Commoning with George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici

Camille Barbagallo, Nicholas Beuret, David Harvie, Camille Barbagallo, Nicholas Beuret, David Harvie

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786804679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

This collection explores key themes in the contemporary critique of political economy, in honour of the work and practice of Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis - two of the most significant contemporary theorists of capitalism and anti-capitalism, whose contributions span half a century of struggle, crisis and debate. Drawing together a collection of essays that assess Federici and Caffentzis's contributions, offering critical and comradely reflections and commentary that build on their scholarship, this volume acts as a guide to their work, while also taking us beyond it. The book is organised around five key themes: revolutionary histories, reproduction, money and value, commons, and struggles. Ultimately, the book shines light on the continuing relevance of Caffentzis and Federici's work in the twenty-first century for understanding anti-capitalism, 'primitive accumulation' and the commons, feminism, reproductive labour and Marx's value theory.

II

MONEY AND VALUE

5

Cogito Ergo Habo: Philosophy, Money and Method

Paul Rekret

…from the abstractions of philosophy to who’d put the kettle in the work-house. – Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged

Money on the Mind

What relationship is there between thought and money?¹ The question is an awkward one, at least where philosophy is concerned. The very ideal of the love of wisdom implies that philosophical activity be pursued as an end in itself, having no bearing on the philosopher’s quest for survival. Indeed, philosophy’s ideology of autonomy, inherited from the Greeks, has disposed it to tend to neglect its material conditions; whether slavery in Ancient Athens or intensifying commodification of higher education and publishing in the present. Of course, one might insist upon the exclusion of such concerns from philosophical inquiry proper, restricting them instead to the less lofty domains of the sociology of knowledge. But such a claim would betray a rather narrow conception of philosophy, for where the structures of social relations are discernible at the level of the concept, the question also recoils back upon theoretical inquiry in any event.

One formulation of the affinity of philosophy to its context – the categories of capitalist society in particular – is implied in this essay’s title, itself a phrase drawn from C. George Caffentzis’s study of John Locke. Caffentzis employs it there to indicate a certain reciprocity between subjectivity and property emergent in late seventeenth century Britain.² Of course, he is not altogether unique in delineating an exchange between money and philosophy, but he is noteworthy nonetheless for the intricacy by which he characterises that relationship; one defined ultimately by the exigencies of class struggle. Indeed, while the dominant strains of the philosophy of money have tended either towards positing the identity of philosophy and money or, in contrast, their complete autonomy from one another, Caffentzis has sought instead to trace out, in some historical detail, instances in the work of specific philosophers where money and conceptual thought intersect, and the terms upon which they do so.

By way of comparison, take Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. In seeking to formulate money’s transcendental conditions, Caffentzis notes, Simmel ‘dichotomises’ philosophy and money, so the possibility of their intersecting becomes unthinkable.³ By pursuing the conditions of money as such, the argument goes, Simmel not only leaves philosophy independent of it, but in addition, abstains from assessing how philosophical interventions have transformed understandings of money. At the opposite pole, in Intellectual and Manual Labour, Alfred Sohn-Rethel implies a formal identity between philosophy and money, one where the latter is afforded temporal priority. That is, in Sohn-Rethel’s reasoning, the abstraction that occurs in acts of exchange between commodities precedes and conditions abstractions in the human mind.⁴ This is a point to which we will return, but it bears pointing out here that Sohn-Rethel posits a relation between money and thought that runs along a single temporal vector, whereby the circulation of coinage enabling conceptual abstraction pervades the history of Western epistemology; money functions as an independent variable from the moment of its emergence. Yet whether philosophy and money are identified (as in Sohn-Rethel) or dichotomised (as in Simmel), an anachronistic understanding of money tends to prevail.

