13th
God is dead. And we have killed him — you and I. How did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? (Nietzsche, The Gay Science)
The essence of the power of finance capital is not the accumulation of past labour. To the contrary, the history of past monetary transactions merely determines one’s present accumulated stock — a quantity, not a power. When one turns to the power of capital, however, one steps into an entirely heterogeneous element: value of credit is determined by expectations of future interest. The transcendence of capital is its appeal to the future. This finite expectation in then combined with the violence of coercion, the infinite demand, to ensure the power of capital. Just as the slave is controlled by the threat of death, a future recompense, capital seizes sovereignty by a combination of debt, the finite threat of future reparation, or abandoning the contract, the infinite threat of exclusion from the means of subsistence.
The result is that the system of finance capital has usurped the prerogatives of right, liberty and piety. Advancing its control over nature by fixing prices, it controls right; advancing its control over history, by controlling labour — preventing some from working while assigning many others ephemeral jobs which merely serve the interests of capital and are of little benefit to anyone — it controls liberty; advancing its control over expectations of the future and transcendence, it controls piety. Usurping the sovereign yet independent functions of law, government and religion, the system of finance capital gains a despotic sovereignty by stealth. Thus this newly ascendant god, visible nowhere, emergent from the future, executes the murder of God.
Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety, pp. 37-38.
