Money-Power of Capital and Production of ‘New State Spaces’:

A view from the Global South

Ilias Alami

The University of Manchester

Politics, School of Social Sciences

Arthur Lewis Building, Oxford Road

M13 9PL, Manchester, UK

Email: ilias.alami@manchester.ac.uk

Abstract (185 words)

An array of innovative financial and monetary institutional and policy initiatives recently emerged

across the Global South at various spatial scales: (1) the deployment of national ‘self-insurance’

strategies such as large foreign reserve accumulation, different forms of capital controls, and currency

market interventions; (2) the multiplication of bilateral, sub-regional, and regional financial and

monetary mechanisms, including currency-swaps and reserve-pooling arrangements, credit lines,

bilateral aid, and development finance; (3) a growing participation and assertiveness in multilateral

financial arrangements. After critically reviewing the existing literatures – the IPE of ‘policy space’

and the IPE of ‘financial statecraft’ – the paper deploys a ‘scalar-relational’ critical IPE approach and

interprets these policy initiatives in terms of a crisis-driven production of ‘new state spaces’ across the

Global South, in the context of the current period of credit-led capital accumulation. The paper argues

that this process has been characterised by the contradictory extension, intensification and growing

complexity of the tasks taken on by the capitalist state at various scale levels, resulting in the

increasing entanglement of state power in the nested hierarchy of monetary relations, from the global

scale to bodies and subjectivities.

Keywords: policy space, financial statecraft, Marxist political economy, state theory, scale debate,

money

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Introduction

Recurring financial and monetary crises across the Global South have been a key feature of

the neoliberal era, and have importantly shaped the development trajectory of Developing and

Emerging Capitalist Countries (DECC). Over the past thirty years or so, global financial market

integration, capital-account liberalisation, the removal of exchange controls, and financial

(re)regulation have largely contributed to the increased financial fragility and vulnerability of DECC

to the volatile cross-border movement of money and capital. These processes have recently sparked a

series of innovative institutional and policy initiatives at various scalar levels of governance across the

Global South, and these include the following (listed by scale levels):

1. The deployment of ‘self-insurance’ strategies at the national level, such as large foreign

reserve accumulation, different forms of capital controls, sustained foreign exchange market

interventions, the upgrading of domestic financial systems, and the use of public banks for

counter-cyclical policies;

2. The multiplication of bilateral, sub-regional, and regional financial and monetary mechanisms,

including currency-swaps and reserve-pooling arrangements, credit lines, bilateral aid, and

development finance;

3. Growing assertiveness and calls for more inclusivity and representativeness in the Bretton

Woods institutions, G20, and other multilateral organisations.

Recent International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship has examined the extent to which

these new arrangements have been conducive to ‘power dispersion’ and ‘institutional heterogeneity’ in

the global financial architecture (Cohen, 2008; Wade, 2011; Grabel 2015). Scholars have also

wondered if they have represented a challenge to the structural dominance of the US in the global

monetary system (Wade, 2013; Helleiner, 2014), or to the ‘global liberal economic order’ (Armijo &

Katada, 2014). However, an important question remains relatively unexplored: what is the historical

significance of these new forms of socio-spatial regulation of monetary and financial issues for

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contemporary capitalism? Indeed, a quick glance at these various policy initiatives is enough to get a

hint of the multiplicity of spatial scales involved in the diverse processes. This raises the question of

understanding shifting relationship between financial and monetary dynamics and policy arrangements

at different scalar levels of governance, and their role in the reproduction of capitalist class rule across

the Global South. This is particularly important, since it has been argued that the Global South has

become increasingly central to patterns of global accumulation and the reproduction of the financial

world market (Marois, 2012; 2015).

Two bodies of IPE literature have recently made a first step in that direction: the ‘policy

space’ and ‘financial statecraft’ literatures (Helleiner, 2010; Grabel, 2015; Gallagher, 2015; Armijo &

Katada, 2014; 2015). Despite their important contribution, the paper argues, these literatures suffer

from at least two important shortcomings. Firstly, they largely neglect class dynamics, and in

particular, the relations of domination and exploitation that underpin these new financial and monetary

arrangements in their relation with wider dynamics of capital accumulation. Secondly, these literatures

remain trapped in a fetishism of the binary opposition between national/international: the significance

of socio-spatial transformations at other spatial scales is systematically interpreted in light of the

antagonistic relationship between the national and the international, ultimately resulting in the inability

to grasp the nature of those new financial and monetary arrangements. My claim is therefore that it is

possible to deepen our understanding of these transformations by deploying a class analysis (drawing

upon Marxist political economy) and a greater sensitivity to space and scale (as developed in radical

geography).

The remainder of the paper is organised as follows. Section 1 provides an overview of the

innovative financial and monetary institutional and policy initiatives recently deployed across the

Global South. Section 2 critically reviews the two main arguments put forward in the IPE literature in

order to explain these policy initiatives: the IPE of ‘policy space’ and the IPE of ‘financial statecraft’.

Section 3 argues that in order to comprehend recent monetary and policy initiatives, it is crucial to

examine the broader socio-spatial forms that capture and express the contradictions between capital,

money and the state at various scales. I develop a ‘scalar-relational’ critical IPE approach (Macartney

& Shields, 2011a,b), grounded in the Marxist critique of political economy and radical geography, to

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study the scalar configurations of those socio-spatial forms across the Global South. This provides the

theoretical apparatus in order to interpret, in Section 4, the emergence of financial institutional and

policy initiatives in terms of a crisis-driven production of ‘new state spaces’ (Brenner, 2004) across

the Global South, in the context of the current period of credit-led capital accumulation. My main

argument is that the phenomenal expansion of the spaces of money-power has resulted in enhanced

(spatial) contradictions in the realm of money and finance at various scales. More complex and

‘muscular’ (Marois, 2012) socio-spatial forms of monetary regulation have therefore emerged across

the Global South in order to mediate these contradictions and associated class tensions, facilitate the

reproduction of money, and enforce its class-power over labour and extra-human natures. This

process, I claim, has been characterised by the contradictory extension, intensification and growing

complexity of the tasks taken on by the capitalist state at various spatial scales, resulting in the

increasing entanglement of state power in the nested hierarchy of monetary relations, from the global

scale to bodies and subjectivities. On a more theoretical level, this contribution aims to demonstrate

the potential of the Marxist critique of political economy, when enriched by a sensitivity to space and

scale, to understand changing scalar configurations of socio-spatial state forms.

