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Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
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Martin Amis’s Money and the crisis of Fordism
Roberto del Valle Alcalá
To cite this article: Roberto del Valle Alcalá (2018): Martin Amis’s Money and the crisis of
Fordism, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2018.1459457
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2018.1459457
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Taylor &
Francis.
Published online: 10 May 2018.
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Martin Amis’sMoney and the crisis of Fordism
Roberto del Valle Alcalá
School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden
ABSTRACT
This article proposes a fresh contextual reading of Amis’sMoney as a novel
that engages the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s and 1980s. Critical attention
has focused largely on its satirical examination of the Thatcherite ethos, but
Money is also centrally preoccupied with the collapse of postwar capital-
ism’s institutional structures of inter-class coordination. As a result of this
process, the social phenomenology constructed by the novel is not only
defined by growing inequality and economic fetishism, but also by a
pervasive sense of political uncontrollability over the accumulation process.
KEYWORDS
Martin Amis; Money; finance;
class; Fordism
Martin Amis’sMoney stands out in the literary landscape of the 1980s as a mordant commentary on
the follies and complexities of late twentieth-century capitalism. Its eponymous focus on money as
an increasingly enigmatic and intractable economic entity is guided by an overarching interest in
Gresham’s Law, that general principle according to which bad money drives out good.
1
In a sense,
the novel’s entire fictional strategy appears to offer a lengthy transcription of this notion, as it follows
the misadventures of protagonist John Self along the unreal circuits of transatlantic credit and high
finance. One of the plot’s main triggers is, in fact, Self’s decision to quit his previous job making
controversial yet profitable commercials in order to embark on an ultimately stillborn filmic project
initially titled “Good Money”and later renamed, as the destabilizing effects of his financial dealings
begin to register, “Bad Money.”
Set in 1981, the narrative is nevertheless motivated at a deeper level by an acute historical
awareness of the fact that Nixon’s decoupling of the dollar from the gold standard in 1971 had
effectively ushered in a new regime of monetary policy, which in turn enabled a reconstruction of
political–economic relations in capitalism as a whole. Following the central admission that “money
went wrong 10 years ago”(7), the novel inscribes its farcical treatment of money, and the distorted
subjective dynamics it enables, within a broader horizon of historical transformation, whether we
choose to call it post-Fordism, neoliberalism, or even postmodernism. Critics have abundantly
insisted on this point, suggesting, for example, as Joseph Brooker does, that “we cannot pin the
culture described by the book too rigidly on the 1980s. A slightly longer development of post-war or
post-sixties society is clearly in question”(330). Focusing more directly on the economic logic
centrally engaged by the novel, Jon Begley has observed that “Money’s depiction of postmodernity
is premised on a specific socioeconomic thesis,”in the sense that “Amis apprehends the emerging
culture of the 1980s as predicated on the OPEC crisis and the recessionary cycles and economic
reorganization that followed in its wake”(81). Thus the novel offers a sharp assessment not only of
early Thatcherism in Britain and the first wave of neoliberal experimentation with what deputy
Labour Party leader Denis Healy notoriously described as “sado-monetarism,”
2
but also of a much
broader conjuncture of crisis and transformation in late twentieth-century capitalism.
3
Money’s
figurative strategy, with its insistence on the intractable slippages and substitutions operating within
(and ultimately driving) money in contemporary capitalism, points, as Nicky Marsh has noted, to
CONTACT Roberto del Valle Alcalá roberto.del.valle.alcala@sh.se School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University,
Alfred Nobels allé 7, 141 89 Huddinge, Stockholm, Sweden.
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION
https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2018.1459457
“the divergence between […] financial and industrial forms of capital”and, more specifically, to “the
hierarchical relationship”whereby the former subordinates and diminishes “the political purchase”
of the latter (“Money’s Doubles”116–17).
