Hegemony, class struggle and the radical historiography of global monetary standards.

[T]here seem to have been very few efforts to apply Marx's concepts to international monetary phenomena ... the questions asked ... do not seem to demand a class-based interpretation.

John S. Odell, u.s.. International Monetary Policy

Introduction

While Odell's observations, above, are not unexpected in a text that reflects the silences and prejudices typical of international political economy (IPE), the difficulty in refuting them is troubling. Odell's first claim is essentially correct, for the Left has failed to apply Marx's basic insights into the class nature of capitalism to so-called 'international monetary phenomena', leading one to presume that the second charge must likewise be true. (1) As Odell and other mainstream commentators have pointed out (e.g. Walter, 1991), radical scholars ultimately identify the same factors as those highlighted in orthodox accounts. Rather than seeking to understand how such 'phenomena' both reflect and propagate the subordination of social life to the expanded reproduction of capital through the commodity form, the analysis remains stubbornly attached to theoretical categories common to any orthodox IPE tool kit, including the nation state, national interest and interstate rivalry. But above all, the Left has accepted the concept of hegemony--whether understood as domination, leadership, or some form of socio-normative integration--as the master key unlocking the social meaning behind such phenomena, including the topic of this article: the global monetary standards (GMSS) that have organised and integrated capitalist money in toto: the classical gold standard, the inter-war gold-exchange standard, Bretton Woods, and the current 'non-system'.

This radicalised power politics--radicalised because it posits a close, if not identical, relation between the interests of the nation state and those of capital--pervades the monetary historiography of the Left. According to the editors of Monthly Review, understanding developments in international finance requires an analysis of 'the way the rival nations manoeuvre to strengthen their competitive positions' (1983: 12). A classic example of this, written during the monetary chaos of the 1970S, is Block's new-Left history of post-war international monetary arrangements. An attempt to specify how these 'reflect and influence the distribution of political-economic power among major capitalist countries' (1977:1), the analysis adds little to a political-realist approach except moral disquiet. More orthodox Marxist accounts have also had difficulty in conceptualising the collapse of Bretton Woods and the resulting chaos as anything other than 'a grand inter-imperialist conflict' (Parboni, 1981: 118), precipitated by a declining hegemon forced to abuse its privilege of seigniorage (Brett, 1983; Carchedi, 1991; Evans, 1985; Itoh & Lapavitsas, 1999; Pilling, 1986). Whether perceived as a colossal defeat for the us (Innes, 1981) or as a ruthless reassertion of its power (Gowan, 1999), 15 August 1971--the date Bretton Woods effectively ended (2)--is only explicable through the lens of inter-state power politics. A similarly direct, unmediated identification of capital with the nation state permeates not just Brenner's recent thesis on the collapse of the post-war 'Golden Age' (1999), but those of many of his critics as well.

Post-Marxist approaches have fared little better. Having accepted 'the primacy of the national dimension'--Bretton Woods rating a single mention in Aglietta's (1979) seminal study of the 'us experience'--the regulation school restricts its analysis of the global economy to the interaction of 'national social formations' and the elucidation of 'the conditions through which one nation exercises hegemony over others' (Aglietta, 1982: 6). While world systems theory begins from the opposite ontological assumption--successive long-wave restructurings of the capitalist world economy-this history by analogy paints a familiar picture. Taking 'as its political framework the inter-state system composed of so-called nation states' (Wallerstein, 1982: 12), the analysis is again constrained by a radicalised power politics in which individual states--'containers of power' for the leading capitalist agencies (Arrighi, 1994: 217)--struggle for dominance and eventual hegemony. Even the neo-Gramscian school, perhaps the most self-conscious attempt to transcend state-centrism, portrays the rise and fall of GMSS in terms of successive hegemonic orders that seem disappointingly familiar, given the lengthy expositions on method, ontology and episteme (Cox, 1983: 170-1).

Only occasionally does a wraithlike subject materialise before the reader. The spectre haunting these accounts should be a familiar one to the Left. Yet Odell's challenge remains largely unanswered, for the struggle lying at the heart of the Marxist worldview--the extraction of surplus value from living labour--fades away upon reaching the international departure lounge. This expurgation of the working class as an active subject supports the assertion that class struggle has little, if any, explanatory power in the sphere of international finance. In its stead, we are given a view from the top: a hermetic drama enacted on a stage where 'the possessor of money meets the possessor, not of labour-power, but of political power' (Arrighi, 1994: 25). Brenner's recent claim of a 'supply side' consensus is, in this context, difficult to sustain. Indeed, his own account of the collapse of Bretton Woods (1999: 94, 116-24) is easily situated (even if lacking a value-theoretic approach) within standard Marxist accounts such as Mandel (1978) and Carchedi (1991), which highlight the role of uneven development in generating 'horizontal' competition between blocs of 'national' capital. Crises, flaws or contradictions within GMSS are seen as signs of hegemonic decline, rivalry, malignance or non-formation, rather than as the most generalised social expression of the contradictory and antagonistic relationship between labour and capital.

The aim of this article is twofold: to verify Odell's first claim, and to challenge his second--a claim that the majority of radical scholars seem, at least implicitly, to accept. I begin by tracing the origins and limitations of the radicalised power politics that continue to dominate the critical historiography of GMSS, before outlining an alternative approach: one that suggests that money's social power and working-class resistance to this alien force--not power politics and the internecine struggles of fractions or blocs of capital and their nation-state proxies--is the key to exposing the class content of GMSS. By organising and integrating money in toto, global monetary standards are fundamental to the constitution, reproduction and mediation of this social power even as they confront, neutralise or subsume working-class resistance against the subordination of social reproduction to the rule of money. To back this claim, I conclude the article with a potted history of GMSS from the 1870S to the present.

Origins

Radical monetary historiography faithfully reflects the fixation on the 'politics of nation states' (Radice, 1984: 114) that has long pervaded the Left's analysis of global capitalism. Unlike political realism, the causal determinants of this radicalised power politics--ranging from mysterious Kondratieff waves to the formation of new regimes of accumulation--are located deep within state-society complexes: 'second image' theories, in the lexicon of international relations. Its origins can be traced to Hilferding (1981), Bukharin (1973) and Lenin (1983), who replaced Marx's intuitive grasp of capital's globalising tendencies with an inter-nationalism that lent itself to a geopolitical analysis with a Marxist 'spin'. In further contrast with political realism, this power politics was historicised, albeit teleologically, while the structural characteristics of political anarchy and market instability were fused into a single logic; for the anarchy of inter-state relations expressed the 'inner laws of motion' of capitalism at its highest stage. Competition, withering within domestic economies with the rise of finance capital and its attendant monopolisation, flared with incandescent brilliance across the world market in the form of nation-state rivalry. Subsumed by finance capital into 'capitalist trusts', nation states became imperial rivals competing for raw materials, profitable outlets for excess capital and other spoils. Power politics, in this view, was the political and military manifestation of the anarchy and competition underlying the expanded reproduction of capital in its monopoly phase of uneven development. Finance capital 'demands unlimited power politics' (Hilferding, 1981: 345), leading inexorably to a 'world tournament of "nations"' fighting their colossal battles in the arena of the world economy (Bukharin, 1973: 120).