1. The multiplication of monetary and financial policy initiatives across the Global South

Recurring financial and monetary crises (often characterised by brutal capital flight and

currency collapse) have sparked an array of monetary and financial institutional and policy initiatives

across the Global South since the 1990s. The present section provides a brief overview of these

measures.

(1) Firstly, DECC1 have increasingly deployed ‘self-insurance’ policies against the risks associated

with volatile global money-capital flows, and their boom-and-bust pattern (Chin, 2010; Helleiner,

2010). These have included:

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Large foreign reserve accumulation in order to defend the value of their currency during

episodes of capital-account reversal. Reserves in DECC grew from about 5% of their GDP in

the 1980s to about 25% by 2010 (IMF International Financial Statistics).

The deployment of capital controls,2 foreign exchange derivatives regulation, and ‘aggressive’

foreign exchange market interventions to alter the composition of money-capital inflows, tame

currency speculation, and reduce exchange rate volatility (Grabel & Gallagher, 2015);

The strengthening of domestic financial systems and upgrading to international standards,

with tighter prudential regulation and supervision of banking and financial sectors (Akyüz,

2007; Ocampo, 2011);

Efforts to reduce external debts. 94% of developing countries with a population over 5 million

improved their external debt ratios over the period 2003-2007 (Griffith-Jones & Ocampo

2009);

More recently, in the post-2008 crisis environment, the extensive use of public banks to

implement counter-cyclical policies (Armijo & Katada, 2015). The examples of Brazil, China,

India, and Russia are cases in point (Mettenheim, 2014).

(2) Secondly, DECC have multiplied bilateral, sub-regional, and regional mechanisms of financial

cooperation. This has included currency-swaps and reserve-pooling arrangements between central

banks, credit lines, and clearing systems for intraregional payments to facilitate balance-of-payment

financing. These initiatives have been upgraded and scaled-up during the recent global financial crisis3

(Grabel, 2013). Their explicit aim is to escape the ‘old multilateralism’ of Bretton Woods institutions,

considered illegitimate, and its conditionalities intrusive (Helleiner 2010). Notable examples include

the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization in East Asia, the Anti-Crisis Fund of the Eurasian

Economic Community, the Latin America Reserve Fund, the Andean Development Corporation and

the Agreement on Reciprocal Payments and Credits in Latin America (Grabel, 2013; Antoniades,

2015). Similarly, there has been a multiplication of initiatives in the realm of aid and development

finance. DECC in in Latin America established the Bank of the South, Russia led the creation of the

Eurasian Development Bank in 2006, China led the establishment of the China Silk Road Fund and

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Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (ibid; Huotari & Hanemann, 2014). The BRICS Development

Bank is also a notable example.

(3) Thirdly, since the late 1990s emerging market crises (in East Asia, Russia, Argentina, Brazil),

DECC have increasingly pushed for a reform of the international financial architecture. This has

included calls for more inclusive and representative global financial governance arrangements, and for

more flexibility in the management of cross-border money-capital flows (Ocampo, 2011). These calls

have been moderately successful: advanced capitalist countries have recognized the necessity to

include emerging powers in global financial governance (Gallagher, 2011). The creation of the G20 in

1999 shows some evidence of that (Payne, 2010). More recently, several DECC (including Brazil,

South Korea, Mexico, South Africa, Argentina, Turkey) have been members of the newly created

Financial Stability Board. The US Congress has also finally ratified (in December 2015) the reforms

of quota and voting shares in the IMF (the 2010 Quota and Governance Reforms), after having stalled

for five years, giving more voice to DECC.

At least two other DECC initiatives have been interpreted as attempts to challenge the

domination of the US dollar in the global monetary system (GMS). There have been recurring calls

from DECC for the adoption of an alternative system such as IMF Special Drawing Rights, 4

particularly from the BRICS, as well as some degree of reserve diversification away from the US

dollar and Treasury bonds (Huotari & Hanemann, 2014).

Despite significant evidence that some of these policy initiatives have helped DECC weather

the 2008 global financial crisis, IPE scholars have emphasised that their impact should not be

overstated, because they have failed to challenge the existing structures of global governance

(Helleiner, 2014) and the structural power of advanced capitalist countries led by the US (Wade,

2013). Grabel warns that it is unsure that these changes in the global financial architecture will

become permanent. More importantly, the rapid deterioration of the financial situation of several

DECC since 2015 (such as Brazil, South Africa, and China) shows the limits of these policy and

institutional innovations, and their incapacity to solve a series of capitalist contradictions in the realm

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of money and finance. Regardless, I would argue with Grabel & Gallagher, the scope and diversity of

these measures are quite remarkable: ‘From a pre-crisis vantage point, the boldness, range, and

creativity of the policy interventions deployed in capital and currency markets across a large number

of economies were, in a word, unexpected’ (2015: 2). This raises important questions about the

historical significance of these transformations: how to interpret them, how do they contribute to the

reproduction of capitalist class rule across the Global South, and more broadly, to the reproduction of

global capitalism?

2. Two main interpretations in IPE scholarship

IPE scholars have provided two types of arguments in order to explain this variety of policy

initiatives, assess their significance, and evaluate the extent to which they have led to changes in the

degree of financial vulnerability in DECC (Antoniades, 2015: 2). This section critically examines

these two explanations in turn.

The IPE of ‘policy space’

The ‘policy space’ literature has put forward the argument that the series of policy initiatives

discussed in the previous section should be understood as a multi-level strategy on the part of DECC

to re-gain policy autonomy in financial and monetary matters (Helleiner, 2010; Grabel, 2015;

Gallagher, 2015). This argument relies upon the relationship between high capital mobility and policy

space5 that has been established in the Post-Keynesianism and Statist Political Economy scholarship:

in addition to constituting an aggravating factor of macroeconomic instability and a major crisis

transmission mechanism, sharp swings of unregulated money-capital flows have also seriously

reduced the policy autonomy of DECC to achieve development. Their margin of manoeuvre to

implement policies of their choice, i.e. their policy space, has been reduced (Epstein, 2005; Akyüz,

2007; Ocampo & Stiglitz, 2008) and this has been made brutally obvious by recurring financial crises

in the 1990s across the Global South. Insofar as the series of policy initiatives previously discussed

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have (allegedly) contributed to reducing the vulnerability of domestic financial systems, facilitating

counter-cyclical macroeconomic management, easing the constraint on monetary policy, and

channelling money-capital flows towards the ‘real’ economy, they have been interpreted as part of a

broader attempt by DECC to regain policy space to prevent and mitigate financial crises (Helleiner,

2010; Grabel, 2013, 2015; Gallagher, 2011; 2015). The key argument is that even though these

innovations, and associated changes in practice and thinking, have been ‘messy, uneven, and

uncertain’, they have nevertheless widened policy space in the post-crisis environment (Grabel &

Gallagher, 2015: 3).