The end of dollar-gold convertibility (that specific moment when “money went wrong”) marks
the center of the ongoing crisis to which the novel responds from the vantage point of the early
eighties. The de-linking of the monetary expression of value from the solid materiality of a general
equivalent (gold) amounted to a generalized crisis in the very measurability and representability of
value,
4
which in turn exacerbated, as Marsh writes, “the distance between the speculative and
industrial economies”(“Money’s Doubles”118). This is the focal point of many literary and cultural
critical engagements with financialization in this period, and a constant theoretical reference for
readings of so-called financial fiction (including Money). An emphasis on the self-referentiality of
money was at the heart of groundbreaking interventions such as those of Jean-Joseph Goux and the
New Economic Criticism,
5
but also of leading poststructuralist thinkers such as Jacques Derrida.
6
Authors such as Jean Baudrillard went even further in their assessment of this historic turning point,
suggesting that, in the 1970s, “[w]e are at the end of production”(9): “Determinacy is dead,
indeterminacy holds sway. There has been an extermination (in the literal sense of the word) of
the real of production and the real of signification”(7).
And yet the growing divergence between finance and industry in the 1970s and 1980s is only fully
intelligible, I would like to suggest, from an integrated perspective on the relational (which is to say,
the political) dimensions of capitalism itself and, specifically, on the historically operative institu-
tional forms governing productive, or class, relations over this period. In other words, if the
historical context and experience on which the novel draws are defined by crisis (a crisis of the
representation of economic value in terms of money), then we should also attend to the ways in
which the latter registers—or possibly even originates—at the level of class relations and the
institutional forms regulating them. In effect, while Money is committed to a representation of the
crisis haunting the monetary/linguistic sign (and, as such, to the representation of a general crisis in
economic and semiotic representation), the novel is also centrally attentive to the concrete processes
of social rupture and disjunction to which the abstraction of money from its material referent sought
to respond. The turbulent and troubling phenomenology of capital depicted by Money (one in which
subjective experience is frequently denoted by disorientation, confusion, and forgetting, not to
mention excess in all forms) is a primary aspect, but its real triggers lie in the broader dynamics
of conflict, in an imaginary of creeping—and sometimes explosively overt—social convulsion to
which the novel does not fail to pay attention.
I want to begin by insisting on the significance of the 1970s crisis in terms of its political
reorganization of class relations. This, I will then try to demonstrate, is the central context for the
novel’s investigation of the disjunction between material production and monetary self-referentiality.
It is a well-documented fact of economic history that capitalism underwent a series of dramatic
transformations in the central decades of the twentieth century, giving rise, in the postwar period, to
an unprecedented phase of both economic growth and social stability.
7
In A Theory of Capitalist
Regulation, one of the most important interventions in Marxian political economy in the 1970s (and
the founding text of what would later be known as the Regulation School of economics),
8
Michel
Aglietta describes the general characteristics of this postwar phase of capitalist history, which he
names Fordism. The technological development and rationalization of mechanization processes,
combined with a new social rule of mass consumption, would lead to “a gigantic upsurge in
accumulation”after World War II (381). First introduced at the Ford Motor Company in 1914
with the pioneering “Five Dollar Day”(Beynon 20), the basic principle of scientifically managed
production plus high wages “rested,”as John Holloway points out, “on an implicit trade-off between
a high degree of alienation and boredom at work and rising consumption after hours,”where
“dissatisfaction was transformed into demand”; consequently, a firm separation between the times
of production and reproduction (or, in other words, between work and life) was enshrined (22). The
seeds of crisis were deeply planted in the Fordist system, however. The basis for growth, namely “the
2R. DEL VALLE ALCALÁ
long-run fall in the social cost of reproduction of labour-power”(Aglietta 381), would undergo a
steady reversal from the mid-1960s under the cumulative effects of its two main dynamics. As
Aglietta explains, “an ever more intensive application of the principle of mechanization tends to
exhaust its productive potentialities and renews the class struggle in production.”On the other hand,
the rule of mass consumption was “disturbed by the fact that Fordism drives the production of these
collective goods to the margins of capitalist accumulation,”and, therefore, their “cost increases
dramatically with a rise in social demand”(384).