Of course, Marxist-Leninism saw the solution to this anarchy in the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism--seemingly imminent given that global disorder was the final detritus of an 'overripe' and parasitic rentier capitalism in terminal decline. Yet the refusal of capitalism to exit the historical stage left the analysis open-ended. Both theoretically and politically, the world economy became permanently demarcated as a 'space' outside class antagonism. While capital grasped the possibility of imperialist ideology transcending class antagonism (Hilferding, 1981: 336), the radical theorisation of imperialism went far further by avoiding, as Arrighi admits (1983: 34), any explicit treatment of class or class struggle. This lacuna ultimately derives from a failure to perceive this tradition as a hastily developed political response to the threat of war and the collapse of the Second International. In shifting to a hermetic world of monopoly capital and client states, the revolutionary role of the metropolitan proletariat could avoid being tainted further, for the 'collapse of the proletarian movement' could be apportioned to 'the unequal situation of the "state capitalist trusts" within the boundaries of the world economy' (Bukharin, 1973: 161). While strategically understandable, the preservation in aspic of this tradition over the following decades held back our understanding of the trajectory of global capitalism. As the revolutionary imminence of Marxist-Leninism dissipated, the theory of imperialism shifted to analyses of the exploitative relations between 'core' and 'periphery' more reminiscent of the apostasy of Kautsky's 'ultra imperialism' than Lenin, while analysis of the metropolitan centre failed to rise above a historical periodisation centred on the rise and fall of dominant or 'hegemonic' capitalist states, usually ascribed to long-wave developments in the forces of production.

Evolving concurrently to this rather crude notion of 'national' pre-eminence was an alternative conception of hegemony as leadership. First used in early debates over proletarian political strategy, this concept was radically reworked by Gramsci, who inverted its class perspective to a theory of bourgeois 'leadership' within western capitalist states. More than tyranny or false consciousness, Gramsci's Machiavellian reworking (further developed by the structuralism of Poulantzas and post-Marxist discursive theory) suggested that hegemony required the active consent of subaltern classes, co-opted by ideological inculcation, political compromise and material concessions.

While the details of this elaborate journey need not detain us, an offshoot of this tendency achieved some prominence in IPE from the mid-1980S onwards. Self-consciously styling itself 'neo-Gramscian'--a pedigree more analogous than substantive--this school returned hegemony to its proper etymological roots by situating it in the sphere of inter-state competition (Arrighi, 1994: 28), although in a more structurally complex and diachronic fashion than the crude accounts of inter-imperialist rivalry found in Marxist orthodoxy.

Hegemony is dependent upon the formation of transnational historic blocs that articulate a dominant ideology capable of ensuring a coherent fit between three interconnected but non-determinant structures: political, economic and ideological. While historic blocs exist within a transnationalised civil society, the material, political and ideological foundations of any 'world order' are deeply embedded within, and dependent upon, specific states (e.g. Holland, Britain, the United States).

Despite the theoretical sophistication, world orders are removed from the problematic of power politics by degree only. Break this fragile hegemony and the global system reverts to a logic of domination (Cox, 1987: 299). Yet it also remains trapped within the categories of power politics at a more fundamental level, for, true to the neo-Gramscian school's structuralist origins, social relations remain external to structures. These structures in turn become objects of struggle among classes which seek to bend them to their interests through the formation of 'scripts'--a discursive process located within a transnationalised civil society whose only 'citizens' are globalised and 'structurally literate' classes. Ascending to a world of boardrooms and backrooms, think-tanks and shadowy agencies, it becomes clear that this civil society is composed solely of cosmopolitan fractions of capital (or their representatives) that have freed themselves from the spatial container of their 'state capitalist trusts'.

Yet transnational civil society alone, following Gramsci's formula, fails to equate to a transnational state, meaning that hegemonic blocs tend to coalesce around dominant 'units' of the inter-state system. Neo-Gramscian IPE thus quietly slides into a 'shorthand' that reduces transnational social forces--already identified as synonymous with capital--to rivalry or cooperation between the 'us', 'OK', 'Japan' and so on. The result of this 'mixture of idealist and realist arguments' (Jessop, 199O: 162) is a sophisticated analysis of 'the relations between the advanced capitalist states' (Gill, 1986: 209), whether as proxies for historic blocs or 'transmission belts' for hegemonic ideology.

A final influence has been a growing interest in 'hegemony' within social theory more generally. In IPE, this has been most in evidence with the development of regime theory, which originated in attempts to address some of the more obvious failings of international relations theory in the 1970S. Yet in forming a bridge between the liberal and realist traditions, regime theory managed to retain the inadequacies of both, fusing state-centric power politics with all the flaws of liberal idealism.

The offspring of this unpleasant union, apparent even to such common-sense practitioners of IpF. as Strange (1982), was a theory of the status quo: an apologetics for stability, order, discipline and authority. This tendency is especially pronounced in one variant of regime theory--hegemonic stability theory (HST). In its modern form, HST was popularised by Kindleberger, although antecedents exist, including Brown (194O) and the 'key currencies' approach of Williams (1945). In Kindleberger's influential study of the Great Depression (1973), the instability of the inter-war period was inevitable given that no single country was both willing and able to solve the dilemmas of collective action in the global economy by acting as 'stabiliser'.

It seems that many on the Left agree in principle with Kindleberger's proposition. Despite serious challenges from within the specialist literature on monetary historiography (Eichengreen, 1990; Gallarotti, 1995; Simmons, 1994; Walter, 1991), the Left remains stolidly orthodox. Both the editors of the Monthly Review (1983: 7) and Innes (198I: 15) attribute the failure of the inter-war GMS to rivalry between British and us capital, although Block (1977: 30) goes further in supporting Kindleberger's argument that it was largely the result of us reluctance to fill the vacuum left by Britain's decline. 'A stable international monetary system', notes a widely cited article, 'has depended on one state being sufficiently financially dominant to impose its money on the rest of the world economy' (Evans, 1985: 104). Suspicious of the ahistorical abstractions of HST, Pilling (1986) nevertheless fails to fundamentally challenge HST or its propositions, questioning instead the ability of any one country to act as a stabilising hegemon given the 'objective' conditions of economic stagnation and inter-imperialist rivalry. While the apologetics of public goods and hegemonic altruism are shorn away, (in)stability is a hermetically sealed affair between blocs of capital and their client states.

