1. Theories of Capitalism & Postcapitalism
Seminar 9: Alternative Currencies and Current Alternatives
Dr Harry Pitts

2. Money and the capitalist schema
Lotz gives a Kantian interpretation of the law of value. This states that the money form works along schematic lines.
Money, for Lotz, establishes the conditions of possible experience and the social thinghood of objects.
Following Frankfurt Schoolers like Adorno, Horkheimer and Sohn-Rethel, Lotz trades in Kant’s idealism for a materialist approach, advocating a social standpoint rather than a psychological one.
This roots the way we see the world, and our understanding of objective reality, in the kind of exchange relations we engage in.

3. The Kantian schema
Kant writes, ‘Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind’; the concept is needed to make sense of the world and our intuitions of it
What we perceive is ‘structured by the conceptual structures we already possess’
Objects as we perceive them- in their objectivity- ‘follow our ways of thinking, rather than vice versa’. Their objectivity derives from the objectivity of these mental processes.  
Kant thought that the concepts that we use to understand the world and nature could not possibly have sprung from that nature, and as such human experience is structured by the concepts gifted to us by pure understanding.

4. Kant and the Frankfurters
Frankfurt School critical theory, however, sought spatio-temporal roots for the ordering of experience in conceptual thinking, centring on commodity exchange as a real abstraction that gives rise to the ideal abstraction of conceptual reasoning.  
Alfred Sohn-Rethel writes that Kant ‘was wrong in attributing this preformation to the mind itself’, to a transcendental synthesis ‘locatable neither in time nor in place’ (1978, pp. 6-7).
Rather, the ‘transcendental subject’ Kant’s transcendental idealism centres on is spatially and temporally rooted in the form of money.
The transcendental subject exists nowhere other than in the ‘innermost core of the commodity structure’ (1978, p. xiii).

5. Sohn-Rethel on the social synthesis
As opposed to Kant’s mental and a priori ‘transcendental synthesis’, Sohn- Rethel instead posits a ‘social synthesis’ (1978, p. 37).  
For Sohn-Rethel the ‘social synthesis’ is the set of relationships and collective mental constructions through which society coheres.
In commodity society this is constituted by the function of money as a universal equivalent which expresses the abstraction from individual human labours in the process of exchange.
Sohn-Rethel claims that the social synthesis of any given time conditions its ‘conceptual basis of cognition’ (1978, p. 6).

6. Abstract thought and abstract labour
The social synthesis produced by the exchange abstraction gives rise to the capacity for abstract thought and intellectual labour in general. 
Sohn-Rethel writes that ‘the abstractness operating in exchange and reflected in value […] find[s] an identical expression, namely the abstract intellect, or the so-called ‘pure understanding’- the cognitive source of scientific knowledge.’ (1978, p. 34)
The development of coinage and the use of money as the universal equivalent brings about the capacity to think in ‘abstract universals’ (1978, p. 60), which makes possible conceptual thinking in philosophy and the sciences.  

7. On real abstraction
The abstraction of human labour is not taken to be a feature of labour itself but of exchange. It is a real, practical abstraction.
The exchange abstraction, rather than being purely one of thought, is one of practice, a practical abstraction. This leads Sohn-Rethel to the contention that it is necessary to ‘dispose of the age-old idea that abstraction is the exclusive privilege of thought’ (1978, p. 7).
Abstraction is not the exclusive privilege of thought, but is subject to concrete human activity (1978, p. 6).
Rather than the ‘exclusive property of mind’, then, abstraction ‘arises in commodity exchange’ (1978, p. 19).
Yet it exists only in the head. As Sohn-Rethel writes, ‘[i]t exists nowhere other than in the human mind but it does not spring from it.’ It is, rather, a ‘real abstraction resulting from spatio-temporal activity’ (1978, p. 20).  

8. Money as ‘uniform denominator’
Preoccupied with the use of commodities, Sohn-Rethel suggests, the minds of those involved in exchange cannot have attributed to them the exchange abstraction.
Rather, this abstraction is attributed to the action that they conduct in the process of their preoccupation to acquire an item of use. In exchange, therefore, ‘consciousness and action […] part company’ (ibid., p. 26).
commodity exchange is abstract because it excludes use; that is to say, the action of exchange excludes the action of use. But while exchange banishes use from the actions of people, it does not banish it from their minds. The minds of the exchanging agents must be occupied with the purposes which prompt them to perform the deal of exchange. Therefore whilst it is necessary that their action of exchange should be abstract from use, there is also necessity that their minds should not be. The action alone is abstract. (ibid., p. 28, emphasis added).  
The obliviousness of those involved to the abstraction they actively perform is secured through the reduction of these actions to ‘strict uniformity, eliminating the differences of people, commodities, locality and date’. Money is what achieves this.

9. Lotz and the capitalist schema
Following in the footsteps of the Frankfurt School tradition, Lotz situates his work in a similarly Kantian philosophical lineage.
Thus, ‘everything we think and do is … filtered through a schema'.
This 'structures every reference and makes the relation between subject and object possible’. Breaks with Hegelian tradition.
Like Sohn-Rethel et al, where Lotz breaks with Kant’s psychological explanation is in his social-materialist approach. 
But he makes the claim to root this in Marx’s work itself.

10. Marx on money and the schema
Lotz tells us that the argument of The Capitalist Schema can be traced to a passage in the Grundrisse.
Here, Marx contends that the money-form performs the same function as the rational schematism in Kant’s idealist philosophy.
This schematism ‘makes it possible for a rational being to access and represent objects for the subject’.
Through it, reason establishes ‘a framework under which all objects … make sense and can exist’ (xvi).

11. Money and capitalism
Lotz states that value is not a thing, but sociality itself, which money expresses.
Monetary value is a potentiality for anything that meaningfully 'exists‘, because it is only by virtue of something having an actual or potential monetary value that it can be said to exist at all.
This potential differentiates, for example, love and family in capitalist society from love and family in a non-capitalist society.
Maintaining and reproducing the family in capitalist society proceeds through the money-form. The family is ‘unthinkable’ outside the money-form and the nexus of social relationships that it implies.

12. The contempt it deserves?
So: Money has a powerful psychological effect in capitalist society, but one that is rooted in practical relationships.
It arises from a world constituted in a state of separation whereby we gain access to the things we need through commodity exchange by spending money received in the form of the wage.
In other words, it contains an antagonistic relationship. But does it need to be this way?

13. Bitcoin- fairer money?
‘The unforgiving power of the public address/private key combination has seen 7500 bitcoin lost under a landfill outside Newport in Wales, when an IT worker chucked an old hard drive on which he had stored the private keys from his 2009 bitcoin stash. Current value of loss: £2.1 million.’ (John Lanchester, ‘When Bitcoin Grows Up’, LRB 21st Apr 2016)

14. LETS schemes- the Bristol Pound

15. Questions for discussion
Do alternative currencies really present a new way of acquiring the things we need?
To what extent are they much the same as the currencies we have currently?
What social relations remain in a world where our access to goods and services is still mediated by money?
Can money be retained in a postcapitalist society?
What are the alternatives to this?

16. Next (and last) session
Questions we will consider: How does theory relate to practice? What do different ways of conceiving and critiquing the world imply for how we approach it politically, empirically and practically in our everyday lives?