The IPE of ‘financial statecraft’

A second body of literature has developed a slightly different interpretation, building upon

International Monetary Power theory6 (Andrews 2006; Cohen 2006). From a Neo-Realist perspective,

it has been argued that these institutional and policy initiatives should be interpreted as an expansion

of emerging powers’ ‘financial statecraft’ (Armijo & Katada, 2014; 2015). Financial statecraft is

defined as ‘the intentional use, by national governments, of domestic or international monetary or

financial capabilities for the purpose of achieving ongoing foreign policy goals, whether political,

economic or financial’ (ibid: 43). This literature argues that emerging powers, taking advantage of a

global rebalancing in the distribution of financial capabilities (Armijo et al. 2013), have made attempts

‘to reshape the major contours of the global political economy of money and finance’ (Armijo &

Katada, 2015: 56). The new financial initiatives have been part of a qualitative shift in emerging

powers’ financial statecraft, from ‘defensive’ and bilateral strategies (whereby states resist against

‘pernicious influences from global financial markets’), to ‘offensive’ tactics, designed to ‘fend off

disruptive influences from the global financial system’ (Armijo & Katada, 2015: 53).

However, the transformative potential of this new form of offensive financial statecraft is

limited, since it is targeted at increased participation in the liberal international economic order, rather

than a challenge to it (Armijo & Katada 2015: 58) and the potential for further cooperation between

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DECC to enhance financial statecraft is bleak since their interests are likely to further diverge (Huotari

& Hanemann, 2014: 307).

A critical assessment

These two bodies of literature have made an important contribution inasmuch as they make an

attempt at explaining recent financial and monetary policy dynamics at different levels of governance

across the Global South and the relation between them7. Arguments rely upon a serious

acknowledgement that international financial and monetary relations are highly asymmetrical

(translating into difficulties for DECC to manage monetary issues). These scholarships also pay

attention to monetary issues (even though, as suggested below, in a very incomplete manner) and how

they are regulated, a matter that has been (partially) neglected in recent studies of finance and

financialisation (Christophers, 2012; 2015). Finally, the focus on the agency of DECC – and their

attempts to cope with the shortcomings of the highly asymmetrical GMS – is laudable. It contrasts

with most accounts of the contemporary GMS, which primarily look at the structurally dominant role

and hegemonic power of the US and the US dollar (Antoniades, 2015; for a recent example see

Eichengreen, 2010). Nevertheless, despite the importance of these contributions, it is possible to

identify a series of methodological and ontological shortcomings.

(1) The narratives of the two arguments, ‘increasing policy space’ or ‘expanding financial statecraft’,

tend to overstate the overall coherence of these two projects, and by the same token, downplay the

multiple conflicts, inconsistencies, and even irrationalities between institutional and policy initiatives

at different scalar levels of governance. Besides, the tendency to see policies as instruments rationally

deployed to achieve broader political and financial aims may obfuscate the extent to which they can be

driven by contradictory capitalist development, crisis tendencies, and social class struggles (Gough,

2004a). As Demirović puts it, even though the state must appear ‘as if it owned the initiative and

defined the situation’, it is ‘not a subject with agency, nor is it an instrument’ (2011: 43), it is a

contradictory social relation open to social struggles. Section 3 further develops this point.

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(2) Despite an attention to policy dynamics at different scalar levels of governance and the relationship

between them, these literatures remain trapped in a fetishism of the binary opposition between

national/international. Indeed, financial statecraft strategies are seen as endeavours to ‘alter or protect

[national economies] against either international market conditions or the rules and institutions of

international financial governance’ (Armijo & Katada, 2015: 48; my emphasis). Similarly, Gallagher

argues that some DECC had sufficient policy space ‘to countervail political pressure and sophisticated

global capital markets in order to manage [national] financial stability between 2009 and 2012’ (2015:

17; emphasis added). The national and the international are conceived of as two separate and

externally related (if not mutually exclusive) social spheres, and their conflictual relationship is the

primary lens of analysis. Consequently, while those literatures discuss policy initiatives at other spatial

scales, these are systematically interpreted in light of the opposition between the national and the

international. This tendency to subsume their significance within the antagonistic relationship between

national/international results in a lack of sensitivity to socio-spatial transformations that extend across

and beyond those (and other) scalar levels of analysis. To be clear, this is not to say that those two

scalar levels have lost relevance. As a matter of fact, as argued at length below, the national scale

indeed remains particularly important to understand the politics of financial and monetary regulation.

However, what is needed is a multi-scalar account of those politics that is sensitive to the production

of new spatial scales, the changing relationships between them, and the shifting positionality of the

national scale within them (Brenner, 2001). In other words, an approach that takes seriously space,

scale, and their internal relations, as constitutive elements of social relations, or what Macartney and

Shields have suggested to call a ‘scalar-relational’ approach (2011a,b), in order to make sense of

recent changes in forms of state power in relation to monetary and financial dynamics.

(3) These two bodies of literature, by focusing on ‘power politics’ between national states, and

between states and markets, largely neglect class dynamics. This sharply contrasts with the rich and

growing literature on uneven processes of financialisation in DECC (for a review, see Kaltenbrunner

& Karacimen, 2016). In particular, scholars have highlighted the class-based policies, mechanisms,

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and processes that have contributed to reproducing capitalist class rule in DECC in the broader context

of credit-led accumulation on a world scale (e.g. Marois, 2012; Painceira, 2012; Lapavitsas, 2013).

They have also convincingly showed that due to the subordinate integration of DECC in the financial

world market, the policies implemented to cope with recurring financial crises, boom-and-bust

patterns of money-capital flows, and to maintain locally specific forms of capital accumulation, have

incurred large social costs, disproportionately borne by working classes in the Global South

(Soederberg 2004; Marois, 2012; 2015). What is needed, then, is an explanation of the new

institutional and policy initiatives that takes into account the relations of domination and exploitation

that underpin both private money-capital flows and state policies, in their relation with wider

dynamics of capital accumulation.

To sum up, this critical assessment has underlined three interrelated limitations: (1) an

overestimation of the political-economic coherence of policy and institutional initiatives and an under-

reckoning of the contradictory character of capitalist development; (2) a lack of sensitivity to space

and scale; (3) a neglect of class dynamics and social class struggles. In the remainder of the paper, I

therefore develop a scalar-relational approach to the changing forms of financial and monetary socio-

spatial state configuration, in their relation with the totality of capitalist social relations of production

and reproduction, the crisis dynamics of capital accumulation, and the unfolding of social class

struggles.