The inflationary climate of the 1970s was a clear expression of these structural problems within
the regime of accumulation. As Holloway observes:
In the face of rigidity and revolt, money was the great lubricant. Wage-bargaining became the focus of both
managerial change and worker discontent. Raising wages (or granting special bonuses) became the principal
means by which management overcame its own rigidities and introduced changes in working practices. (23)
The final revocation of gold-based constraints on the money supply represented by the 1971
inconvertibility decision amounted to a last-ditch attempt to escape the accumulated class contra-
dictions, which had manifested themselves in heightened levels of overt social conflict. The basic
principle on which Fordist growth had rested over the years was the political coordination between
the classes, and it was precisely in the possibility of disruption along the temporal axis of this
coordination that the potential for crisis resided. The Fordist use of money as a social “lubricant”in
the form of wages paid out in advance of production could work only if these remained tied to
productivity and were therefore followed by increases in the rate of capitalist accumulation. But the
reactivated dynamics of class struggle and the corresponding disturbance of managed productive
flows since the 1960s had shown that this was no longer the case. As Christian Marazzi summarizes
the situation in the mid-1970s:
The resistance of workers to productivity increases and their continuous pressure to push up wages has made it
impossible to reduce wage costs relative to new investment projects. As a result, industrial capital has been
forced to move further and further along the path of restructuration of more and more investment to reach
necessary levels of productivity: this spiral of investment has become an ever-increasing spiral of debt. (80)
While the manipulation of the money supply initially seemed to delay the effects of capital
devalorization (Aglietta 384), the increasing detachment of working-class demands and temporal-
ities—in terms of a self-valorizing and autonomous assessment of needs—from production
9
resulted
in an uncontrollable inflationary spiral where money was “blocked from becoming capital”and
could “only remain at the level of simple circulation”(Marazzi 80).
Admittedly, the social universe depicted by Amis’sMoney does not immediately match this
description. The “working class transformation of money into income”(80) identified by Marazzi
at the heart of the crisis appears to have been replaced, ten years after “money went wrong,”by a
social landscape of extreme class polarization in which money emerges as a blunt economic
instrument for the enactment of exclusion and marginalization rather than the coordination and
management of class relations (even in the temporally dislocated form characteristic of the infla-
tionary periods). But we should remain attentive to the fact that the picture drawn by Money is
framed by a profound sense of uncertainty and political irresolution in the restructuring of
capitalism. Essentially, the prevailing atmosphere of confusion and disorientation in the novel is
warranted by not just one, but effectively two disarticulations in the postwar configuration of money.
To its literal dematerialization after the ending of dollar-gold convertibility and the fixed-exchange
rate system, we should add the—arguably—more profound disarticulation of money from the
political cycle of Fordist relations of production. John Self’s enduring impotence and inability to
comprehend the world around him effectively transcribe the proven incapacity of capital, in the late
1970s and early 1980s, to govern its relationship with the working class or, in other words, to exploit
living labor in a successful and stable manner.
CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 3
The characterization of the working class that we find in Money is one that results from this
experience of social disarticulation: rather than appearing as a factor of production, it is imagined as
an abject other, as a crime-prone lumpenproletariat arising from the broken sociality of late Fordism
and its increasingly untenable financial temporality.
10
And yet this image of extreme social polariza-
tion that the novel cultivates assumes an illusory temporal relation of its own. As John Self observes
soon after arriving in New York on the first of many transatlantic trips: “Inflation, they say, is
cleaning up this city. Dough is rolling up its sleeves and mucking the place out. But things still
happen here”(3). This implies, we could say, a wishful reversal of the growing temporal gap between
Fordist spending (in the form of working-class incomes) and deferred production. Rather than as a
factor of socialization, money is effectively imagined as an element of coercion—as an autonomous
agency charged with keeping working-class subjectivity in check. Of course, the ironic uncertainty of
the situation is confirmed by the ambiguous final sentence, for indeed “things”are still happening in
1981 that do not suggest a durable restructuration of capitalist command. The failure of the
monetarist experiment (begun in 1979 with President Carter’s appointment of Paul Volcker to the
Federal Reserve and continued by the first Thatcher government in Britain), which for over two
years was unable to meet its aim of containing inflation, is rather the immediate backdrop to John
Self’s elucubrations. The inflationary atmosphere that saturates the novel is thus tinged with a sense
of failure and negativity. Projected as a wishful anticipation of a political resolution that has not been
attained, the social effectivity of this money that is imagined as “cleaning up the city”is little more
than a form of withdrawal, a rear-guard action devised to maintain the social fracture rather than
solidify the power of capital.