Limitations

My concern is not to argue the veracity of one definition of hegemony over another, but rather to argue that this concept, and the radicalised power politics that result from it, gives far too much ground to those who accept 'the estranged forms of appearance of capitalist social relations' (Burnham, 1995: 95-6).While this struggle is animated by social forces, these are reduced to a single category--'competition'--external to the primary and constitutive antagonism of capitalism: the struggle between necessary and surplus labour.

By accepting an international 'level' outside this class relation, where a 'different' explanatory logic applies, it becomes impossible to chart the trajectory of each GMS against the historical movement of this antagonism. Instead, the fetishised manifestations of this antagonism are simply appropriated as theoretical categories. Failing to conceptualise capitalism as a totality of relations, these categories are severed from the 'organic unity of reality' (Ollman, 1978: 47), their constitutive presuppositions remaining hidden. The result, unsurprisingly, is a tradition of radical monetary historiography almost indistinguishable from its mainstream rivals; in shifting from the 'national' to the 'international', we, in turn, shift from Marx to Machiavelli and Morganthau (Burnham, 1993: 22).

Such arbitrary limitations inevitably sustain the reification of those social forms constituting each GMS. This is clearly evident with money--a form strangely neglected in both orthodox and radical accounts of GMSS. Emerging fully formed upon the world market, having already been functionally predetermined by the exigencies of 'domestic' market coordination, money's global organisation appears relatively uninteresting. At the 'international' level, it simply becomes an object to be exchanged, controlled, fought over or wielded by states or world elites, rather than an antagonistic social relation that assumes its most generalised expression at a global level. From this moment, money is trapped in the theoretical categories of inter-state competition, even if this struggle masks the interests of capital. It becomes an object of state power, such as Parboni's (1986) 'dollar weapon', whose institutional organisation within a GMS is no more than inter-state squabbling that 'veils a struggle for power and wealth' (The editors, Monthly Review, 1983: 1).

The outcome is an inherent bias towards an explanatory logic focused on domination, infusing it with the logic and perspective of capital--a view from the top. Systemic disorder and instability become characteristics of an objectified world market, rather than the most generalised expression of class struggle--presuppositions that effectively pre-programme it to seek patterns of order and stability as evidence of the existence of a hegemon. It is a theory of system-maintenance with an inherent conservatism towards reproduction of the status quo, the final result being a hypostatised history of capital's idealised and exaggerated notion of control. Any contradictions left in the anaemic forms and categories used to analyse GMSS play themselves out already emptied of any social content that hints at an active working-class subject. Politically, the result is a dead end: denouncements of one or another fraction of capital, or the pseudo-radicalism of Euro-nationalist railings against the dollar. What we fail to see is the determining role of working-class struggle in the rise and fall of GMSS. As Holloway (1994: 42) observes, Marxism, if nothing else, should always be a theory of the power of the powerless, and it is this that has been lost in radical monetary historiography.

Alternatives

Exposing this power requires careful examination of the organisational content of each GMS, which is often forgotten in the rush by radical scholars to identify 'who' exerts hegemonic control over it. At one level, this appears straightforward. In the familiar triad first expounded by the Bellagio group in the mid-1960s, a GMS must address the technical problems of adjustment, liquidity and confidence.

Framed by the synthetic categories central to the Keynesian system of national accounts, such 'bookkeeping' schema are simply too narrow to grasp the social content of GMSs.

Taking a broader perspective, each GMS establishes parameters governing the global money supply (a pyramid formed by private, state and 'world' monies), its integration (exchange-rate mechanisms), and its distribution (capital flows) between 'national' economies that subsist in and through the world market (Bonefeld, 2000). They are fundamentally about the control and manipulation of capitalist money; but understanding why they do so requires the re-examination of money as a social form, or mode of existence, of the antagonistic class relation between capital and labour (Bonefeld et al., 1992).

Form analysis not only insists that social relations exist in the immediacy of forms, but also that in subsuming the constitutive but antagonistic power of labour, forms--and thus social relations--are inherently contradictory and fluid. Labour exists both 'in' (the reproduction of integration/ domination) and 'against' (the struggle for separation/ autonomy) capital (Bonefeld, 1994), creating a dialectic between structure and struggle that manifests itself through deepening contradictions between social forms and the class content they must posit.

This 'gap' between form and content intensifies class antagonism, as labour and capital seek to overcome what appear as barriers to their own reproduction. By tracing this contradiction-in-movement, the point can be identified at which a particular form can no longer posit its content and is 'stripped away' (Rosdolsky, 1974).

The analysis begins with the claim that money's content in capitalism is not congealed socially-necessary labour time, but rather value as a constant process of becoming through its power to ceaselessly command (i.e. alienate) living labour. Money's social power to command is the moment in which the non-commodity of 'life-producing life' becomes the commodity 'labour power'. The orthodox theorisation of money presupposes the successful exploitation of labour, for money enters ex post as an independent expression of value. In contrast, I suggest that money is constitutive of, and presupposed in, the exploitative and antagonistic relation between labour and its alienated self. The mode of existence of working-class struggle against this exploitative content is a dematerialising money-form--a process that, I suggest below, weakens the foundations of money's social power'. Preserving this power is fundamental to the day-to-day reproduction of capitalist class relations, and capital has sought strategies with which to assert and reinforce this social power by organising and integrating money at ever-higher levels of generalisation, culminating finally in GMSS. GMSS are thus institutionalised strategies designed to confront, neutralise or subsume working-class struggles against this alien power. Through various techniques, mechanisms and pathways, GMSS manipulate the spatial and temporal characteristics of money to either strengthen or weaken the foundations on which its social power, and ultimately the law of value, is constituted. (3) The rise and fall of GMSS has in turn been driven by the dematerialization of the money-form, i.e. class struggle. Only by interrogating money through this form/content dialectic can we pierce the categories that form the surface or estranged appearance of GMSS. By accepting social forms, particularly money, as 'things', radical monetary historiography has failed to transcend the reified categories of international relations theory: it is critical IPE, not a critique.

Substantiating this claim requires further analysis in order to untangle the peculiarities of how the money-form posits a content of exploitation and how, in the moment of positively affirming itself as money, it negates the foundations of its social power and hence its very content. Money's power depends entirely upon the social bond formed by the act of exchange. This is the only mechanism of social reproduction recognized within a market system. Satisfying our material needs under a regime of private property requires the mediation of money between these needs and social wealth (that is, use values). It is this that draws us into the web of market relations and the 'callous "cash payment"' (Marx & Engel's, 1973). Despite its formal appearance of freedom and equality, this monetary 'exchange' is both antagonistic and coercive in content. Antagonistic, because 'what the capitalist wants is the growth of value; what the worker wants, on the other hand, is the growth of use-values' (Laborite, 1992: 98). Coercive, because it presupposes--and is constituted upon--the individual's exclusion from the means of production. In short, the individual has the freedom to starve--or to work to obtain money.

