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CHAPTER TWO

Interest, Money, and the State

1.

In Volume III of Capital we find that Marx’s language undergoes a sudden change. It is no longer a question of commodity fetishism and alienation, or of the value of labor-power and surplus-value. Marx speaks to us now of social classes as they appear in concrete reality—of workers, industrial capitalists, moneylenders, landowners, peasants, and so on—just as he speaks to us of incomes as they can be perceived directly, through statistics—such as wages, the industrialist’s and the merchant’s profit, the rate of interest, ground-rent, and so on. It is the moment when he begins to go beyond political economy and to develop his argument in terms of historical materialism.

2.

What Marx has to say about money and interest is scattered through various parts of his work. In the drafts for Capital (especially the Grundrisse) Marx gives us a series of reflections that are as concrete as can be: observations on the policy regarding discount rates followed by the Bank of England or the Banque de France at particular moments of history, critical thoughts relating to the commentaries of the principal economists of the time on these policies, and so on. No explicit theory is expounded in Volume III, however. Marx puts before us a theory of the rate of interest that runs like this: (a) interest is the reward of money capital (not of productive capital); (b) it is therefore a category of distribution; (c) the rate of interest is determined by the interplay of supply and demand for money capital, in which two subclasses, lenders and borrowers, confront each other; and (d) this rate is indeterminate and can be situated at any point between a floor (zero interest) and a ceiling (a rate of interest equal to the rate of profit).

This theory seems to me inadequate. Indeed, Marx does not show any particular fondness for resorting to “supply and demand,” and when he does so he usually raises at the outset the question: what real forces determine this supply and this demand? Here, however, we find nothing of the sort. The theory is inadequate, in the first place, because the floor and the ceiling in question are too low and too high, respectively. The rate of interest cannot be zero because, if it were, there would be no lenders. It cannot be equal to the rate of profit, for then the productive capitalists would cease to produce, and so they would not borrow.

Above all, however, it is inadequate because the resort to postulating two subclasses of capitalists, imagined as being independent of each other, contradicts Marx’s thesis on money. Marx considers the demand for money, the social need for a certain quantity of money, as being determined a priori by the conditions of expanded reproduction, with lines of production and prices determined independently of the quantity of money available. This rigorously anti-quantitativist position has not only been accepted by all Marxists, it has morover been continued and made more precise in relation to the schemata of expanded reproduction (see chapter one). It suggests, moreover, that the supply of money adjusts itself to this need, this demand. The creation and destruction of credit by the banking system fulfills this function.

If that is the case, one cannot see how the confrontation of supply and demand could in any way determine the rate of interest. We do not observe two independent subclasses meeting in a market for lending and borrowing. What we do observe is, on the one hand, those who demand—namely the productive capitalists as a whole, their demand being dependent on the extent to which their own capital is insufficient—and, on the other hand, institutions that respond to their demand. What do these institutions represent? They do not represent a subclass, that of the bankers. Even if the banks are private establishments, and even if the bank of issue to which they are subject, since it is the ultimate lender, is also a private establishment, state policy has always intervened (even in the nineteenth century) to regulate this supply of money. The monetary system of capitalism has always been relatively centralized. The point is that the bank, like the state, represents the collective interest of the bourgeois class. The “two hundred families” who held shares in the Banque de France were not merely money-lending capitalists; they also constituted, through this bank, the principal nucleus of the French bourgeoisie. Thus, we have here a contrast not between two subclasses but between the capitalists as individuals in rivalry with one another (the fragmentation of capital) and the capitalist class organized collectively. The state and the monetary institutions are not the expression of particular interests counterposed to other particular interests, but of the collective interests of the class, the means whereby confrontation among separate interests is regulated.

3.

The radical critique of political economy initiated by Marx grasped right away the reality of the “real economy/financial image” duality proper to capitalism. Capitalism is not expressed solely through private property in the real means of production (factories, inventories, and other such things). It is equally expressed through ownership instruments relative to these “real” properties. The joint-stock-company offers the classical example of the mode of financialization associated with the circulation as commodities of these ownership instruments. The real capital/fictitious capital duality is thus not the result of a “deviation,” still less of a “recent deviation.” Through it, even at the beginning, was made manifest the alienation specific to the capitalist mode of production. That alienation puts in the place of the productivity of social labor—the only objective reality—the productivity of separate “factors” of production among which, of course, is capital, assimilated to ownership instruments.

This association of the two faces—real and “fictitious”—of accumulation is begun in Volume III, but Marx intended to develop the discussion of this question in the following volumes, which he did not live long enough to write.

The alienation of the modern capitalist world, like that of earlier epochs, separates “soul from body” and assigns to the soul (today, property) predominance over the body (today, labor). Our modern left, alas, prisoner of empiricist positivism (in particular the Anglo-Saxon variety) and simultaneously allergic to Marx, is by that very fact ill-equipped to grasp the immanence of this duality and of unavoidable financialization.