John’s travelogue in the universe of financial abstraction is countersigned by his insistent forays
into the netherworld of urban poverty and exclusion. While the former is marked by an enduring
sense of disorienting opacity, the latter stands out for its transparent brutality. He thus straightfor-
wardly observes that “certain less-than-fashionable New Yorkers have taken up residence in the
sewers and subway shafts,”since money “has driven them deeper into the planet, money has brought
them down in the world”(199). These victims of “the money conspiracy”make up a consistently
grotesque and, ultimately, threatening subhuman landscape of “proletarian ghosts”(24). The agency
of money is thus refracted through a general social condition of extreme inequality. As John points
out, when he “came of age in the Sixties, when there were chances,”“if you wanted, you could just
drop out”(153). But now that those chances have been destroyed for the majority, now that “the
dole-queue starts at the exit to the playground,”“[y]ou can’t drop out any more. Money has seen to
that. There’s nowhere to go. You cannot hide out from money”(153). This presents an interesting
contrast to John’s repeated admission that he knows “very little”about money (23). The growing
abstraction of money’s post-Fordist logic seems to evade scientific description and intelligibility,
11
but not a concrete manifestation as social violence. Having done away with the mediations and
balances of Keynesian policy, with its temporality of deferred accumulation and commitment to
proportionality, the political nature of money reappears now, more crudely than ever, as a dynamic
attempt to institutionalize a social practice of inequality. As Antonio Negri suggests in a 1980s essay:
It is not enough—say the theorists of the capitalist offensive –to destroy the conditions of the socialization of
the labour force or the horizontal communication entailed by productive cooperation; more positively, it is
necessary to establish conditions of separation and detachment (…) The almost religious—and therefore even
more mystified—spirit of inequality among people is inherent in this project. (The Politics of Subversion 134)
But this attempt to consecrate inequality as a regulative principle remains haunted by the specter of
uncontrollability. As John Self repeatedly insinuates and, at one point, openly declares: “Money, I
think, is uncontrollable. Even those of us who have it, we can’t control it”(154). Beyond its
presumed abstraction from production, the enduring problem of money at this critical conjuncture
is exactly this: for all its inflationary violence, money’s agency appears to be bereft of a guiding
subjective principle. Its power is that of a class determination without control over its social
directionality: command (naked, brutal command) without the connective tissue that would make
4R. DEL VALLE ALCALÁ
it effective and fully coherent as an expression of class subjectivity. The confused social phenomen-
ology of the novel is punctuated, in John Self’s paradoxically cogent formulations (cogent in that
they effectively manage to capture this internal crisis in the strategy of capital), by a split between
money’s abstract trajectories and the more “primitive”material hoarding it enables. When later in
the novel his American friend Martina Twain gives him a book titled Money, which happens to be
his first attempt at an intellectual engagement with the elusive entity that governs his life, John is
delighted to learn that
they used to use meat for money, and snout, and booze, and chicks of course, and ammunition for fighting
with. Now those sound like my kind of market forces. I’d have been happier in the old days. You wouldn’t have
had to pay me in money. You could have used all that other stuff, that bad money. (284–85)
In his commitment to the more mystified expressions of finance, John is forced to admit that this
hyper-material version of commodity money, rather a grotesque iteration of the barter economy, is
“bad money.”And just like the eponymous film that is never made and that, with its entropic pull of
fraudulent negativity, ends up dragging him to the bottom of society, the experiential reality of
money as a destructive but ultimately rather base fact of life insistently provides a graphic instantia-
tion of Gresham’s Law as the ruling principle of John’s existence. Indeed, as he candidly puts it: “my
life is also my private culture—that’s what I’m showing you, after all, that’s what I’m letting you into,
my private culture. And I mean look at my private culture. Look at the state of it. It really isn’t very
nice in here”(123).
Money’s uncontrollability is thus experientially registered, first of all, as subjective destitution.
