Lindsay Barrett

Bio: Lindsay Barrett is an academic researcher from University of Technology, Sydney. The author has contributed to research in topics: German & Nation state. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 12 citations.

The multiplication of the margin: price, housing wealth and inequality*

Abstract: Price is one of the key axioms of capitalism This paper seeks to understand the axiomatic status of this category in material terms by focusing on the nexus between housing, price, wealth and ineq

Remembering German-Australian colonial entanglement: An introduction

Abstract: The role of German actors in European colonialisms, especially before the foundation of the German nation state in 1871 and Germany’s entry into imperialism proper with the so-called protectorates ...

Market technologies and the pragmatics of prices

Abstract: This article contributes to a pragmatist analysis of pricing and valuation through an account of the production of closing prices at the Paris Bourse. The Paris Bourse is an electronic stock exchange and the actors in charge of its technological configuration often need to face concerns about the quality of the prices that the configuration produces. Closing prices are particularly important because they constitute references that circulate widely. The author analyses how a problem of representativeness of closing prices was raised in the late 1990s and how several techniques aimed at solving it. In order to deal with this problem of representativeness, the author proposes the consideration of prices as signs in a pragmatist manner. Adapting Charles S. Peirce's theory of the sign to the study of prices, the author concentrates attention on the material display of prices, on their capacity to stand as traces of some event, and on the way they may suit a set of calculative conventions.

Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital and Class

Abstract: labour lying idle so that its form (gold) can symbolically play the role of the equivalent form of value. Distinctly capitalist commodity money would be a living part of accumulation, not a congealed, dormant, labour numeraire! How is this problem to be framed within Marxist theory? As well as money being a produced commodity like other commodities, it has to be a commodity that can guarantee value, but without reliance on the imprimatur of the state. This money commodity has to resolve temporal and spatial variability in value: it has to, in itself, resolve the problem of conventional state money, that a process of exchange of equivalent values is always expressed at a given time and in a given monetary unit. For conventional state money, this means that there are volatile exchange rates and a range of interest rate regimes for each currency: the equivalence of exchange cannot be verified. There is, in Marxist terms, a spatial and temporal problem in the commensuration of value: there is a discontinuity in the measured value of capital in different forms and at different locations, and this discontinuity needs to be reconciled.23 The new commodity money has to have the capacity to absorb that discontinuity into itself as (one of) its defining characteristics, so that money can, indeed, secure equivalence (commensurate value) across time and space. This process of commensuration is what Marx attached to the function of money: money is the means by which ‘[different] commodities become magnitudes of the same kind, of the same unit, i.e. commensurable’ (Marx 1939: 143). But how different moneys are commensurated within a theory of value, and what it means to commensurate packages of financial assets whose underlying value is not itself being exchanged were questions not posed by Marx, nor since Marx. It is this issue that brings financial derivatives to the centre of a Marxist theory of capitalist money. Marx’s theory of money: its link to financial derivatives The investigation of the rudiments of a theory of money consistent with financial derivatives must look beyond the form of gold. It is to Marx’s earlier writings, particularly on alienation, that we look for conceptual propositions about the nature of money and finance.24 For example, reviewing James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy, Marx (1844) emphasised the importance of contingency in relation to ‘laws’ about money and the essential role of money as a mediating process. Here Marx goes on to explain the basic characteristics of capitalist money, and it warrants citing at some length: The essence of money is not, in the first place, the property alienated in it, but that the mediating or movement ... is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money. ... The personal mode of existence of money as money – and not only as the inner, implicit, hidden social relationship or class relationship between New, Global, Capitalist Money 159 23 The concept of discontinuities is explored in detail in Chapter 7. 24 Marx’s writing at this time, being strongly influenced by Feuerbach, is drawing on parallels between money and religion and both as alienated forms of social relations. commodities – this mode of existence corresponds the more to the essence of money, the more abstract it is, the less it has a natural relationship to the other commodities, the more it appears as the product and yet as the non-product of man, the less primitive its sphere of existence, the more it is created by man or, in economic terms, the greater the inverse relationship of its value as money to the exchange value or money value of the material in which it exists. Hence paper money and the whole number of paper representatives of money (such as bills of exchange, mandates, promissory notes, etc.) are the more perfect mode of existence of money as money and a necessary factor in the progressive development of the money system. In the credit system, of which banking is the perfect expression, it appears as if the power of the alien, material force were broken, the relationship of self-estrangement abolished and man had once more human relations to man. The important point Marx was contending above is that the more money is ‘lifted above’ direct commodity relations by ‘losing’ the characteristics of other commodities, the more ‘perfect its mode of existence’ because the social relations of capital, expressed in commodity production, are not being contaminated by the particularities of the chosen money commodity.25 Gold is, in this regard, an extremely primitive form of capitalist money: indeed, we know it historically as pre-capitalist money. Financial derivatives, on the other hand, as advances beyond promissory notes and bills of exchange – contracts that are man-made and having no ‘natural relationship’ to the products from which they derive, appear as a highly advanced form of money. Nonetheless, the requirement for a global monetary system is precisely as Marx conceived of it in the abstract – a role for commodities that are both part of other commodities, but also discrete commodities in themselves. But gold is a single (or at best dual) dimensional commodity.26 There are too many types of discontinuities in the global financial system to be reconciled by a single commodity in the role of money. The multiple forms of risk-exposure, reflecting the range of possible inter-temporal, inter-spatial, inter-financial-instrument price relativities requires intermediation in a form that is itself flexible and able to reflect the range of possibilities in these relativities. Gold does not meet this requirement, especially in an era when money capital increasingly takes the form of different types of credit money and other financial assets. Derivatives, on the other hand are commodities produced and traded for precisely this purpose. Derivatives: commodities commensurating monetary discontinuities We have seen that, in terms of Marx’s benchmark of the ‘progressive development of the money system’, derivatives meet the requirement of a more ‘perfect mode 160 Capitalism with Derivatives 25 Notice also that Marx could contemplate an association of ‘perfect money’ with something as basic as the credit system and paper representations of money. That now seems a rather low bar for depicting perfection. 26 The duality relates to Marx’s emphasis that gold never traded at its costs of production. of existence’ by being abstracted from ‘a natural relationship’ with other commodities. But are derivatives themselves commodities, and how can Marx’s conception of money reconcile the need for commodity money, yet for commodity money to appear as ‘not the product of man’? Marx’s conception of commodity money was both advanced and constrained by the Gold Standard within which it was conceived. It was advanced by recognition that money must have a commodity basis if it is to be an integral component of capital accumulation and not just a numeraire. But Marx’s conception was also constrained by the then widely held belief that one commodity, gold, could act as a universal equivalent form of value and furthermore, that the robustness of its status resided in its defined and finite quantity. In Marx’s time, the expectation was that one particular commodity (gold) could traverse and reconcile all the discontinuities within the money system. Derivatives, however, confront that image. Any single unit of measure such as gold can represent only a balance of multiple processes of commensuration, and thereby actually reconcile perhaps none at all. Derivatives, on the other hand, are literally thousands of types of commodities whose specific characteristics are designed to secure commensurability between different forms of capital and their spatial and temporal characteristics. If money is defined by its role in the process of commensuration (or, as Marx also put, it in the ‘mediating’ process), there is no logical preclusion that a range of ‘commodities’ could not fulfil the function of the equivalent form of value when there are clearly articulated mechanisms of commensuration between the various monetary commodities. New, Global, Capitalist Money 161

Automated landlord: Digital technologies and post-crisis financial accumulation:

Abstract: This article centers the role of digital technologies in extending financial accumulation into new sectors of the US housing market in the wake of the global financial crisis. I argue that while post-crisis market conditions provided an opportunity for large investors to acquire foreclosed single-family homes, convert them to rental housing, and roll out an new asset class based on bundled rent checks, these conditions were insufficient on their own. Digital innovations coming to prominence since the 2008 crisis were required to automate core functions, such as rent collection and maintenance, in order to efficiently manage large, geographically dispersed property portfolios. New information technologies enabled investors to aggregate ownership of resources, extract income flows, and securely convey these flows to capital markets. Such advances have, therefore, given rise to the “automated landlord”, whereby the management of tenants and properties is increasingly not only mediated, but governed, by smart...