conductor of currents
pig on (marx on) gold
before gold was reduced to “Au”
by a series of scientific solutions
or a “general equivalent of value”
by a series of scientific sentences
it was brushed upon sacred pages,
adorned upon holy bodies,
and hammered into powerful icons.
gold was planetary star stuff
with which human desires were woven.1
it could be said
that the most powerful of these gold crafts
was the craft of making it
and in so doing,
chasing the power of dying stars.
many lives have been spent in this pursuit.2
others contend
that the purpose of this craft was not to make and obtain gold
but to become like it
so pure, so unreactive as to never corrode, but to purely conduct, in perpetuity.3
(this spiritual-material pursuit of the star-state of gold
was the knowledge-craft known as alchemy.)
to be a good conductor of currents
one must be very pure, very consistent,
and very complete.
impossible to get into a reaction with,
so to speak.4
the conductor of conductors: gold
the current of currents: sunlightheat
and surely it is significant
that the light of the sun
and the dust of dead stars
share a shimmering shade?
“For simplicity’s sake,” Marx begins Capital’s third chapter, “I assume in this book that gold is the money commodity.” Marx does not dwell much on the reasons for gold’s unique capacities. But gold is a special substance, made in the explosive furnace of dying stars, joining gas clouds that form new stars and planets. Channeled and purified in hydrothermal processes on earth, and carried by water into veins, gold is the rain of the cosmos falling into the lake of the earth.
Marx claims gold as a product of human labor, like all products. But what about the American land whose processes produced and stored the gold, which was just then being robbed and mined by European colonizers? Marx writes, “witness the price of uncultivated land, which has no value because it doesn’t contain any objectified labor.” Of course the land was cultivated, in its way, by the people who lived upon it. But in this moment Marx’s words participate in the rapacious alien naming and claiming that was falsely taking credit for the labors of other humans and nonhumans alike.
Gold is among the least reactive metals. it doesn’t oxidize, which means it doesn’t corrode, and so it conducts the most perfectly, though not as quickly as silver or copper.
Marx attributes gold’s capacity to function as a money commodity to the ease with which it can be split and recombined. According to Marx, gold is a good money object because of its uniform quality and the ease with which it can be divided and recombined. In other words, its precious, pure, and liquid nature. This best conductor of man’s symbolic currencies is also earth’s most faithful conductor of electric ones implies to pig. It seems to pig that these properties are linked.
Marx writes about how circulation and use corrode money into nothing but name. Meanwhile, he says, money was condemned by the ancients as corrosive to economic and moral order, with its capacity to turn qualities and relations into values and commodities—objects for sale. Marx misses another corrosive process. “price is the money name for the labor objectified in a commodity,” he writes (76). The quality of labor also corrodes and slips away beneath the name of price as the price circulates.