Deprived of proper agency, John Self—as the name ominously reminds us—is reduced to tautolo-
gical self-referentiality, to a reified privacy that contrasts sharply with the eminently public (and
therefore politically meaningful) logic of Fordist mass consumption. For all his attempts to rise
above this level of self-canceling fetishism, John’s lot in the universe of intractable money remains
with those “primitive creatures driving around with money in their Torpedoes and Boomerangs […],
innocent beneficiaries of the global joke which money keeps cracking”(153), a class of subjectless
capitalists, of conspicuous consumers who “don’t do anything”since “it’s their currencies that do
things”(153–54). John “long[s] to burst out of”this stagnant world of passive fetishism and into “the
world of thought and fascination”(123), but in his absolute impotence and exhaustion, “the
exhaustion of not knowing anything”(184), the most immediate road to fascination lies precisely
in an aestheticization of money as pure abstraction. If money is fundamentally uncontrollable, it is
then best to imagine it as a higher level of experience, well above the base materialism of “primitive
creatures”like himself. This is the level inhabited, for example, by Martina’s husband, Ossie, whom
John effectively describes as an irrationally exuberant object of fascination:
Her English husband Ossie, now he’s rich-for-life but he works in money, in pure money. His job has nothing
to do with anything except money, the stuff itself. No fucking around with stocks, shares, commodities, futures.
Just money. Sitting in his spectral towers on Sixth Avenue and Cheapside, blond Ossie uses money to buy and
sell money. Equipped with only a telephone, he buys money with money, sells money for money. He works in
the cracks and vents of currencies, buying and selling on the margin, riding the daily tides of exchange. For
these services he is rewarded with money. Lots of it. It is beautiful, and so is he. (120)
Monetary self-referentiality reaches its paroxysm here. Described as practically a Nietzschean
Übermensch, a blond beast of late capitalism, Ossie charts the unexplored territories of financial
abstraction with a phallic confidence (clearly suggested by his natural habitat, those “towers on Sixth
Avenue and Cheapside”) that continues to elude John in his impotent disorientation and ignorance.
Such an extreme cartography of hyper-capitalist masculinity is, nevertheless, as stratospheric in its
verticality as it is “spectral,”impermanent, and ambivalent. High finance is a matter of “cracks,”
“vents,”and “tides”with no center of gravity, no solid foundation to properly anchor capitalist
accumulation and class power.
However, perhaps the character that represents this impermanence and ambiguity best is Fielding
Goodney. The presumptive sponsor of John Self’s doomed filmic project, Goodney appears to Self as
CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 5
“money incarnate”in Elie Edmondson’s2001 phrase (147), a blend of expertise, determination, and
sheer deceitfulness that make of him the focal point of mystification in the novel’s treatment of
money. In a sense, what John repeatedly describes as the “money conspiracy”of financialized capital
becomes indistinguishable from the protracted scam perpetrated by Goodney. As Cathryn Setz has
noted, he is “a protean, flickering presence across the novel,”a hybrid of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and
Shakespeare’s Iago whose main character traits come across in “a visceral form of fluidity and
physical transformation”(73). Beyond his main act as Self’s faux mentor, whose ostensible purpose is
to bring about John’s downfall by encouraging him to spend on the assumption that his credit is
unlimited, Goodney also impersonates an anonymous caller, referred to as “Frank the Phone,”who
torments him with unmotivated threats and taunts. But as the character Martin Amis, Self’s
occasional confidant and the novel’s pinnacle of narrative self-referentiality, suggests to him once
Fielding’s masquerade as Frank is uncovered, motivation has ceased to function as a prime mover in
the present: “Go for a walk in the streets. How much motivation do you see?”(359). According to
Colin Hutchinson,“Self may be correct in claiming that he never hurt Frank/Goodney personally,
but the nature of the anonymous calls is collective, not personal”(62). At one point, challenged by
John to explain why he keeps “doing this,”Goodney/Frank declares “Oh, it’smotivation you want.