Financialization is thus in no way a regrettable deviation, and its explosive growth does not operate to the detriment of growth in the “real” productive economy. There is a whole lot of ingenuousness to propositions in the style of “social democracy taken seriously” that suggest controlling financial expansion and mobilizing the “financial surplus” to support “real growth.” The tendency to stagnate is inherent in the monopoly capitalism superbly analyzed by Sweezy, Baran, and Magdoff. Financialization then provides not only the sole possible outlet for surplus capital, it also provides the sole stimulus to the slack growth observed, since the 1970s, in the United States, Europe, and Japan. To roll back financialization would thus merely weaken yet further the growth of the “real” economy. Simultaneously, this inescapable financialization increases the fragility of the global equilibrium and multiplies the instances of “financial crises” which, in turn, are transmitted to the real economy. Monopoly capitalism is of necessity financialized; its reproduction goes from “bubble” to “bubble.” A first bubble necessarily bursts as soon as the pursuit of “unlimited” growth is hampered for any reason; and the system can get out of the financial crisis occasioned by this bursting only by fabricating and inflating a new bubble.

Analysts from the “critical left” (those unwilling to sign up openly to social liberalism) believe themselves able to propose policies capable of “regulating” capitalism and forcing it to take into consideration the legitimate social demands of workers and citizens. They fear being called “unrealistic radicals” (or even “Marxists”!) were they to come up with anything more. But it is their propositions that are completely unrealistic, for reasons given by Baran, Sweezy, and Magdoff in their precocious analyses of “financialization,” which they grasped at its very beginning in the 1980s.

The financial collapse of 2008 has occasioned a flood of disinformation, organized by the dominant media with the help of “experts,” accusing the banks of having “abused deregulation,” of having “made errors of judgment” (subprime mortgages), even of dishonesty—thus distinguishing and whitewashing the “good capitalists” who are innovators and who invest in real production. Such dissociation is meaningless; the same oligopolies dominate quite equally places of production and financial institutions. Even worse, this dissociation proceeds from a “theory” that knows not that a class state can function, precisely as a class state, only by placing itself above the interests of particular parcels of capital so that—especially through finances—the collective interests of capital should prevail. “Regulation” is the name given to this permanent and unavoidable state intervention.

This regulation takes place in two domains where the collective interest of the class has predominance. The first is regulation of the trade cycle and the second is regulation of international competition.

4.

Regulation of the conjunction does not signify suppression of the cycle but, on the contrary, an ordered intensification of its scope, as a means whereby to maximize the pace of accumulation in time of prosperity and then to control this through liquidations, restructurings, and concentrations in times of crisis. This form of regulation is given ideological expression in the monetarist theories of the conjuncture—that is, in the attempt to rationalize the bourgeois practice of competition. The rate of interest appears as the supreme instrument for this regulation.

When the state acts through the monetary system to impose an increase in the rate of interest, the central authority is intervening actively in economic life in the collective interest of capital. The raising of the rate of interest intensifies the crisis, multiplying bankruptcies. But it thereby accelerates the process of concentration of capital, the condition for the modernizing of the apparatus of production and the conversions that have become necessary. Contrariwise, the reduction in the rate of interest accelerates the growth rate and enables the economy in question to derive maximum benefit from its restored external competitiveness.

5.

The second domain is that of competition among national capitalisms. In the nineteenth century, in Marx’s time, the rule of the game where international competition among the central capitalist formations was concerned was that of the gold standard (dual convertibility, internal and external). The flow this way and that of the yellow metal therefore responded to the differences among interest rates. This flow constituted a source, positive or negative, of the supply of money at the disposal of the national monetary institutions. The practicing of monetary policies—that is, the manipulation of rates of interest—was therefore a means of intervening in the conduct of relations among the different national formations. Here, too, increasing the rate of interest in times of crisis helped to reestablish the external equilibrium when this was threatened during the conversion period, by attracting into the country “floating” capital from abroad.

The methods of managing international competition are no longer those known and criticized by Marx. The abandonment of the gold standard and the generalization of flexible exchange rates on the one hand, and the puffing up of the Department III for the absorption of excess surplus-value, on the other, have simultaneously imposed and allowed extreme diversity in economic and financial policy methods. These interventions are based on a healthy dose of empiricism: there is “what has worked” and what has not. But they likewise deploy a vast repertory of “theories,” ranging from Keynes to Hayek and on to Chicago monetarism. They continually reformulate models that claim to integrate the “givens” provided by observation and, consequently, to guarantee the efficacious working of the policies envisaged on that basis. To extend the critique that Marx began of the bases and methods of vulgar economics requires, in turn, the critique of all these post-Marxian theories emerging from the field of vulgar economics.¹

Naturally, study of the domain of international competition cannot be reduced to abstract analysis of the mechanical relations linking different economic magnitudes, national and foreign: the volume and price of imports and exports, the flow of capital and its response to the rates of profit and of interest, and so on. In this domain it is always possible to claim that one can derive economic laws from empirical observation of the facts. Thousands of econometric models have been constructed with this end in view, but the results obtained from them have proved meager. In most cases, the laws inferred from observation of the past cannot be confirmed in the future and do not endow the public authorities with effective instruments of control. The reason for this is that what is essential often lies outside these models: the rate of progress of the productive forces, the results of the class struggle, and the effects of the latter upon the former.