It is important to stress, however, that this disparity between form and content is both real and deeply contradictory. Money's formal appearance is essential to the constitution of a depoliticised bourgeois civil society, for no external compulsion is exerted upon the individual to enter this realm of alienated relationships: 'it is only my own nature, this totality of needs and drives, which exerts a force upon me' (Marx, 1973: 245). Money is impartial, impersonal and indifferent, its power disembodied and thus depoliticised. 'Rob the thing [money] of ... social power', observed Marx, 'and you must give it to persons to exercise over persons' (1973a: I58). Such fetishism, while both real and necessary, introduces a fundamental contradiction that compromises money's power to command, for the fragile bond that is so formed is effaced with the negation of the original need initiating the monetary exchange. The very success of money in satisfying needs blanches the 'dull compulsions' that force the individual to enter the market. Money is a chemical power that dissolves social relations just as effectively as it cements them (Marx, 1977: 377). In order to make this social bond(age) permanent, money must ceaselessly act as 'pimp between need and object, between life and man's means of life' (Marx, 1977: 375); it must be able to endlessly reposition itself between (socially determined) needs and wealth. Only if money is experienced as a continuous moment of scarcity mediating between an individual's 'totality of needs and drives' and their satisfaction can it flex its full social power, and force the individual to re-enter the market as the seller of alienated labour. (4) This mediation occurs through the decentred capillaries of the market mechanism--a web of monetarised social relations, transposing the need for scarcity to money itself (Altvater, 1993: 5), or inverting our class perspective: 'the powerlessness of the individual with respect to society ... is experienced as the absence of a thing, money' (Lebowitz, 1992: 79). Only then can it apply hard constraints signalling the scarcity relations intrinsic to the continuing exploitation of labour.

Yet there is nothing inherent in this social form that can guarantee scarcity as an ontological certainty, which brings the issue of its organisation and integration to the fore. 'Money', wrote Bagehot, 'will not manage itself' (1915: 20); and 'There is nothing', argued Jevons, 'less fit to be left to the action of competition than money' (Hayek, 1990: 42). This would matter less if money were synonymous with the commodity form--say, gold--for access to social wealth remains restricted by an essentially rigid global supply. This is the strategic goal of monetary internationalism (Hayek, 1964), where the world market is a seamless web of 'individuals' interconnected by a money-form that expresses scarcity relations in their purest form, i.e. as hard money. Manipulating national wage and price levels is impossible, for a fixed supply of world money is continuously redistributed between 'national' economies on the basis of the law of one price, while adjustment is immediate and unmediated.

In practice, domestic money had long escaped the shackles of the commodity form, as the evolution of fractional reserve banking allowed an expanding layer of parasitic credit money to circulate alongside specie. Adjustment was mediated through central-bank policies influencing bank money, not directly through changes in national money stocks. More fundamentally, the belief that commodity money could, as world money, resolve the contradictions between money's form and content, seems in retrospect, misplaced. Gold confronted individual currencies as the representative of all other currencies, i.e. it established a relative rather than an absolute value relation, mediated through the system of parity rates--itself a social construction reflecting the political fragmentation of the inter-state system. Inviolate international standards remain a Ricardian fantasy, while 'world money' leaves the contradictions between money's form and content 'unresolved in the international arena' (Harvey, 1982: 250).

Resolution, if at all possible, would have to be political; and in the absence of any overarching global authority the task fell, by default, to the nation states that subsist in and through the world market. Yet the state's own increasingly contradictory role in the organisation of domestic money made any easy resolution unlikely, even if it added urgency to the problem. While it is beyond the scope of this article to trace the state's monopolisation of note-issuing privileges and the subsequent rise of a 'one-reserve system', suffice to say that by the second half of the nineteenth century, both were rapidly advancing.

What interests us here is the generalisation of the antagonism inherent in the money-form that this upward shift in its organisation entailed, for money became exposed to the contradictions unfolding within the liberal-democratic state-form itself.

Even the timid experiments in the wake of the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 imposed 'on the political rule of the bourgeoisie democratic conditions which constantly help its enemies towards victory and endanger the very basis of bourgeois society' (Marx, 1973b: 71).

By defining the boundaries of legitimate 'political' action, the state sought to efface class antagonism from those social relations mediated solely by the money-form. Equality before the rule of law was the counterpoint to the inequality of property relations and the social power of money.

Yet this was an act of transferral rather than negation, for it simply relocated this antagonism to a sphere separated from the social power of money, where all individuals stood before the state as undifferentiated citizens. Crude efforts to limit citizenship through property or income criteria (e.g. the Reform Act of 1832) undermined the formation of this alienated politics, and were anyhow doomed in the face of the growing numerical weight, organisational capabilities and militancy of the working classes.

How could this 'unnatural, inverted domination' of the dispossessed be restrained from undermining the sanctity of property relations through monetary debasement? One only needed to look across the Atlantic to the rebel Continentals, or to the revolutionary assignats across the Channel--'the discredited paper securities of impoverished fraud and beggared rapine' (Burke, 1999: 432)--in order to discern the dangerous confluences between the 'swinish multitude' and fiat money divorced from the principle of scarcity. Further warnings appeared in the twenty years after the 1848 crisis, as the circulation of paper notes soared and debt pyramided on the back of expanding bullion stocks (Landes, 1972: 204-5). At issue was the question of how to ensure that this slow but inexorable widening of the franchise expressed the abstract rights of the individual citizen, rather than the collective interests of the working class.

Containment took various ideological forms, including nationalism, racism and reformism; but of at least equal importance was the construction of a cordon sanitaire shielding the 'economic' functions of the state from 'political' interference. If the bourgeois citizen were forced to leave her purse behind when entering political society, than the social power of money would have to re-enter the political sphere of the state from above. Beneath the economic minimalism of the liberal night-watchman state lay the bedrock of 'sound money', secured through constitutional checks embedding scarcity as the guiding principle organising monetary management. These included defining the currency as a fixed quantity of commodity money, whether gold, silver or both ('bimetallism'); guaranteeing convertibility between token and commodity money at par; and creating a 'cast iron' rule (Bagehot, 1915: 26) to ensure the 'metallic fluctuation' between centralised reserves and notes issued, either by imposing a fiduciary limit or, more commonly, a proportional ratio. Of course, the true disciplinary power of such checks lay in their internationalism. Opening the vaults of the central bank to the world market subjugated the state to the global rule of money by allowing money to flee, rather than congeal into domestic hoards. This global reversal of Gresham's Law is fundamental to the constitution of money's social power to command labour domestically.