3. State, Money, and Capital: a ‘scalar-relational’ approach

Based upon these critical reflexions, the present section develops a scalar-relational critical

IPE approach, grounded in the Marxist critique of political economy8 and radical geography, to study

the recent monetary and financial policy initiatives that emerged across the Global South. I proceed in

two steps. I start (1) at an abstract-theoretical level by defining the state as a socio-spatial capitalist

form, and by highlighting its spatial and scalar dimensions. I then (2) examine in further detail one

particular aspect of the state, namely its contradictory relationship with money and capital. This

provides the analytical framework for an interpretation (in section 4) of the series of innovative

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financial and monetary institutional and policy initiatives across the Global South in terms of a crisis-

driven production of ‘new state spaces’.

The state as a socio-spatial capitalist form

From the perspective of the Marxist critique of political economy, the state9 is conceptualised

as a particular ‘moment’ in the totality of capitalist social relations, a historically-specific political

form assumed by antagonistic class relations, which purpose is to embed capitalist reproduction in

lived social relations (Clarke, 1991; Bonefeld, 1992; Radice, 2008). Despite its fetishised appearance

as an independent political form that guarantees public interest, formally separated from the process of

surplus-value production and from civil society, the class character of the state is evident in its role:

processing global class relations and politically mediating the contradictions in global accumulation

(Clarke, 1988; Burnham, 1996). The state-form exists in and through the concrete institutional

developments of the state apparatus, the activities of state agents, and other forms of state power,

which are an expression of the historical development of social relations (Holloway, 1991).

These diverse forms of state power unfold at various scales, they are ‘tangled and imbricated

in a nested hierarchy of scalar relations, from the body to the interstate system, and everything in

between’ (Peck, 2004: 397). The concrete variation in their perimeter, scope, and modalities, in other

words, the boundary between the state and civil society, constantly change with the crisis dynamics of

capital accumulation and social class struggles in space (Clarke, 1991; Gough, 2004a). In other words,

‘state space’, that is, the ‘complex expression of on-going processes and practices of socio-spatial

regulation at various scales’, is socially produced and historically specific (Brenner et al. 2003: 7).

However, as Erik Swyngedouw makes clear, processes and practices of socio-spatial regulation and

their expression through state space reconfiguration are ‘not conceived as intentionally and a priori

designed in order to produce particular forms of political-economic coherence but as, at any given

point, the regulatory mechanisms through which forms of class struggle are captured and contained’

(1992: 45). State space restructuring processes are the ‘presupposition, arena, and outcome of evolving

social relations’ (Brenner, 2004: 80). Crucially, the production of state spaces also involves the

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production of scale. The scale of social relations is ‘a logical, intrinsic part of them’, and the

‘rescaling’ of political economy is interpreted as ‘expressing and re-articulating spatial contradictions

of capitalist accumulation and reproduction and their associated class tensions’ (Gough, 2004b: 186-

187). Therefore, shifts in scale can be a means of class struggle, and the rescaling of state power is an

essential part in the wider rescaling of social relations, on the part of capital and in relation to labour

(ibid; Swyngedouw, 1992).

Over the past twenty years, a vast pluri-disciplinary body of literature has dedicated itself to

investigating the ‘changing spatial parameters of statehood and… the uneven development of

regulatory forms across places, territories and scales’ (Brenner, 2009: 124), or what Bob Jessop has

called ‘the political economy of state rescaling’ (2002). Critical human geographers (often working

within urban-regional studies) have studied the spatiality of the capitalist state with a specific focus on

urban and regional governance and the changing role of local governments (e.g. Smith, 1995; Cox,

1996; Swyngedouw, 1997; Brenner, 2004; Brenner et al. 2003). Largely drawing upon those

contributions, critical IPE scholars have also developed a growing interest in the changing geographies

of state power (e.g. Jessop, 2002; Macartney & Shields, 2011a; Brand et al. 2011; Demirović, 2011;

Sandberg & Schneider, 2014). Using the work of Antonio Gramsci and Nicos Poulantzas, this

literature has offered creative scalar-sensitive analyses of the transformations of state spatiality in light

of the transnationalisation of social class forces, their struggle against nationally-oriented class

fractions over hegemonic projects, and the internalisation of transnational bourgeois interests within

emerging socio-spatial supranational state forms (e.g. Hirsch & Kannakulam 2011; Wissel, 2011;

Bruff, 2012; Bieler & Morton, 2013; Raza 2016). While the range of empirical cases and topics

covered has been impressive (multilateral trade governance, resources and environmental policy, the

transnationalisation of financial interests, the construction of the European Union, the significance of

international organisations, etc.), there has been a relative neglect of the centrality of the money-form

in reproducing capitalist hegemony, which leaves those approaches little equipped to deal with the

research puzzle of this paper. This relative neglect is also somewhat surprising, given that some of the

seminal contributions of the political economy of scale literature were in fact particularly concerned

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with the changing spaces and scales of state monetary and financial regulation (e.g. Swyngedouw

1992, 1996, 2004; Jessop, 2000, 2002).10

By contrast with the aforementioned literatures, the present paper places primary emphasis on

money as a capitalist form of social regulation, the abstract impersonal expression of class-power

which subjects social reproduction to its logic (Clarke, 2003). My key claim is that the pervasive

(spatial) contradictions of the money-form, and the crisis-ridden and struggle-driven reproduction of

its social power over labour and extra-human natures, are key to understanding the new financial and

monetary institutional and policy initiatives across the Global South. The source of these

transformations, I argue, is to be found in one particular aspect of the state, namely its contradictory

relationship with money and capital. Before turning to the empirical analysis, let me further elaborate

on this relationship.

The contradictory relation between state, money, and capital

My concern here is with the ‘moment’ of the state-form involved in the reproduction of a

particular aspect of capitalist class rule, the money-form.11 Money in capitalism is a form of class

struggle (Bonefeld, Holloway, 1996). It is the preeminent and ‘autonomous’ social incarnation of class

power (McNally, 2014). As ‘command of people’s lives as labour’, it is a form of social regulation

which expresses the power of capital in its ‘most abstract and impersonal form’ and subordinates

social reproduction to its logic and movement12 (Cleaver, 1996:142; Clarke, 2003). It is therefore

intimately linked to the social form of imposing work and appropriating living labour and extra-human

natures, such as land, natural resources, biodiversity, and so on (Smith, 2007; Arboleda,

forthcoming).13 Consequently, monetary regulation is conceived of ‘as containing the working class

through imposing the elementary form of capital, money’ (Bonefeld, 1993: 65). The repressive use of

state power is crucial in that process (ibid). From that perspective, the movement of private money-

capital across the world market (such as portfolio investment, bank loans, etc.) does not simply

express the investment decisions of individual international investors. Under the form of abstract

wealth, money-capital constitutes ‘the common capital of a class’; it expresses the disciplinary power

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of ‘capital-in-general’ (Marx, 1894/1991; Clarke, 1978). The imperative that capital accumulation

imposes upon the form of the state is expressed through the involvement of the money-power of

capital in the ‘inner workings of state finance’ (McNally, 2014: 15; Clarke, 1988).

