. ‘State capitalism in Russia’, he notes, ‘retains many of the features of the inflation era’. Any NEPman can, from one day to the next, fall victim to a turnabout in economic policy or to a passing whim of propaganda. Nonetheless colossal fortunes accumulate in the hands of what Benjamin calls the heroes of NEPmanship. Another feature of the inflation era is the ration cards. The limited distribution of limited commodities depends on a coupon system: ‘paper continues to play a major role in business transactions’. And just as previously only seen in the inflation era in Western Europe, the Soviet citizens are oblivious to clothes. Though this is on the turn – in the theatres dress is becoming more formal again, presumably as the revolutionary wave recedes.

According to Benjamin, the curious nature of the situation in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s is expressed precisely in the misalignment between money and power, two forces that are aligned in the West. In the West money buys influence. In the Soviet Union, the party has power, and the NEPmen, the motive forces of the New Economic Policy and its limited return to capitalist economics, have the money. Money and power are dirempt. In the Soviet Union social status is determined by the relationship between an individual and the Party. The Party or the bureaucracy retains the power and the NEPmen have the money. It is a class state still – and alongside that, castes have emerged, but money and ownership of the means of production are not strictly the determinants of influence. Caste status is determined not by clothes but by relationship to the party. The NEPman is often an outcast, because he has money, and so therefore he is distrusted, for his position does not accord with the legitimating narrative of the state. But the NEPman has no power and no status. His money is not a symbol of value, but of pariah status. For the Soviet people, wealth, geniune wealth does not come in the form of money, coins or paper notes, but is human, territorial, and connected to the ability to make decisions. This sense of wealth as activity, engagement, social power is what makes life in Russia so heavy with content, so full of events and prospects. ‘From early till late people dig for power.’ Self-activity, engagement is the watchword. Benjamin comments:

Power is returned to the people – with all the contradictions and corruptions – which that involved in a revolution confined to one country. Money becomes fluid there again, but without any meaning for power. This was just one episode in money’s undoing in the twentieth century..

In 1928 Hans Richter attempted to make artistic and political capital of the madness of the inflation years. He made Inflation, a little b-movie before an UFA feature film called The Lady with Mask. The opening title reveals the film to be ‘a counterpoint of declining people and growing zeros’. It is a montage of inflation scenes cut across by dollar signs and multitudes of zeros whose multiplication signals the shrinking value of the Deutschmark. Commodities flash past, a house, a car, a sewing machine, an ornamented clock, shoes, alcohol, a book, a cigarette, this last one burning up as smoke and ash, and making graphic how temporary commodities and their value is. More and more money buys less and less goods, as prices depreciated by the hour and $1.00 equalled up to billions of marks. Exchange is a dizzying substitution. People stare out from the screen, their heads patterned into the shape of zeroes. In this context, they have become nothings. Exchange is everything – and the people are but reactors to the temporary values of their notes. The human figures exist beneath the superimposed zeros figures of the superinflated banknotes, cramped by the unbroken link of money. Dollars are the new hieroglyphs, their equivalence value unfixed. Inflation is, at the same time, its opposite, depreciation. These zeros link into history again, for they seem to be portents of the devaluation of human life in the mass mobilizations that had been and were to come, ciphers of thousands of men deployed in war, and the millions who would kill each other and be killed.

The same year - 1928 - brought the first coloured notes issued by the Bank of England. They were also the first to be printed on both sides. Notes were becoming more elaborate, though still they held onto that squiggly old-fashioned look. Intricate machine-engraved patterns and a greater pictorial element hoped to beat the counterfeiters. This intricacy was not enough though, as the big 1940s forgery operation based in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp outside Berlin proved. The concentration camp prisoners successfully faked the Allies’ money, leading to extraordinary panic. Of course, money was always a curious thing inside the camps. Some camps had money, produced by the prisoners, but it was not a payment for work, for the workers were slave-labourers. It was rather a ‘reward’ for good behaviour, something more of a symbol than something real. Currency in the camps was another indication that this rationalizing solution, money, could quite well exist in the most irrational of ‘communities’.

On 22 August 1994, Cauty and Drummond – The K Foundation – travelled to the island of Jura off the West Coast of Scotland with a suitcase containing £1 million in new £50 notes. Two others accompanied them as witnesses to the deed they were about to commit. In the early hours of the next morning in a derelict boathouse Cauty and Drummond set the notes on fire. £1 million burnt to ash in just under an hour. The ashes were swept into a suitcase.

They did not burn food – as food producers and their agents do each day in order to keep up prices on the world market. And they did not – National Lottery-like - lift one person out of poverty into millionaire status. Nor did they buy a Mars bar for 400 000 people. Instead, not knowing quite why they did it, they burnt a million pounds, which is tantamount to burning an idea of something. Drummond speaks ruefully of how the £1 000 000 was a magic figure, of psychic significance – and now seems paltry with the multi-million lottery wins. Until the winning of a billion – or the burning of a billion – is conceivable, there cannot be another magic number, another (al)chemical act of transformation – of money into art (was the act the art or was the art in the clumping of the ashes into a brick for exhibition?) This K Foundation act led only to more questions and from them to exasperation and confusion. Marx might have predicted the responses, for from his first political-economic writings he had recognized that money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and exchanges everything. It is the universal confusion and transposition of all things; the inverted world, the confusion and transposition of all natural and human qualities. Money’s destruction could only lead to more confusion as it, the bond between people, is immolated, the lines of communication, the threads of what we have come to call understanding or rationality, are devastated too. Marx provides a motto for this incomprehension:

Iain Sinclair, confusionist extraordinaire, cut through the confusions of money as art, art as money – with the helpful pointer that art money is ‘no more negotiable than Monopoly money’, and he saw the magic of K Foundation’s pyrotechnical act in its truth:

Though demagogic politicians cling to the look of money, the look of yesterday – symbol of a ‘a nation’s pride and heritage’ – the problem is not money’s appearance. It is the thing itself. The problem is money.