Caffentzis evades this Scylla or Charybdis of identity or dichotomy between philosophy and money by abandoning the project of the philosophy of money altogether. Instead, he restricts the scope of his enterprise to the study of specific philosophers – Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume to be exact – whose work, in engaging in questions of policy, ‘constitutes and subsumes a monetary act’.⁵ Doing so allows Caffentzis to attend to the more restricted, historically refined terrain of how particular epistemological, ontological and political formulations inform monetary ones. Equally, it reveals a level of contextual specificity that permits him to suggest how particular social relations, and monetary debates more narrowly, have shaped philosophy. This is, I think, what Caffentzis has in mind in referring to his approach as ‘ampliative’, one which finds conceptual architectures first averred in a work of philosophy, later refracted in policy proposals, or the obverse.

It is notable that putting philosophy in its place in this way involves viewing it as a capitalist class project. Money, after all, as the mediator between people and their means of subsistence in a capitalist society, is a form of command. Moreover, this makes it, to borrow Harry Cleaver’s formulation, an ‘essential moment in capitalist class relations’ where life is lived as labour.⁶ And it is with this basic function in mind that we might understand Caffentzis’s delineation of his object of study to the oeuvres of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, poised as they are at crucial junctures of capitalism’s development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; each faced with urgent questions around the generalisation of exchange relations and the compulsion to wage labour. The state’s role in money’s creation and management and the social employment of money in the imposition of a universal form of value are especially important for Locke; overcoming resistance to capital’s generalisation is particularly crucial for Berkeley; and money’s civilising function as a spur to industriousness and entrepreneurial behaviour is central to Hume’s project.

But attending to the reciprocity of philosophy and money, as I have suggested Caffentzis’s philosophical oeuvre does, entails a further move: the examination of the ways these problematics are shaped by and come to shape theoretical inquiry. Thus, in Clipped Coins, his study of Locke, Caffentzis reveals a philosophy mobilised by the problem of the universalisation of money in the late seventeenth century, along with the ways this relates to the criminalisation of pre-capitalist forms of survival and the legitimation of enclosure and indefinite capital accumulation, underpinned by a metaphysical notion of personhood and a conception of knowledge as a mode of labour.

If Locke can thus be said to be ‘the philosopher of primitive accumulation’, then Berkeley is the theorist of ‘import substitution’ and economic diversification.⁷ For while Locke’s fundamental concern was the generalisation of a mode of property that would subject the whole of the world to the impersonal power of the market, Berkeley’s conundrum, framed by his experience as Bishop of Cloyne, is centred upon compelling his recalcitrant Irish flock into wage labour all while inducing the Anglo-Irish gentry’s investment in Ireland. It is through this problem of needing to ‘excite’ or stimulate productive activity that Caffenztis reads Berkeley’s defence of a specieless currency: given his setting in an under-developed economy, for Berkeley the function of money does not rest with its capacity to store value as it does for Locke but with its potential to stimulate and regulate behaviour. In other words, it is the ‘monetisation’ of life itself that Berkeley seeks. And it is in these terms that Caffentzis interprets the development of the conception of ‘notion’ in the Irish philosopher’s later work: here is a referent to volitional impulse inseparable from the view of money as a reflection of the ‘spirits’ that guide it.

While his efforts are focused upon the rebellious Scottish Highlands rather than Ireland, Hume’s monetary programme emerges from a problem analogous to Berkeley’s: the process of expropriation associated with Locke, it turns out, is insufficient as a compulsion to wage labour. Yet while Berkeley calls for a temporary withdrawal for Ireland from the world market as a means of transforming social relations along capitalist lines, Hume proposes complete integration into the national and world market as a means of ‘civilizing’ Scotland’s aboriginal cultures.⁸ Hume’s defence of a metallic money standard is therefore not a sign of regressive essentialism as is often assumed, but, Caffentzis shows, a response to the promiscuous issuing of promissory notes widespread in eighteenth century Scotland, along with the balance of payments crisis that results. Read through the frame of Hume’s functionalist ontology, his defence of a metallic standard for money is centred upon a moral argument against paper money’s ability to sever the ‘barbaric’ Scottish Highlanders from a gift economy to t...