This is the source of the mutually dependent yet contradictory relationship between the

disciplinary power of capital, the reproduction of the money-form and the reproduction of the state-

form: the state is central to reproducing and enforcing the rule of money, but is also disciplined by it.

Clarke summarises this as follows: ‘the relation between money-capital and the state is realised

through the state’s responsibility for the regulation of the monetary system’ (Clarke, 1978: 65; also

Harvey 1982/2006: 324; Mann, 2013: 201; McNally 2014: 26). In other words, the money-power of

capital, which contemporary expression is the global flow of money-capital across space in order to

appropriate living labour and extra-human natures, shapes the modalities through which states

politically contain and integrate labour within their respective spaces of accumulation. For instance,

pressures on the exchange rate by the movement of highly volatile private money-capital are an

important medium through which the imperative of accumulation impinges upon the state at the

national scale (Brunhoff, 1981; Clarke, 1988). The national scale is a key aspect of this contradictory

relation between money and the state, since the national state controls the currency, but it is certainly

not the only one. For instance, the flow of money-capital, particularly in the form of debt, also directly

subjects local (regional and municipal) governments to impersonal capitalist disciplines.

Put differently, the aforementioned antagonism is politically mediated at various spatial scales.

Transformations, rescaling, and emergence of new socio-spatial forms of monetary and financial

regulation – i.e. the production of new state spaces – capture, express and articulate evolving (spatial)

contradictions between capital, money, and the state. I want to suggest, then, that in order to develop a

scalar-relational understanding of the new financial and monetary institutional and policy initiatives

discussed in section 1, it is necessary to examine the historically and geographically specific set of

socio-spatial state institutions, apparatuses, policies and practices through which the money-power of

capital over working classes and extra-human natures is constituted, reproduced, and politically

mediated at various scalar levels, from the world market to bodies and subjectivities. My key claim,

developed and substantiated in the following section, is that in the era of credit-led accumulation, the

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expansion of the spaces of money-power led to an intensification of the (spatial) contradictions

between capital, money, and the state, which in turn triggered a significant round of state space

restructuring to politically mediate those contradictions.

4. Credit-led accumulation and rescaling of state spaces across the Global South

This section offers a scalar-relational interpretation of the series of innovative financial and

monetary institutional and policy initiatives in terms of a crisis-driven production of new state spaces

across the Global South. I proceed as follows: I first give a brief account of the expansion of the

spaces of money-power over the past thirty years in relation with global dynamics of capital

accumulation and with specific reference to the Global South. I then look at the crisis-driven

transformations and rescaling of state spaces of monetary and financial regulation that this expansion

has entailed.

Expansion of the spaces of money-power

The last thirty years or so have been characterised by a process of considerable expansion of

the spaces of money-power. This expansion has been extensive: the removal of capital-account

regulations, the liberalisation of exchange controls, the (re)regulation, opening, and privatisation of

domestic financial systems, have contributed to increasing the spatial reach of money-capital. It has

also been intensive, in the context of the increasingly credit-led character of global capital

accumulation since the capitalist crisis of the 1970s, and particularly since the late 1990s (McNally,

2009): growing volumes of interest-bearing money-capital have been created and have circulated

across the financial world market in the form of fictitious capital. This has been accompanied by the

extension of debt relations at a variety of spatial scales (to national governments, regional and

municipal governments, private and public sector corporations, households and workers) and to areas

of social reproduction that were previously relatively protected from their reach (Lazzarato, 2012;

Roberts & Soederberg, 2014). In Erik Swyngedouw’s words, this process of ‘rescaling and retiming

16

the circulation of money and capital’ (1996: 160) resulted in the deepening of the rule of money over

social life. These dynamics of financial expansion have been inseparable from the acceleration of the

spatial reorganisation of global production, the huge expansion of the reserve army of labour and the

relative surplus population on a global scale, and the growing marketization and financialisation of

land and ecological commodities (McNally, 2009; Smith 2007; Arboleda, forthcoming): the spatial

expansion of the money-power of capital and the deepening of its reach has been a key mechanism in

the appropriation of growing pools of living labour and extra-human natures by capital.

In that context, the Global South has received growing volumes of money-capital and has

become increasingly important for the valorisation of fictitious values and the reproduction of the

financial world market (Marois, 2012; 2015). According to World Bank Debt Statistics, net private

money-capital flows increased from about $50 billion in 1990 (the equivalent of about 2% of GDP) to

about $510 billion in 2010 (4.4% of GDP), with a peak of more than $1.1 trillion in 2007 (about 8% of

GDP). Yet, DECC have retained their subordinate position in the financial world market and the

global monetary system, characterised by little ability to borrow long-term in their domestic currency,

the increased dependence of DECC non-financial firms upon international financial markets, and the

huge volume of money-capital inflows and outflows in relation to the size of their economies

(Kaltenbrunner, Karacimen, 2016; Paludeto & Abuchedid, 2016), which means that they have

remained highly vulnerable to the volatile cross-border movement of money-capital. This has led to

acute difficulties in managing monetary and financial affairs, and associated recurring financial crises

(encompassing banking crises, monetary and convertibility crises, sovereign debt crises) across the

Global South in the 1990s with devastating socio-economic costs.

These violent crises, I argue, have been driving transformations in state spaces (examined in

the next sub-section) for the following reasons. Firstly, they highlighted a fundamental contradiction:

increasing integration into the financial world market and global patterns of money-capital flows has

enhanced the money-power of capital over everyday life in spaces across the Global South. However,

the expression of this power through sharp movements of money-capital has also the potential of

undermining its own social basis (i.e. massive capital flight can trigger a currency crash, the massive

devaluation of locally-operating capitals, a dislocation of local financial systems, and potentially a

17

collapse of capitalist social relations), especially since the movement of money is often uncertain,

volatile and unpredictable, and the expansion of the spaces of money-power have generalised financial

risk and the possibility of contagion. Secondly, the acute subordination to the money-power of capital

posed growing problems in terms of the management of class relations at national and sub-national

scales, because of the multiplication of various forms of resistance to crisis deflationary adjustments,

exploitation, dispossession, displacement, and ecological destruction. This was acknowledged by both

local ruling classes and elites in International Financial Institutions such as the World Bank and the

IMF in the late 1990s (Taylor, 2005).