Constitutionalism allowed bullion, even as its status as domestic money slowly faded (although private ownership of commodity money remained substantial before falling away precipitously after 1913), to continue to enforce the principle of scarcity over the entire pyramid of capitalist money. Not only did it appear possible to replicate the classical price-specie flow mechanism through the state's centralised hoard, but also to sever the dangerous connections between 'representative government' and the money supply. As Weber noted, 'the significance of metallic standards today lies precisely in the elimination of these interests [the masses] from influence on the monetary situation' (1947: 307-8). The gold standard was, as the Treasury head Sir Bradbury informed Churchill, 'knave proof' (Moggridge, 1969: 61). It prevented 'individual follies and eccentricities' (Keynes, 1930: 299); or in modern parlance, it created a credible 'commitment mechanism' that ensured that state policies were not 'time inconsistent' (Bordo & Kydland, 1996).

In sum, efforts to resolve the antagonism corroding the foundations of money's social power--the dialectic between money's depoliticised thing-like form and a content that must constitute a social relation of domination and exploitation--force the organising principle of scarcity to ever-higher levels of socialisation. Only in the world market--the 'substratum' where the objective alien categories that together form the totality of bourgeois class relations acquire their 'livelihood as capitalist command over living labour' (Bonefeld, 2000: 49)--can money constitute its universal exploitative content through the particularistic form of national currencies. In the absence of a world state and thus world money, the constitution of and struggle against money's social power is mediated (but not resolved) in the successive GMSS that organise and integrate the totality of capitalist monies. In turn, their rise and fall does not mirror the fortunes of hegemonic states or fraction of capitals, but rather shifting strategies to confront, neutralise or subsume working-class struggle against money's social power, which exists in the mode of a dematerialising money-form. In the following sections, I sketch an alternative historiography of GMSS in terms of their ability to combine these contradictory social processes--socially imposed scarcity and monetary dematerialisation--into the organisation of capitalist money.

The rise and fail of monetary internationalism

Beginning around 1870, a mad ten-year 'scramble for gold' took place, as one industrialised economy after another formalised its commitment to a domestic monometallic standard. By maintaining parity against a golden numeraire, international cross-rates formed, creating a GMS linked through private flows of gold and credit. It is almost a truism among radicals to ascribe the rise of this GMS to British hegemony, even as Britain's rivals retreated more generally from 'Manchester School' ideology. The way hegemony was 'exercised' is vague: sterling played a limited role as reserve currency; (5) the Bank of England remained parochial; while the City, globally recycling capital on commercial criteria alone, formed a triumvirate with Berlin and Paris (with Amsterdam and Brussels playing supporting roles) (Feis, 1930; Lindert, 1969; Gallarotti, 1995; Palyi, 1972). While Britain no doubt served as a role model for a bourgeoisie that had secured its political victory throughout the metropolitan core by the 1870S, the rise of this GMS is better explained by a bourgeois aversion to inflationary monetary standards and a subsequent desire to entrench money's power over the state, for the 1860S were marked by fears of an imminent depreciation of silver, as falling demand and oversupply threatened its scarcity status.

Amid economic malaise, higher wages, increasing working-class organisation and a widening franchise, the gold standard ensured that the management of money remained outside the sphere of everyday politics (Eichengreen, 1992: 30), muting any fiscal pressure upon the state (welfare expenditure in the 1880s was typically below 2 per cent of GDP (Maddison, 1984: 58)). This was its purpose. Even as it forced the costs of adjustment upon the working class--the only 'variable', under the mechanics of the gold standard, being wages (Eichengreen & Temin, 1997)--maintaining convertibility rather than external adjustment per se was the policy 'objective'. As long as commitment to this goal remained unquestioned by wealth-owners--ultimately, a belief in the eternal subordination of social reproduction to the gilded laws of scarcity economics--gold movements were minimal, as accommodating flows of short-term capital relieved authorities of much of the day-to-day management of the adjustment process (at least for core 'gold club' members). (6)

Yet all this was to rapidly change, leaving this naturalised GMS exposed as a fragile mechanism of class control, contingent on a precarious balance of social forces. Furthermore, the seeds of politicised money that were to bloom noxiously in the following century were already being sown by the central-bank system, whose very existence undermined the internationalism of the gold standard by mediating between the credit system and commodity reserves. Central bankers quickly learnt techniques that weakened the rigid connections between centralised gold hoards and internal credit structures. Gold devices and other administrative measures to widen the gold points acted like capital controls by manipulating arbitraging opportunities. Some jurisdictions allowed for overissuing on payment of fines, or the issuing of low-denomination notes (demonetarising gold), while the growing use of foreign-exchange reserves--ironically a sign of the confidence engendered by the gold standard--allowed central banks to further dampen the scarcity signals sent by a pure commodity standard. While such interventions ultimately intensified fluctuations and socialised their impact, in the final instance the authorities' commitment to convertibility was absolute and remained unquestioned.

By the inter-war years, it was apparent that the assumptions underpinning this commitment to the internationalism of the classical standard were outmoded. Instead of 'bourgeois freedom', the inter-war commodity standard offered restrictions, limited choices, dilemmas and, ultimately, incoherent policies that fuelled the market's 'distrust of currency' (Warren, 1937: 67). The painful efforts to reestablish parities after the First World War only accentuated their fluid, politicised foundations. Yet the 'return to gold' was pursued with great urgency across the metropolitan core. Portraying this period as a failed attempt by Britain to reassert its hegemonic position--Cox (1986) quaintly refers to it as a case of misplaced nostalgia--is unconvincing. Rather than being a faint echo of Pax Britannica, the reconstruction of a metallic standard formed a central thread in containing 'the spirit of revolution' (Bolshevism) looming over the old order. On both sides of the Atlantic, the working class was enfranchised and represented by parties seeking election; shorter working weeks were entrenched (significantly increasing real wages); and union numbers soared as commentators panicked at the 'unprecedented revolt of the rank and file' (Brecher, 1972: 101).

Furthermore, the exigencies of war financing had freed money and domestic credit structures from the scarcity relations imposed by gold (public expenditure had increased six-fold in the UK), exposing the possibility of 'consumption to all'--including the 'labouring classes' (Keynes, 1971: 11-12). Lord Cunliffe's oft-criticised claim of 'automaticity' was not some elementary technical misunderstanding, but a political manifesto calling for the untrammelled accumulation of capital, untroubled by working-class resistance. The 'return to gold'--accomplished in forty-three countries by 1928--was driven, above all else, by the need to reassert the social power of money over a restive and, after October 1917, potentially revolutionary working class: 'the only means of averting economic and social disaster' (Cassel, 1932: 11).

In turn, its failure was not, as radical accounts often suggest, primarily attributable to inter-imperialist rivalry or hegemonic vacuums, but rather to the growing internal rigidity in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Of special concern was the willingness or even ability of labour to adjust its 'price' downwards, as required by the mechanics behind maintaining convertibility at par. Whether this global 'asymmetry' in class relations can be dated from the collapse of the short post-war inflationary boom in 1921 (Kindleberger, 1973), 'the deplorably inelastic conditions of industrial organisation' were evident shortly thereafter (Keynes, cited in Vicarelli, 1984: 52). While Mussolini, to the admiration of the British bourgeoisie, simply ordered a 20-per-cent cut in wages before decreeing the lira at par (Skidelsky, 2000), adjustment in the OK was reliant on the Bank rate, which despite its aggressive application and the desired unemployment, had a 'remarkably moderate effect as measured by the fall in prices' (Hawtrey, 1939: 126).

