The Hoard as Processual Object: A Marxian Perspective on Money Power

This article departs from ongoing monetary turmoil in Bolivia and Argentina to explore broader theoretical issues around hoarding, value, and power. A dominant approach rooted in exchange theory treats the hoard in formalist fashion as a stable object of economic value, which grounds credit issuance, with its surrounding power relations of stewardship as about seizing or retaining control of this object. I suggest that Karl Marx's account of hoarding refocuses attention on questions of payment, and so on dynamics of monetary compulsion. On this basis, I reread Marx's monetary theory and wider account of capitalist banking as one in which credit precedes hoard formation rather than vice versa. The upshot is a processual approach to hoarding predicated on movement and flux. This approach, I suggest, points to Marx's notion of the ‘metabolism’ between humans and nature as helping illuminate the exigencies of the US dollar faced by countries like Bolivia and Argentina, and dynamics of dispossession and coloniality more generally.