In other words, and to paraphrase Brenner (2009: 127), expanding spaces of money-power

engendered contextually specific forms of socio-spatial dislocation and crisis formation. My key

contention is that this in turn sparked transformation and rescaling processes of socio-spatial state

configurations in order to politically mediate these contradictions, while continuing to facilitate the

expansion and deepening of monetary disciplines, and the appropriation of growing pools of living

labour and extra-human natures by capital.14 The remainder of the paper explores some of the key

transformations that this has involved.

The production of ‘new state spaces’ of monetary and financial regulation

An important tendency throughout the 1990s, largely commented upon in the IPE literature,

has been external financial liberalisation. This has included a deep process of both current-account and

capital-account liberalisation, the adoption of floating exchange rates in the late 1990s (including in

South Africa, Brazil, Poland, Israel, Chile, the Philippines, South Korea), and the opening of domestic

financial systems. While this process has been instrumental in opening and expanding the spaces of

money-power previously described, a far-reaching consequence is that in many DECC reproducing the

national money has become increasingly linked to patterns of global money-capital flows. For

instance, a boom in money-capital inflows often generates inflationary pressures and an appreciation

of the exchange rate, while capital flight triggers currency collapses. In other words, financial

liberalisation has meant that the contradiction between global circulation of money-capital and the

18

national scale of monetary regulation has become more acute, resulting in monetary instability and

crises, and with implications for the expression of the money-power of capital at other scales. This

triggered a multifaceted process of scalar transformation of the socio-spatial regulation of monetary

and financial issues in DECC, in order to mediate this contradiction.

Firstly, there was a deep reconfiguration of monetary, fiscal, exchange rate, and capital-

account policy. Monetary and fiscal policy became driven by the double objective of attracting large

money-capital inflows, while maintaining a tight money supply at home, in the context of the

restoration of capitalist class rule after the period of intense monetary instability of the 1980s and early

1990s. This took the form of the growing institutionalisation of monetarist policies and objectives and

the subordination of broader aims of policy-making to the imperative of price stability. Restrictive

financial and monetary policies such as high real interest rates and tight control of public expenditures

have been fundamental in the restructuring of class relations, by strengthening monetary disciplines

(Clarke, 1988). Indeed, together with policies of wage ‘moderation’, commodification of social

reproduction, labour market ‘flexibilisation’ (with the proliferation of part-time and precarious forms

of work), and the extension of debt relations, these restrictive financial and monetary policies

contributed to strengthening the social power of money over social life, and the disciplining of

workers and surplus populations (Soederberg, 2014). Such policies have been institutionalised through

a variety of quasi-legal and constitutional mechanisms, for instance, central bank independence and

the mandate of inflation-targeting, with the purpose of isolating them from democratic and popular

pressure. While this has been a tendency in countries all over the world in the neoliberal era,

monetarist policies have been particularly tight across the Global South, due to the vulnerability of

DECC to the volatile cross-border movement of money-capital (more on this below). For instance,

throughout the 2000s, Brazil maintained extremely high real interest rates (more than 40%), adopted a

Fiscal Responsibility Law to constrain expenditures at all levels of government, and generated high

primary fiscal surpluses (reaching 4.4% of GDP in 2003) in order to secure sustained money-capital

inflows, and simultaneously enforce monetary scarcity and discipline at home.

Exchange rate and capital-account policies were also reconfigured in order to minimise

potential convertibility issues and to tame the impact of financial volatility on the national money.

19

Importantly, this has been characterised by the growing direct involvement of the state in the cross-

border circulation of money-capital. This has included large foreign exchange reserve accumulation to

defend the value of the currency in case of capital-account reversal, continuous central bank

interventions in foreign exchange markets, monetary sterilisation to reduce inflationary pressures

(through issuing state debt), liquidity provision to financial systems in case of liquidity crisis, and the

occasional deployment of various forms of capital controls (see Alami, 2016). In sum, this amounted

to a significant process of rescaling the spaces of monetary, fiscal, and exchange rate policies.

Secondly, in response to repeated financial crises, DECC states have streamlined and

consolidated a variety of financial institutions to support financialised accumulation and mitigate the

risks associated with it. This is what Thomas Marois calls the institutional development of more

‘muscular’ state-financial apparatuses (2012; 2015). This has included a variety of the ‘self-insurance’

policies discussed in section 1, such as large reserve accumulation, but also: the empowerment of

central banks and treasury departments and other state institutions involved in the management of

financial and monetary affairs; the design of policies and institutions to socialise financial risks and

the costs of financial crises, such as funds earmarked for bank bailouts and the recapitalisation of

foreign banks, credit and deposit guarantees; and active state intervention to rationalise and strengthen

failed domestic financial and banking systems, their upgrading to international norms such as Basel I

and II. Such processes have been particularly widespread in Latin America throughout the 1990s (see

IMF, 2003), but also in South Africa, Turkey, and developing Asia. State spaces have therefore been

extended and intensified inasmuch as forms of socio-spatial regulation of monetary and financial

issues have been prioritised over other forms, their reach has been deepened, and they have mobilised

increasing social resources.

Thirdly, there has been a process of internationalisation of state spaces of monetary and

financial regulation. This included several of the monetary and policy initiatives described in section 1

(the bilateral, sub-regional, and regional financial mechanisms, including currency-swaps, reserve-

pooling arrangements, credit lines, etc.) as well as increasing participation of DECC in multilateral

financial governance (the IMF, the G20, the Financial Stability Board, etc.). Interestingly, currency

swaps have included both North-South and South-South arrangements. For instance, Indonesia has

20

signed bilateral currency swap deals with Australia, South Korea, and China. This process of

internationalisation can be interpreted as a scaling-up of state spaces , to facilitate the global

circulation of money-capital and the reproduction of national moneys, and create cooperative

mechanisms to mitigate crises.

