A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, Chapter 2.3 Money, a) Hoarding - Part 5 of 6

Marx sets out the contradiction involved in hoarding as a fetish for wealth in its most liquid form, but then holding it in its congealed state.

“But the accumulation of money for the sake of money is in fact the barbaric form of production for the sake of production, i.e., the development of the productive powers of social labour beyond the limits of customary requirements. The less advanced is the production of commodities, the more important is hoarding – the first form in which exchange-value assumes an independent existence as money – and it therefore plays an important role among ancient nations, in Asia up to now, and among contemporary agrarian nations, where exchange-value has not yet penetrated all relations of production.” (p 134)

This also applies to the hoarding of financial and speculative assets by the ruling class, today. The ruling class has, itself, moved beyond its historic and progressive role as owners of industrial capital. In that role, they acted as the personification of industrial capital, as property, and so representatives of its interest, including the need for its accumulation. But, today, the ruling class does not perform that function. Industrial capital is no longer privately owned, but is socialised capital. 

The ruling class now owns its wealth in the form of fictitious capital (shares, bonds, landed property) whose interests in maximising interest/dividends and rent, are antagonistic to the interests of industrial capital in maximising profit.

In a period of speculative activity, the ruling-class, does not even hoard such fictitious capital so as to maximise the revenues from it, but purely in order to obtain these speculative capital gains. The hoarding of such assets, becomes similar to the hoarding of treasure by the Pharaohs, and the interests of the real economy, the expansion of production of social wealth, in the form of commodities, is subordinated to it, hence the use of profits to buy back shares and so on, rather than to accumulate industrial capital. They have become entirely parasitic on the very form of property they originally nurtured.

As well as gold hoards in the form of metal, which may be buried, in one form or another, out of sight, the wealthy may also wish to display their wealth, conspicuously. The fact that gold and silver, as use values, are used in jewellery etc., enables them to do this, whilst holding the gold and silver in this form is also a form of hoarding, because, if required, these items can, themselves, be converted into money.

“He bedecks himself and his house with gold. In Asia, and India in particular, where the formation of hoards does not play a subordinate part in the total mechanism of production, as it does in bourgeois economy, but where this form of wealth is still considered a final goal, gold and silver articles are in fact merely hoards in an aesthetic form. The law in mediaeval England treated gold and silver articles simply as a kind of treasure-hoard, since the rough labour applied to them added little to their value. They were intended to be thrown again into circulation and the fineness of the metal of which they were made was therefore specified in the same way as that of coin.” (p 134-5)

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