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[...] currency the name of a certain social relation, and money the name of the desire to which this relation gives birth.

Michel Aglietta and André Orléan made the decisive contribution of refuting the substantial (intrinsic value) and the functional (convenient means of exchange) approaches to…

[...] money, as the almost exclusive mediation of material strategies, ‘the digest of everything’, became the object of meta-desire – the obligatory gateway through which all other (market) desires must pass.

[...] Marx and Polanyi among others have amply shown how the conditions for proletarianisation emerged, notably through the enclosure of the commons. In the wake of that act of the most complete, organised immiseration, people were left with only one option, the sale of their undifferentiated labou…

Capitalism inherited this layering of markets that evolved over the long term. But it could only truly take form by closing off the last avenues of independent individual or (small-scale) collective production, thus raising material heteronomy to an unprecedented level.

[...] Free enterprise, in the most general sense of the freedom to undertake – that is, in the sense of the conatus – is consequently nothing other than the freedom to desire and to set out in pursuit of one’s desire. That is why, outside the restrictions a society deems it appropriate to stipulate…