Fourthly, there has been a process of intensification of DECC states’ management of monetary

flows across space, between regions and sectors. This has involved policies of privatisation and

liberalisation to channel money-capital flows and promote the spatial expansion of capitalist

development at sub-national scales. For instance, Lavers (2012) shows how the Ethiopian state,

through a variety of policies favouring the commodification and financialisation of land, has facilitated

the appropriation of land and exploitation of displaced poor peasants. DECC states have also been

increasingly involved in the channelling of monetary flows across space through the expansion of

operations of national development banks (and the multiplication of regional development banks as

discussed in section 1). Besides, subsidised credit and public investment have been used as counter-

cyclical measures to maintain the flow of money-capital in case of economic crisis and pressures

emanating from advanced capitalist countries (Antoniades, 2015). The creation of sovereign wealth

funds, financed with revenues from commodity exports and/or workers’ savings (examples include

South Africa’s Public Investment Corporation, Brazil’s Fundo Soberano do Brasil, Mexico’s Fondo de

Estabilización de los Ingresos Petroleros, Malaysia’s Khazanah Nasional Berhad) has also meant that

DECC state spaces have become increasingly imbricated in global circuits of money-capital. At sub-

national scales, sovereign wealth funds, and particularly those that manage pension savings, have also

contributed to a process of deepening and widening the rule of money over society, by further

enhancing workers’ reliance on global money-capital circuits for social reproduction, and by aligning

their interests with the performance of the financial system, in an attempt to co-opt workers and

neutralise social struggles (see Soederberg, 2011). State promotion of the formalisation and

financialisation of migrant remittances, which was pioneered in Mexico in 1994 and then extended to

many DECC with large diaspora populations like India, Indonesia, the Philippines, have participated

in the same process, while simultaneously embedding financial relations and practices into the lives of

the poor (Hudson 2008; Guermond 2014).

21

This points to the fifth type of state space transformation, which has consisted in the growing

involvement of the state in processes of financial subjectification. This refers to the ideological and

cultural production of rhetorical tropes, meanings, knowledges and worldviews that shape financial

subjectivities in order to deepen and depoliticise the rule of money over social life and neutralise

social class struggles. The rhetorics of ‘financial inclusion’, ‘self-entrepreneurialism’, and

‘individualisation’ have been used to promote participation in financial markets, and extend and

‘naturalise’ monetised relations of debt (Roy, 2010; Lazzarato, 2012; Rankin, 2013; Soederberg,

2014). Commodification of social reproduction, the ‘democratisation of credit’, and the delivery of

social assistance through conditional cash transfers and other forms of ‘workfare’ have also

contributed to developing cultures of hard work and financialised personal responsibility, that strip

away possibilities for collective action and undermine social solidarity, and introduce financial metrics

and calculus logic into households and everyday life management (ibid; Peck, 2001; Langley, 2008).

State-promoted credit, by promoting conceptions of citizenship and social justice based on the free and

equal ‘hyper-individualised – as well as the de-racialised, de-classed and de-gendered – consumer’,

has increasingly been used to co-opt and control working classes (Soederberg, 2014: 63). In Brazil, the

number of ‘bankless’ Brazilians has declined from 80 to 50% and credit to household tripled as

percentage of GDP tripled between 2000 and 2010, which has been instrumental in engineering a

particular form of ‘social inclusion’ based on credit access (Mettenheim, 2014; Lavinas 2013). In

South Africa, the state adapted the regulatory framework to extend credit relations to the poor, the

rural population, and other marginalised groups in the 2000s. In South Asia and elsewhere,

microfinance has pictured acute self-exploitation as entrepreneurialism. Those processes, of course,

have been inherently violent: failure to repay debts has inflicted much physical and psychological

suffering to (mostly women’s) bodies (Federici, 2014; Roberts 2015). Moreover, they have been

accompanied by the development of the coercive arm of the state. Legal and penal institutions have

been strengthened to criminalise debtors (as well as social movements and poverty), including along

racialised and gendered lines, when they fail to ‘discipline and regulate themselves in the interests of

capital’ (Roberts, 2014: 234; LeBaron 2014). This amounts to the direct use of state power in the form

of law and coercion to enforce the social power of money and discipline workers.

22

In sum, this section has examined the multifaceted transformations in state spaces across the

Global South that have unfolded to facilitate the expansion and deepening of monetary disciplines and

the appropriation of growing pools of living labour and extra-human natures by capital, while

politically mediating the contradictions and social conflicts that have emerged at various spatial scales.

This crisis-driven scalar reconfiguration of state spaces has been characterised by the extension,

intensification and growing complexity of the tasks taken on by the capitalist state at various spatial

scales, resulting in the increasing entanglement of state power in the nested hierarchy of monetary

relations, from the world market to bodies and subjectivities. My claim is that the new financial and

monetary institutional and policy initiatives at various scalar levels of governance (discussed in

section 1) can only be understood when looking at these broader transformations.

While a full exploration of who has benefited/lost the most from those new socio-spatial state

forms is beyond the scope of this paper, let me make two remarks based on the above analysis. Firstly,

it is clear that the great winners have been those classes and social actors, both in the Global North and

the Global South, capable (due to access to specific monetary, cultural, social resources) of

commanding over the expanding spaces of money-power. Through strategies of portfolio

diversification, that is, the holding of assets with different risk/reward ratios, those social actors have

been able to tap into largest pools of labour and extra-human natures than ever, quickly (re)adjusting

their financial portfolios in order to boost their profit potential and protect the value of their financial

holdings. This constant spatial rearrangement of financial assets (facilitated by the production of new

state spaces), for the purpose of risk-management and diversification across uneven geographies (with

different magnitudes of risk/reward), has allowed those social actors to take advantage of enhanced

competition between particular places and leverage small differences in socio-environmental

conditions of labour exploitation at various scales.

Secondly, the above transformations have had clear distributional impacts. Indeed, the

transformations of state spaces to enforce the disciplinary power of money, while shifting significant

social costs unto labour, have also provided handsome rewards to the application of capital in its

money-form. Here we can think of how policies associated with monetarist imperatives and tight

public finances, have transferred large amounts of surplus to particular classes and social actors within

23

and across territorial borders. For instance, in South Africa, high real interest rates have provided high

financial returns to both local ruling classes and international investors, who owned about 35% of

government debt in 2013. According to recent IMF figures, more than $1trillion of DECC government

debt is held by foreign investors in local and hard currency (Arslanalp & Tsuda 2014). The production

of new state spaces, then, has largely contributed to safeguarding the financial assets and income

streams of particular social groups, and to channelling value across the global capitalist space

economy. Those dynamics, it is worth insisting, have been (almost) completely missing from the IPE

of policy space and financial statecraft literatures, given their blindness to class processes.

