Fictitious money: cryptocurrency as a social form

Abstract

Since the launch of Bitcoin in 2008, social scientists have sought to clarify the relationship between cryptocurrency and money. A dominant conclusion – particularly among approaches employing a commodity theory of money – has been that cryptocurrency is not money but an instrument of speculation whose activities are confined to circulation. This paper deepens the analysis of cryptocurrency and money by drawing on shifts in Marxist theory from the 1970s in the work of Diane Elson and Suzanne de Brunhoff. These developments enable a conceptualisation of money in capitalism not simply as the sum of its functions, but as taking on a particular social form. Building upon this, I develop a novel conceptualisation of cryptocurrency as ‘fictitious money’, a social form anchored in the general equivalent that facilitates the circulation and valorisation of new digital assets in the total circuit of money capital. Situating cryptocurrency in a value-form approach attendant to the unities of the functions of money and of production and circulation reveals productive entanglements and trajectories for it that must be taken seriously within IPE.