/lit/ - Literature

on a less ridiculous note tho pic rel is pretty interesting for talking about 2 of the 3 main influences. will be of interest for anyone who wants to deep-dive into what otherwordly spirits possessed Nick For Speed.

>Money gives anyone the right to exchange directly with anything, anytime, and therefore, everyone seeks to have it. This is the fetish of money. Nonetheless, Marx’s objective was no longer simply to criticize the illusion of bullionism. Classical economists had already attacked the money-fetishist thinking of mercantilism, and Marx acknowledged this as their great contribution; that they opposed the money-centered stance of mercantilism and sought to reconsider the value of commodity from the vantage point of the process of production. Meanwhile, he himself was consistently concerned with money qua metaphysical conundrum.

>What I would like to focus on here is not how capital’s self-reproduction is possible but why capital’s movement has to continue endlessly. Indeed this is interminable and without telos. If merchant capital (or mercantilism) that runs after money (gold) is a perversion, then industrial capital, that appears to be more productive, has been bequeathed the perversion. In fact, before the advent of industrial capital, the whole apparatus of capitalism, including the credit system,
had already been complete; industrial capital began within the apparatus and altered it according to its disposition. Then what is the perversion that motivates the economic activity of capitalism? It is the fetishism of money (commodity).

>At the fountainhead of capitalism, Marx discovered the miser (money hoarder), who lives the fetishism of money in reality. Owning money amounts to owning “social prerogative,” by means of which one can exchange anything, anytime, anywhere. A money hoarder is a person who gives up the actual use-value in exchange for this “right.” Treating money not as a medium but as an end in itself, plutolatory, or the drive to accumulate wealth, is not motivated by material need. Ironically, the miser is materially disinterested, just like the devotee who is indifferent to this world in order to “accumulate riches in heaven.” In a miser there is a quality akin to religious perversion. In fact, both money saving (hoarding) and world religion appeared at the same time, that is, when circulation—which was first formed “in between” communities and gradually interiorized within them— achieved a certain global nature. Therefore, if one sees the sublime in
religious perversion, one should see the same in a miser’s perversion; or if one sees a certain vulgar sentiment in the miser, one should see the same in the religious perversion. It is the same sublime perversion.