Conclusion

The radical geography literature has shown that the capital relation is simultaneously (though

contradictorily) constituted at various spatial scales, from the world market to bodies and

subjectivities. A crucial moment of this process, it has been argued in the paper, is the constitution,

reproduction, and expression of the money-power of capital over social life, which is contradictorily

enforced and politically mediated by a variety of socio-spatial state forms. My key claim is that the

recent emergence of innovative monetary and financial arrangements at diverse scalar levels across the

Global South should be understood within the broader context of the rescaling of those socio-spatial

state forms. I have argued that these changes are rooted in the changing character of the contradiction

between capital, money, and the state, and associated crisis dynamics and class tensions. Due to their

subordinate position in the financial world market and the global monetary system, and in a context of

phenomenal expansion of the spaces of money-power, this contradiction has taken an acute form of

realisation in DECC, and has resulted in repeated financial and monetary crises in the 1990s, with

disastrous social consequences and the intensification of social class struggles. This process has driven

the production of new state spaces, through which capital has attempted to politically contain these

contradictions, reproduce the rule of money, and further develop capitalist social relations. This has

involved the extension, intensification and growing complexity of the tasks taken on by the capitalist

24

state at various spatial scales, resulting in the increasing entanglement of state power in the nested

hierarchy of monetary relations, from the world market to bodies and subjectivities.

On a more theoretical level, I have also aimed to show the importance of a focus on the

constitution of capitalist social forms, the scalar articulations of their internal relations, and their

uneven expression in space, in order to make sense of the contemporary political economy of state

rescaling, and in further developing scalar-relational critical IPE approaches. Finally, I would like to

echo the recent calls made within radical geography (Christophers, 2011, 2015; Arboleda,

forthcoming) and critical IPE (Soederberg, 2014) to put money back at the centre of analyses of

contemporary financial processes. Form-analytical Marxism and the critique of money as a form of

social subjectivity have made an immensely important contribution to our understanding of the

relation between capital, money, and the state at the abstract-theoretical level. However, in my view

they also hold great potential (if largely untapped so far) to understand contemporary uneven

processes of financialisation and socio-spatial state formation, across the Global South and beyond.

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Adrienne Roberts, Stuart Shields, Greig Charnock, Ian Bruff, Jamie Doucette,

Adam Fishwick, Susanne Soederberg, Geoff Mann, Tom Marois, and two anonymous reviewers for

reading earlier versions of this essay and making extensive comments. All errors remain mine. I also

thank the University of Manchester for its generous funding (PDS award).

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1 By DECC I refer to those developing countries that received the largest amounts of money-capital flows and have

been designated as ‘emerging markets’ in the financial press. Over the period 2005-2014, these include: China, Brazil,

Mexico, Turkey, India, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Poland, Indonesia, Thailand, and Russia (IMF, 2014).

Despite the highly diverse capitalist development trajectories of these countries, collectively referring to them as DECC

remains relevant given the shared financial and monetary dynamics discussed in this paper. These dynamics, however,

have not happened evenly across DECC.

2 Brazil, South Korea, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Uruguay, the Philippines, Peru, Taiwan, Colombia, and Thailand

deployed a variety of capital controls (Grabel, 2015).

3 DECC such as Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, Singapore were also involved in the dollar liquidity swap line with the

US Fed during the global financial crisis (Fed website, 2016).

4 The Special Drawing Right is an international reserve asset, which value is based on a basket of four major currencies:

the US dollar, the British pound, the Japanese yen, and the euro. The Chinese renmibi will be included in October 2016

(IMF website, 2016). A GMS with the Special Drawing Right as the main reserve asset would significantly challenge

the hegemony of the US dollar.

5 Space is here used in a figurative sense. It refers to the scope for domestic policies that is available for each country at

a particular point in time in order to implement its national development strategy and manage its integration into the

global economy (UNCTAD, 2002).

6 The central argument of this literature is summarised in Vermeiren (2014: 2-3): ‘international monetary power refers

to the capacity of a nation to avoid the burden of adjustment to balance-of-payments disequilibria – the key foundation

of a nation’s international monetary power is its macroeconomic autonomy to pursue policy objectives in the absence of

the external balance-of-payments constraints that ordinarily follow from engaging in cross-border trade and financial

transactions’.

7 It is worth mentioning the dearth of critical IPE and Marxist scholarship on these issues, with a few exceptions

discussed below.

8 The purpose of Marxism understood as the critique of political economy is the critique of the (fetishised) bourgeois

social relations, and the historically-specific forms that they take (Bonefeld 2001; Heinrich 2004). Capitalist forms of

social life (the forms of the relationship between humans, and between humans and nature), Marx argued, are

‘perverted’ forms (Marx 1867/1991; Bonefeld 2001: 57). The categorial critique of capitalist social forms such as value,

the commodity, the state, capital, money, and so on, thus consists in revealing their social constitution, that is, the

‘human basis of their existence’ (Bonefeld 2001: 54-56).

9 To be clear, the capitalist state is not synonymous with the national state (Demirović, 2011).

10 The main argument is that a specific mode of regulating the different functions of money (money as credit, medium

of circulation, store of value, international currency) at different scales was a key element of the (postwar) Fordist

accumulation regime. Crucially, the regulation of credit money along national lines was central to the construction of

‘nationalised’ space economies and in the consolidation of Keynesianism as a form of class compromise. For reasons

that are now well known (the particular pattern of post-war uneven development, the end of the Bretton Woods regime,

growth of the Euromarkets, etc.), ‘[this mode of regulating the different functions of money] would result in serious

tensions and friction due to the conflicting nesting of these various spatial scales’ and ultimately the collapse of this

monetary order (Swyngedouw, 2004: 36; 1992: 44). Interestingly enough, money and its various spaces of power and

circulation was a central theme of radical economic geography in the 1990s (e.g. Corbridge et al. 1994; Leyshon &

Thrift 1997; Cohen 1998; Martin, 1999), but then dropped off the research agenda as scholars increasingly focussed on

the concept of financialisation (see Christophers 2015).

11 ‘Money-form’ refers to money as a moment of capitalist class relations. By contrast, ‘forms of money’ refers to the

forms taken by money throughout the course of history: commodity moneys, coins and paper moneys, state-backed

privately issued credit moneys, etc.

12 Social life becomes regulated by the real abstractions of money such as wages, prices, interest rates, credit ratings,

etc. (Soederberg, 2014).

13 I owe this crucial point about extra-human natures to Martín Arboleda.

14 There is some evidence that ruling classes in advanced capitalist countries have realised that crises and social unrest

across the Global South are detrimental to global accumulation (for instance, the growing – though contradictory –

inclusion of DECC in global financial governance, Ocampo 2011). This may explain the relatively quiet attitude of

advanced capitalist countries towards the production of new state spaces in the realm of money and finance across the

Global South, even as they seem to challenge their dominance of global finance.