You want motivation. Okay. Here. Have some motivation”:
“Remember, in Trenton, the school on Budd Street, the pale boy with glasses in the yard? You made him cry. It
was me. Last December, Los Angeles, the hired car you were driving when you jumped that light in Coldwater
Canyon? A cab crashed and you didn’t stop. The cab had a passenger. It was me. 1978, New York, you were
auditioning at the Walden Center, remember? The redhead, you had her strip and then passed her over, and
you laughed. It was me. Yesterday you stepped over a bum in Fifth Avenue and you looked down and swore
and made to kick. It was me. It was me.”(217–18)
The irony here is, of course, that this collective dimension is at the same time premised on the most
radical anti-sociality, on a structural condition of violent disarticulation between the classes that
renders Goodney’s purported motive immediately void of real political meaning. In the absence of a
proper inter-class politics, of an effective structure of command over the process of exploitation and
accumulation, what surfaces is a logic of intra-class self-harm. This, I would like to argue, is the
precise sense of the novel’s insistence on suicide, from its revealing subtitle (Money: A Suicide Note)
to the effective proliferation of suicidal gestures whereby the various representatives of capital in the
novel take their accumulated class hatred, in the face of real uncontrollability, out on themselves, as
it were. It is therefore instructive to consider the central notion that money is both “wrong”and out
of control in the early 1980s alongside, for example, the claim that “[d]ollar bills, pound notes,
they’re suicide notes”(116). Indeed, the cash nexus provided by inconvertible paper money in this
context is not only devoid of the solidity of Fordist command over productive relations, but it is also
an extremely flimsy class link, a weak foundation for the production of a viable post-Fordist
subjectivity of capital.
What effectively holds this class together is a negative and, from the point of view of their
collective interests, essentially suicidal commitment to deceit. We may compare Goodney the con
artist to John’s occasional lover Selina Street, whom he describes as a “sack artist”while pointing out
that:
Modern sack artists aren’t languid Creoles who loll around the boudoir eating chocolates all day, licking their
lips and purring, their whiskers flecked with come and cream. No, they’re business heads on business shoulders,
keen-sensed and foxy, not young-looking either but tough, tanned and weathered. (162)
With Selina, ambivalence and duplicity are modulated as sexual attributes, but these continue to
appear as tactical means to the sole strategic end of pursuing money. Behind the hyperbolic
misogyny of the characterization, it is not difficult to sense in Selina yet another instance of
negativity and intra-class violence. For what emerges as the central quality of this business-
mindedness, of the “High Street instincts”which “propel her into the world of money and exchange”
(155) is, as in the case of Fielding Goodney, the ability—indeed, the “talent”—to deceive John Self,
6R. DEL VALLE ALCALÁ
the capitalist everyman of this phase of crisis and uncertain reorganization, and therefore the “talent”
to undermine the subjective foundations of the class as a whole. As she confesses to John after her
final betrayal: “You know, it can be good fun deceiving people …You don’t see that because you’re
no good at it. You haven’t got the talent”(363).
This apparently motiveless self-violence (just like the phone bullying carried out by Goodney/
Frank) may be read as one of the internal consequences, for capital, of the breakdown of Fordism.
But we should not forget that this crisis was rich in external effects, across class lines, as it were. The
collapse of regulation over productive temporalities, rather than the collapse of production as such,
as suggested by theorists such as Baudrillard, not only exacerbated inequality but also presented the
class terms of the resulting social disproportion as increasingly irreducible. While unreality con-
tinues to shape and define the experiential universe of self-referential money in the novel, the
narrative does not fail to register a harder edge, a much more solid dimension of experience, arising,
so to speak, from the depths of working-class disenfranchisement. In the midst of so much confusion
and duplicity, the encounter with class otherness in the form of (lumpen)proletarian violence
provides a fundamental reality check. From the topical reminder that in 1981 “England has been
scalded by tumult and mutiny, by social crack-up”(66) in places such as Brixton and Toxteth, to
John’s firsthand experience of mugging in Harlem, the enduring notion that “slums bite back”(169),
that “[y]ou just cannot go slumming, because slumming pretends that slums aren’t real”(while, in
fact, he adds, “[t]hey were real. They would show us that much”(114)) continues to impose itself
throughout the novel. This particular modulation of inequality reveals, even more flagrantly than
John’s own fall back to his humble origins following Goodney’s swindle, the fundamental truth
behind the money conspiracy: its sheer inability to absorb this class other into a stable structure of
command.