The agent responsible for this breakdown emerged from the pre-war semi-skilled workforce, which found itself first atomised by scientific management, then homogenised through technological innovation. In its stead rose a socially massified workforce, not only collective in its subjectivity, but also militant and unpredictable. The ability to clear markets through retrenchments in working-class consumption could no longer be assumed. Despite setbacks to organised labour during the 1920S, economic science found itself forced to model the business cycle as a political crisis centred on working-class reproduction. No longer a social pathology labelled 'pauperism', unemployment and poverty signified market failure rather than individual flaws. Responsibility shifted to the state, and spending on social and support programs soared, in turn forcing a rapid recomposition of the state form. (7)

Forestalling such an outcome had been a primary objective among financial elites at the close of hostilities. Montagu Norman was less concerned with reasserting British financial hegemony than with establishing a network between formally independent central banks, in order to 'strengthen all of them vis-a-vis their governments' (Palyi, 1972: 13-45). Central bank independence was a key resolution adopted by the Brussels Conference in 1920 (at the instigation of the Bank of England), and a standard condition attached to League of Nation reconstruction loans, especially those made to the anti-Bolshevik states in eastern and central Europe (Kisch & Elkin, 1928). Independence proved ephemeral however, even as central banks doubled in number during the inter-war period. As Gregory warned: 'the future political outlook of Europe is uncertain, the Central Banks, children of a Liberal Age, are surviving into an age of Socialisation and vigorous class opposition. To expect that they will be able to withstand the demands of Ministers of State, without the support of the gold standard--or even with it--is to belie all experience' (1925: 60). Such fears found grist in the growing hesitancy of central bankers to play by the 'rules of the game', even as one state legislature after another formalised higher minimum gold-backed reserves from the customary rate of about a third to 40 or even 50 per cent--although the gold-cover ratio was often far higher (Kisch, 1932)--which were applied 'in a more rigid form' (League of Nations, 1931: 13). It became apparent that central bankers were increasingly ensnared between the conflicting goals of protecting and disciplining a growing mountain of profane money. Reserves became 'buffers' or 'insulators' rather than 'transmitters' (Nurske, 1944: 105--6), while surplus countries sterilised more frequently (Bloomfield, 1959). Furthermore, the systemic need to economise on gold saw the emergence of a gold-exchange standard, raising contradictions that were to become famous thirty years later as the so-called 'Triffen dilemma'. Average foreign-exchange holdings (comprised of gold-centre currencies including sterling, dollars, French and even Swiss francs) increased by 194 per cent over four years, rising to form 42 per cent of total reserves by 1928 (Hawtrey, 1939: 133-4; Nurske, 1944: 235). Such 'monetary alchemy' was little more than a competition between 'the efficiency of the printing-presses ... with the output of gold mines'. Adjustment was simply adjourned, making equilibrium 'artificial' and embarrassment likely, for the right to convert to gold could never be removed (Mlynarski, 1929: 29-90).

Nothing, quipped General Peron, is more cowardly than money; and in the face of 'risks ... never before considered' (Ohlin, 1937: 148), it predictably took flight. No longer convinced of the state's commitment or ability to enforce sound money in the face of working-class refusal, the markets 'subjected the authorities' stated commitment [to parity] to early and repeated test' (Eichengreen, 1992: 391).The pound was nearly toppled in 1927 in response to the General Strike, and again in 193O with Labour's decision to expand already-generous unemployment benefits (Simmons, 1994). Increasing the discount rate only encouraged further flows, since the markets perceived it as a sign of monetary weakness. Shortly thereafter, the inter-war GMS collapsed, buckling under the strains of class struggle whose modes of existence were a dematerialising money-form and a recomposing democratic-welfare-state form. Both were inimical to monetary internationalism, and it would take more than a decade to reconstruct a new GMS able to subsume these social forms.

The rise and fall of monetary nationalism

Extrapolating from surface events, most radicals have seen Bretton Woods as simply a gold standard under American hegemony, rather than seeing such phenomena as manifestations of deeper contradictions caused by the shift that this GMS signified in both the management and ultimate trajectory of class struggle in the second half of the twentieth century. Judged against the freedoms of monetary internationalism, it is the highly illiberal nature of Bretton Woods that requires explanation. But in order to understand this sea-change, we should begin with the observation that Bretton Woods was the culmination of a revolution, not the beginning. Far more than a discursive exercise by Anglo-American elites, Bretton Woods provided a framework for the global organisation and integration of money in light of the inter-war 'currency revolution' (Morgan-Webb, 1935), while avoiding a similar breakdown in the world market. Aside from the cheap money policies, competitive devaluations and exchange controls of the 1930S, this revolution included (with varying intensity across the core capitalist economies) the emergence of bullion standards whether de jure or de facto, as the circulation of specie collapsed, restrictions on private gold markets, waning central-bank independence, politicised parities, diluted statutory gold-reserve requirements and, perhaps most importantly, the growing eligibility of government paper as a reserve asset.

Initially a continuation of nineteenth-century debates over the management of a metallic standard ('rules' versus 'discretion'), this revolution quickly broke new theoretical ground, coalescing into an iconoclastic new doctrine that Hayek (1964) labelled 'monetary nationalism', not because it played to political chauvinism or irredentism, but rather because it signified the rise of a new spatial ontology that recognised working-class resistance in the form of a conflict between internal and external equilibrium (Bloomfield, 1947; Hanson, 1937; Keynes, 1929; Nurske, 1947; Williams, 1934). Rupturing the orthodox understanding of the world market as a seamless expanse across which market forces freely played, monetary nationalism carved out a new, differentiated space, readily transposable over the political map of the nation-state system--the national economy. Over this spatial grid, a new economic science 'concerned with relations between independent national currencies' (Nurske, 1945: 1) formed, providing a conceptual framework within which the state and its agencies could plan, manipulate and stabilise the discrete social space of the 'insular economy' (McKinnon, 1981). Monetary independence required a wedge between the world market and the domestic money supply, achievable through techniques such as adjustable pegs, publicly controlled international liquidity reserves, and capital controls--truly novel, since short-term credit flows had 'always been a necessary part of the mechanism of international money market supply and control' (Williams, 1932: 146).

