South Atlantic Quarterly

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 triumphantly 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 private values. Regulation and the government-sponsored 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 conjuncture 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 measure 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 operations 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 information central and articulates it as thing, index, and computation, a counterpart 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 expressions of labor that emerge from the decolonized ruins of the hitherto autonomous 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 decolonization. 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 colonial 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 massive 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 acquisition 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 colonizing processes of modernity, of anthropological nature and esthetic unconscious that align with the two meanings of culture as a hierarchy of excellence 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 freedom 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 succinctly, decolonization is the dream of self-rule, which emerges from the
divide of colonial subjects who both internalize and resist their subordination. Self-determination remains a horizon, and decolonization is unrealized, 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 Decolonization 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

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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 movements 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. Concomitantly, 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 proliferate 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 apparatus 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 circumstances as such. If culture too has lost its autonomy, then how do we understand 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 figured 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 technical 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 reflection 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 differentiated spheres, was an escape from these primitive mysteries of the cultural.

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The postmodern would seem to augur a certain return, an intimacy of representational and material value, an entanglement of cultural and economic
form. This conceptual opening appeared despite the influential formulations from Jean-Franois Lyotard, Jameson, and David Harvey that reiterated a base-superstructure relation while, at least for the latter two, referencing 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 fragmentation 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-nineteenth 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 cultural itself would seem to be belated, coming in the aftermath of what Mandel would term the second slump of the mid-1970s. Perhaps more germane
than whether culture aptly reflects certain arrangements of capital accumulation 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 repetition 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 relations and processes or to jettison the historical dimensions of particular sensibilities. 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 people, without forcing them to conform to a singular idea.

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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 decolonizations, an undoing of imposed unities and alignments of persons and places
meant to gather wealth for others and subordinate interdependence as a sociality in its own right, to a dependency on forces of subordination. Decolonization 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 insolvency 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 happened 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 movements, 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-

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Money after Decolonization 383

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 circulation 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 consequential 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 creating 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 settles 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, knowledge 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 undertheorized. 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 nonexcludable; consumption by one does not interfere with others enjoyment of

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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 putatively 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 machinery that precluded other public expenditure, and where knowledge was produced 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 securityinducing 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

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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 property. The notion of human capital disseminated in the 1970s rendered education 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 benefit from the knowledge generated by all.
The brief for the economy itself as a knowledge machinery is articulated 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 information regarding the future in the form of derivatives. The utility of knowledge 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 allocations 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 master because it is incomplete, dispersed, contradictory:
The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate 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

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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 possess that can be aggregated statistically and another, unorganized type based
on circumstances of the moment. Expert knowledge on which state planning depends can be unreliable insofar as it lumps together the local variations 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 without 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 registered in price-making activity. But even among the industrial managers who
constitute individuals that count in an economy, it is their proximity to variation 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. Financial 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 nonmarket agents. The ascent of finance would itself be a key signal that knowledge had triumphed in society.
This separation of finance where knowledge is priced from economics, 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

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Money after Decolonization 387

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; otherwise, awaiting certainty of what others know would prevent transactions
from taking place. Conversely, the presence of traders acting as if they possess information they actually dont have renders prices noisy and increases
volume and liquidity, as those with what turns out to be accurate information profit from their relative advantage. Finance is based on those with
observable information profiting from the bulk of those who, lacking it, create an environment of noise.
Yet economy is distinguished from finance precisely because its variables 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 opportunities 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 distribution 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 latter. 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, sometimes 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,

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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 operations are set in advance and pegged to currency exchange rates, which can in
turn be bundled with other futures, options, and swaps as derivative instruments. 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 question 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 consequence 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 collection of information. Finance enables profit from the information gathered by
many where knowledge is something made useful in the course of its circulation. 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 realization 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. Hedging 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 potentiality 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

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Money after Decolonization 389

his attention on the forms of commensurable abstract labor that the industrial proletariat made legible in his day without manufacturing employees
being the predominant expression of labor. The two most intriguing tendencies 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 (selfdesignated market makers) but of all manner of creatives who leverage small
differences in comparable products to make a contingent claim on the superiority 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, connect, 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 making of small differences in exchange matter along the supply chains that
bond producers and consumers, displays a certain moneyness of labor to triple 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 attributes of monetary sovereignty can now be thought along the lines of their
political ramifications. Without claiming to be exhaustive, but merely suggestive, 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 common like land is enclosed, what was once a shared resource becomes a basis

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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 employment, 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 communities as generating revenues, as, for example, in what are called million-dollar blocks in Brooklyn, New York, where the absence of a half dozen incarcerated 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

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Money after Decolonization 391

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 derivative excess between the strictures of austerity that move toward an accessing
of the entirety of the abundance of wealthat once monetary and social
that is already in our midst. Given the potency of anticommunism, a synthetic 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 sequestered 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 optionality, 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 differences 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.

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392 The South Atlantic Quarterly

April 2015

Notes
1

2
3

4
5

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.
For a standard institutional accounting of this process in the aspirational framework of
universal mutual recognition, see United Nations, n.d.
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 argument is that this growth of financial sector profits was a product not of economic evolution but of a failure of political will.
The politics of debt refusal to emerge from the Occupy movement has been well articulated by Andrew Ross in his Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal (2014).
The legibility of communities as sources of expropriated wealth is part of a turn to mapping among artists. For specific graphic documentation of these million-dollar blocks,
see Kurgan 2013.
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 revenue streams. Combining the two amounts to a portfolio approach that creates an intertemporal grammar of past, present, and future from which a more robust social entanglement is generated.

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