In a book titled The Mirror of Production, where he first puts forward his controversial analysis of
the 1970s crisis, Jean Baudrillard perceptively suggests that, unlike in the previous era of industrial
class conflict, where antagonisms were still framed by a general pattern of “integration of labour
power as a factor of production”(133), what the “new social groups, de facto dropouts”demonstrate
is precisely the “incapacity of the system to ‘socialize the society’in its traditionally strategic level”
(133). The lumpen expressions of working-class being, the more obvious manifestations of social
disarticulation and rupture in the political fabric of capitalism, pose an undeniable threat to the
system, which might at any point “crumble on this non-place, on this disaffected zone”(133). In
Baudrillard’s1975 somewhat apocalyptic reading of the crisis, this external quality of contemporary
social conflict is precisely what confirms its superiority over traditional class struggle, which was
merely of the order of an internal contradiction (and effectively, in Fordism, a spur to further
growth): “Subversion is born there, an elsewhere, whereas contradiction operates at the interior of the
system”(133–34). In a different reading of the 1970s decomposition of the industrial proletariat,
André Gorz suggests that the resulting “non-class”“includes all the supernumeraries of present-day
social production, who are potentially or actually unemployed, whether permanently or temporarily,
partially or completely”(68). In fact, the “majority of the population now belong to the post-
industrial neo-proletariat which, with no job security or definite class identity, fill the area of
probationary, contracted, casual, temporary and part-time employment”(69). The dissolution of
Fordist employment is, in effect, the general backdrop against which the novel is set, with the
increasingly prevalent condition of worklessness and precarity clearly pointing toward a dramatic
reconfiguration of the working class.
12
But in Money, the latter remains an external factor, a limit to
effective accumulation whose internal logic is not explored, precisely because what has gone into
crisis in the novel’s social universe is the system of coordination and equivalence that made class
relations the motor of capitalist accumulation in the postwar period.
Read in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 and the protracted recessionary cycle it led to, and
against a literary landscape that seems to have metabolized its social outcomes into recognizable
generic patterns,
13
Amis’sMoney offers a particularly intriguing insight into the earlier stages of that
long historical cycle of capitalist reorganization and turbulence we now often describe with the term
CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 7
“neoliberalism.”Beyond the emphasis on commodification and individualism, what is particularly
distinctive about Amis’s intervention is, precisely, its entropic depiction of social dynamics, its
representation of class relations in emphatically negative terms, through figures of disarticulation,
rupture, and violence. In this sense, the (ultimately semiotic) problem of monetary self-referentiality
emerges as only secondary to the political problem of command and class subjectivation. Although it
is indeed a prescient fiction of the 1980s, of financial deregulation and expanding neoliberal policy,
Money is also, and perhaps even more importantly, an incisive investigation of the politico-
institutional edifice that capital sought to dismantle, with dramatic consequences (initially also for
itself), throughout the long 1970s.
Notes
1. The Oxford Dictionary of Finance and Banking offers the following definition of Gresham’s Law:“The maxim
named after the 16th-century adviser to the royal court, Sir Thomas Gresham (c. 1519–1579), that ‘bad money
drives out good money, but that good money does not drive out bad’. It arose from the once widespread
practice of ‘clipping’gold and silver coins (i.e. removing shavings from the edges of the coins) or of counter-
feiting gold and silver coins. The bad coins (clipped or counterfeit coins) tended to be passed on quickly,
whereas the good coins were retained or hoarded.”
2. The reference to “sado-monetarism”has been taken up and explored in relation to Money by Nicky Marsh
(Money, Speculation, and Finance in Contemporary British Fiction) and Joseph Brooker (“Sado-Monetarism”).
Jackson Ayres, for his part, suggests that Money effectively “anticipates Thatcherism’s amplification”through-
out the 1980s (62).
3. While it could be argued that Amis the public intellectual is far less openly critical of capitalism as a social and
economic system than this novel, his verdict on late twentieth-century developments, typically expressed as a
moral indictment of Thatcherism, is damning. For example, in a 1990 interview with the New York Times,he
claims: “I think Thatcher has done a lot of harm. The money age we’re living through now is a short-term,
futureless kind of prosperity that will last as long as North Sea oil lasts. But it’s really a ‘live now, pay later’
thing”(Stout,“Martin Amis”). It is worth insisting, however, that Amis’s rejection, in interviews and other
nonfictional expressions, of Thatcher and the neoliberal ethos of the late 1970s and 1980s falls short of the
broader historical focus and incisive analysis articulated by the novel.