Monetary nationalists sought to heighten the state's power of seigniorage; not for the purpose of external aggrandisement, as sought by political nationalists, but rather in order to augment the state's ability to manage internal class relations. Even as working-class rigidity against the social power of money forced a dematerialisation of the money-form and a breakdown of its global constitution, monetary nationalists identified in this elastic money a policy tool capable of transforming labour insurgency into the raw fuel to power a virtuous cycle of abundance and growth. Confining class struggle within economistic parameters--the demand for more (modelled as aggregate demand), whether in the form of 'productivity deals' such as the 1950 Treaty of Detroit, socialised via pattern bargaining, or as automatic welfare stabilisers--promised a high-octane capitalism linking endless work to vast outputs (De Angelis, 2000). Achieving a permanent shift to this 'Economics of Abundance' (Modigliani, 1944: 75) required, above all else, the breaking of the fetters of monetary internationalism. Interest rates were freed to target high investment levels, while fiduciary money attenuated the business cycle by manipulating the 'ratio' of private labour that was pseudo-socially validated. The price--a gentle decline in the value of money as the costs of de-valorising capital and labour power were 'socialised', while productivity gains fuelled wage rises--appeared modest, and even essential in recalibrating the balance between necessary and surplus labour by moderating real wage growth through money illusion. As Calomiris and Wheelock argue, the necessary condition for such a price drift 'was the replacement of the interwar gold standard with the Bretton Woods system' (1998: 61).

While Bretton Woods never assumed the institutional form envisaged by its original architects, the IMF'S Articles of Agreement clearly adhered to the core tenets of monetary nationalism. Its key features have been well described elsewhere (e.g. Helleiner, 1994), and we need not dwell on them here. The point to emphasis is that Bretton Woods was the first cogent attempt to incorporate the political economy of the mass worker into the techniques of global monetary organisation. The implications were profound, for this GMS became, in effect, a 'Labour Standard' (Hicks, 1985). Changes in the relative cost of labour power (or 'efficiency wages') became the ultimate determinant of currency values--a reversal of gold-standard causality. As Viner hyperbolised, it crowned 'trade unions as the ultimate and unlimited sovereign over monetary policy' (Skidelsky, 2000: 304).

The ascendancy of the dollar, tenuously linked to a pallid and easily neutered gold residue, did nothing to alter this profound shift--other than amplifying flaws already apparent to early critics such as Lutz (1943) and Viner (1943). Of greatest concern was the question of whether adjustment under this GMS was rather like 'swimming without getting wet'. Supporters of Bretton Woods, including Camille Gutt, the Fund's first director, were unable to convincingly refute this charge beyond stressing the need to 'replace the old but today totally ineffective gold-standard rule that a country must adjust its national economy to external pressure' (1947: 162)--a sentiment repeated by Nurske, who suggested that external adjustment 'is destructive of internal equilibrium and therefore out of the question' (1947: 278). Of course, Bretton Woods sought the extension of the adjustment process, not its extinction: 'iron rations', rather than 'magic carpets on which to soar into the clouds of extravagant living' (Robertson, 1943: 354). In retrospect, it is obvious that the adjustment mechanisms were hopelessly inadequate. The extra 'time' that was supposed to replace the violent liquidations of capital and labour under monetary internationalism--abridging the salto mortale of the commodity--became instead an endless deferment of adjustment, allowing overcapacity and investment distortions to accumulate (Brenner's 'malign hand'). This lacuna signalled an even deeper flaw at the heart of Bretton Woods: 'the assumption of economic equilibrium' (Gardner, 1980: 82) which, in the context of a labour standard, depended on the further assumption of social and political homoeostasis where 'the various balances of power making up effective demand [were] unchanging' (Negri, 1988: 28). Yet social relations are constantly remade through the social forms that constitute their mode of existence, a process of transformation rather than of simple replication,, given that social forms can strengthen working-class compositions, further intensifying contradictions between form and content.

This form/content dialectic manifested itself as unresolved and escalating tensions in the temporal (flexibility/rigidity) and spatial (national/international) organisation of Bretton Woods. These tensions were initially disguised by a mixture of good fortune, us largesse and active credit management that dampened global disequilibrium, while allowing the domestic high-growth strategies (facilitated in Europe by massive imports of capital goods) necessary to contain class struggle at the cessation of hostilities. National business cycles de-synchronised, while a strong internal correlation between savings and investment reduced demand for capital flows. As these contingent factors subsided, the latent flaws of monetary nationalism rapidly surfaced, placing increasing strains on states and central bankers, who, freed from the constitutional checks of monetary internationalism, responded in haphazard fashion from the 1960s onwards (e.g. the Gold Pool, swap facilities). Yet adjustment was endlessly postponed, since massive credit infusions were automatically monetarised. To do otherwise, noted the Bank for International Settlements (ms), invited 'difficult political and social consequences' (1971: 46). Globally, capital account imbalances exploded after 1967 as offshore activity accelerated, although the tendency of radicals to mechanically attribute this to the US's 'benign neglect' of its balance of payments is simplistic. The growth of Euromarkets reflected the decision by wealth holders, resident in the us or otherwise, to park funds in short-term debt markets (Dufey & Giddy, 1994).At issue is why. (8) Although evidence is scarce, what there is suggests a significant shift, especially after 1970, from productive to speculative activity--a flight from factory floor to fictitious capital. (9) This breakdown in the accumulation process manifested itself globally as an 'erosion of confidence in paper currencies' (BIS, 1974: 14) that quickly overwhelmed Bretton Woods, as currency speculation, fed by Eurodebt, increased from $25 billion in 1970 to more than $100 billion by the end of 1973.

In removing the key regulator of socially mediated scarcity--money--from the logic of scarcity relations, Bretton Woods was complicit in its own downfall. The modes of existence assumed by capitalist class relations under monetary nationalism increasingly contradicted their own exploitative content, destabilising the boundaries between state and market, citizen and worker. As the social power of money waned, it became evident to all that 'no bank, no authority ... is able to guarantee, at all, the convertibility of money into labour' (Hicks, 1985: 24). Bretton Woods collapsed when faith in this promised act of conversion crumbled--a breakdown amplified by the global transmission, via the dollar, of the acute crisis afflicting the social reproduction of us capitalism.

From ghetto to factory floor, the circuits of class struggle fused as the disciplining mechanisms of the labour market--unemployment, segmentation and the links between productivity and wages (and more generally work and income)--frayed. Increasing social expenditure--a response to social unrest and internal resistance to the Vietnam war--facilitated the rapid monetarisation of government debt. (10) Symptomatic of this was the 'appallingly ineffectual' engineered downturn of 1969-1970 (Fortune, January 1974: 62).

Despite a sharp contraction in fiscal and monetary policy, the disturbing outcome was a perverse combination of higher real and nominal wages with rising unemployment. 'The rules of economics are not working', Burns admitted before Congress (Fortune, March 1972: 52). Money illusion had vanished--'an explosive situation in every sense of the word', according to former CEA member Eckstein (Fortune, March 1972: 153). This is the framework for contextualising the 'suspension of economics' of 15 August 1971. Abnegation and devaluation were the necessary counterparts to domestic strategies seeking the decomposition of the social forces, unleashed by money's eroding social power, that threatened the expanded reproduction of capital (BIS, 1973: 21).

The return of internationalism

While Nixon's desperate gamble quickly broke down amid the contradictions of monetary nationalism, a new GMS was already forming behind the destabilising capital flows, wildly overshooting exchange rates and the gathering pace of financial liberalisation. This represented a profound, if largely unrecognised shift in the techniques for organising capitalist money: a return to monetary internationalism but on radically different dematerialised foundations. Like its commodity precursors, this GMS is 'a sound money standard' (BIS, 1997: 2), having achieved two decades of disinflation and austerity. Yet it has done so based on an irredeemable, paper-money standard--a collection of valueless and infinitely elastic money-forms. Money's exploitative content has been reconstituted through a form that appears as its antithesis. This paradox is resolved when we realise that it is actually anchored by its own 'profane' nature. Its very laxity creates the necessary conditions for imposing upon money the organising principle of scarcity; for money, whether as asset or medium, has been subsumed within hypermobile capital flows, especially the US$44 trillion of globally traded debt.

Debt is the fastest-growing, most actively traded (in both secondary and derivative markets), and most internationalised (in terms of cross-border flows) asset class. Haunted by a restless 'search for yield', debt-holders exercise constant surveillance over creditors, reshuffling portfolios that result in sharp movements in liquidity preferences for particular currencies (or currency areas). This cross-border churning drives the $2 trillion in daily 'forex' trading, and manifests itself as exchange-rate pressures that can rapidly escalate, if market 'confidence' is shaken, into full-blown crises (e.g. in the balance of payments or the domestic banking sector) that require the severest austerity within the affected country or region. This simple act of currency conversion through the buying and selling of debt instruments ensures that the suppliers of money--states--'face the continuous distrust of money users' (De Grauwe, 1989: 10), once again reversing Gresham's Law. As Chossudovsky suggests, 'what this signifies, in practice, is that central banks are no longer able to regulate the creation of money in the broad interests of society' (1998: 24). Instead, the principle guiding the global organisation and integration of money is the realisation of credit as serviced debt: that is, the global intensification of exploitation.

Conclusion

According to several mainstream commentators, radical theories have failed to transcend the categories deployed by orthodox IPE to explain GMSS, which suggests, at least implicitly, that such 'international monetary phenomena' lie 'outside' the class nature of capitalism as analysed by Marx--or at least, beyond its theoretical power to explain. This article has supported the first contention while challenging the second. Radical analyses of GMSS are dominated by categories such as ' nation state', 'national capital' and 'hegemony'. While its origins are diverse, the end result is clear: a radicalised political realism. It is critical IPE, not a critique.

The fundamental problem lies in a failure to critique the central categories constituting such phenomena--particularly money. Their estranged appearance as 'things'--including, ultimately, capital itself--is essentially unchallenged, and they become objects constituted within a field of social relations bounded by capital and state alone. The result is a hermeneutic drama unfolding to a script with several actors but only one voice. By interrogating social forms instead, as modes of existence of the antagonistic relation between labour and capital, I have attempted to unveil another actor, who speaks with a different, hostile voice. In this story, the rise and fall of GMSs is a tale of the constitution of and struggle against money's social power to command living labour. It has traced a continuous 'red thread' of working-class agency through a hundred years of global monetary organisation--a thread running into the current 'non-system' that emerged from the chaos of the 1970s.

Perpetual crises, instability and austerity--so characteristic of this GMS, at least for those at the bottom--is not some unfortunate, unintended outcome of geopolitical struggle. Nor should we accept the estranged appearance of an uneven 'struggle' between a globalising 'economic space' and a 'political space' tied to the territoriality of nation states, even if accepting states are tightly constrained by the 'rules of the marketplace': to avoid 'overly ambitious policies', exercise 'fiscal discipline', and set domestic policies in a manner that 'the markets will judge sound and sustainable' (BIS, 1997: 143; 1995: 116-9). From the perspective of this article, the social content of this 'nameless' GMS is clearly the imposition of work within national economies. It signifies an ongoing global assault against labour, and its goals are the resubordination of working-class reproduction to the social power of money and, ultimately, a decomposition of working-class formations that grew out of, subverted and finally challenged the politicised social forms underpinning the strategy of monetary nationalism. Remaining trapped in the categories of hegemony and radicalised power politics--the discourse of capital--leaves the Left ill-prepared in the face of this 'return to scarcity'. It demands nothing less than a class-based analysis.

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Notes

(1.) The major exception is the loosely aligned 'open Marxist' tradition, to which this article is heavily indebted--especially the volume edited by Bonefeld and Holloway (1995). Thanks are due for the useful comments made by the anonymous referees of this article. The usual disclaimers apply.

(2.) The date on which Nixon launched his New Economic Policy, effectively ending Bretton Woods by formally abnegating the US's commitment to maintaining convertibility between the us dollar and gold.

(3.) The technical attributes of each GMS are determined by economic science, which De Angelis defines as the elaboration of 'theoretical and analytical tools that, in a particular historical context, may be appropriate to inform and frame strategies of capitalist accumulation' (1997: 4).

(4.) The relationship between working-class reproduction (needs), money and the relation of work--in short, the social construction of scarcity--has always been complex, contradictory, and dynamic (e.g. Marx, 1973: 287). While mercantilist and Malthusian economic science looked to the naturalised scarcity of hunger in order to enforce the work relation (a strategy still brutally applied in much of the world), the generation of new needs--whether in the subjective form of infinite needs within a framework of naturalised scarcity, as found in Lionel Robbins's neoclassical reformulation, or in the objective form of mass working-class consumption found in Keynesianism--came to dominate.

(5.) Sterling comprised only 6 per cent of global reserves in 1913--about the same as the combined total of marks and francs (which also played a greater reserve role in continental Europe) (Gallarotti, 1995).

(6.) Unsurprisingly, gold-core currencies were rarely hedged.

(7.) Government expenditure for France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK and the us as a percentage of GDP rose from an average of 11.9 per cent in 1913 to 17.8 per cent in 1929, and to 27.3 per cent by 1938 (Maddison, 1984: 57).

(8.) Offshore markets developed in response to the inherent contradictions of monetary nationalism. Both the us and the UK encouraged their development in order to circumvent policy dilemmas, while demand was initially driven by heavily indebted corporations seeking cheaper funds, as they increased constant capital in an effort to expel living labour.

(9.) For example, in the us the percentage of total corporate funds devoted to financial assets increased from an average of 19.8 per cent between 1959 and 1966 to 25.4 per cent between 1966 and 1973.

(10.) Federal Reserve holdings of T-bonds as a percentage of marketable securities increased from 14 per cent in 1960 to nearly 27 per cent by 1971.