4. As Marx explains in Capital, gold “has historically conquered”the “advantageous position”of functioning as a
general or “universal equivalent”against which all other commodities can be measured (162). For Marx, and
classical political economy in general, money is inseparable from this role as general equivalent “within the
world of commodities”(162) and, as such, tends to be synonymous with gold. The end of the gold standard will
therefore also mark the end of this understanding of money as a particular commodity elevated to the position
of a general or universal equivalent.
5. Thus, for example, Goux points out in one of his seminal interventions that “[j]ust as nominal money has value
only in relation to other signs in a system, and its convertibility into a unit of intrinsic, real value is always
deferred, likewise language becomes a system of pure values, with no roots in things and in no way deriving
sense from the simple operation of direct designation of an object”(20).
6. Michael Tratner has uncovered a revealing affinity between Derridean deconstruction and monetarist economic
theory. See his “Derrida’s Debt to Milton Friedman.”
7. This period is sometimes referred to with the French expression coined by economist Jean Fourastié, Les Trente
Glorieuses—that is, the “glorious thirty”years between 1945 and 1975.
8. For an overview of this approach, see, for example, Robert Boyer and Yves Saillard’sRégulation Theory: The
State of the Art. A more recent summation can be found in Boyer’sÉconomie politique des capitalismes.
9. The concept of proletarian self-valorization, deployed by militant (especially Italian) Marxists at the height of
the 1970s crisis, specifically alluded to this tendential disarticulation between working-class use values and the
logic of Fordist accumulation. In Toni Negri’s words: “When we say self-valorization, we mean the alternative
that the working class sets in motion on the terrain of production and reproduction, by appropriating power and
reappropriating wealth, in opposition to the capitalist mechanisms of accumulation and development”(Books for
Burning 255, italics in original).
10. In the Marxist tradition, the term “lumpenproletariat”(translatable as the “ragged”or, alternatively, “knavish”
proletariat) typically refers to those lower social strata whose ambiguous position in the class structure
configures them as a potentially reactionary force. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, in
the context of anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, but also with the emergence of new forms of class struggle
in the 1960s and 1970s, the concept was to some extent rehabilitated.
8R. DEL VALLE ALCALÁ
11. Money offers a sustained rebuke to monetarism’s claims of scientificity and political neutrality. For a recent
critical assessment of the latter, see Ho-fung Hung and Daniel Thompson’s“Money Supply, Class Power, and
Inflation: Monetarism Reassessed.”
12. References to precarity (or precariousness) have become a staple of contemporary analyses of working and
living conditions. The erosion of the stable employment model consecrated by Fordism has been described
by leading commentators such as Guy Standing as part of “an agenda for transferring risks and insecurity
onto workers and families. The result has been the creation of a global ‘precariat,’consisting of many
millions around the world without an anchor of stability”(1). For a recent literary investigation of this
increasingly prominent notion (and social reality), see Liam Connell’sPrecarious Labour and the
Contemporary Novel.
13. Financial fiction has greatly developed over the last three decades following the consolidation of post-Fordist
transformations in the economy. Novels such as Don DeLillo’sCosmopolis, for example, may be read as
extending Amis’s preoccupation with the aesthetics of capitalist self-referentiality and abstraction into the
digital age. Following the crash of 2008, novels such as Sebastian Faulks’sA Week in December,John
Lanchester’sCapital,orPaul Murray’sThe Mark and the Void, to mention just a few examples, have often
pursued a more general understanding of the social contexts driving financialization in the runup to the crisis.
As Katy Shaw has noted, post-financial crisis fiction “offers a particular form of writing, content and technique,
aimed at shaping understandings and promoting a new awareness of the relationship between finance and
society during the first decade of the new millennium”(9).
Funding
This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council, project number 2015-01746
Notes on Contributor
Roberto del Valle Alcalá is Associate Professor of English at Södertörn University, Sweden. His book British Working-
Class Fiction: Narratives of Refusal and the Struggle Against Work was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2016.
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