A Usurious Reading of Dante and Marx

This is precisely where Dante's critique of usurers, in part because of the onto-logical schematic which composes the very essence of Dante's metaphysical explication of sin through Inferno intersects with Marx. Throughout Capital, Marx makes reference to money lending as not simply a pre-Capitalistic, but a proto-Capitalistic phenomenon. This comes through in some cogent statements in the unedited third volume:

What distinguishes interest-bearing capital in so far as it forms an essential element of the capitalist mode of production, from usurer's capital is in no way the nature or character of this capital itself. It is simply the changed conditions under which it functions, and hence also the totally transformed figure of the borrower who confronts the money-lender.¹⁶

To be more precise, "usurer's capital has capital's mode of exploitation without its mode of production."¹⁷ Nevertheess, Marx indicates throughout Capital that there is an essential difference between pre-capitalist forms of usury, and modern capitalism.¹⁸ Yet this difference is not incommensurable. To put it simply: capitalism is the systemization of the spirit of usury.¹⁹

In a deep sense of Derridean irony, Dante's usurers are recognizable only through family seals, which have certainly only been given meaning (like modern day brand symbols) by the exploitation of a system of unrestricted, general "economy" where "interest is acquired and nothing is used up."²⁰ That is, the identity of Dante's usurers are simulacrum on top of simulacrum: a "valuable" family name, built on the propagation of "value" from "value," that is utterly, and infernally, exposed as emptiness upon emptiness. It is not far gone from Marx's conceptualization of capital:

Capital is money, capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, [...] and thus valorizes itself independently. [...] its valorization is therefore self-valorization. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs.²¹

This mysterious character of capital is what Marx identifies as the mechanism resulting from commodity fetishism. Commodities which were originally based in concrete social relations take on a mystical quality bound up in supra-sensible "autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race."²² It is not a far stretch to say that Dante's usurers fetishize money in precisely this way—or conversely, that Marx's capitalist fetishizes money in a precisely Dantean way. Although they would diverge on the precise ontological explanation of what is occurring, in both cases, the usurer and the capitalist assign a mystical value to money which it does not possess. For Dante, the fetishization of the coin subsumes the individuals soul for eternity. For Marx, the fetishization subsumes the system of concrete social relations. Significantly, for Marx, it also subsumes the individual in a poignantly Dantean contrapasso so to speak.

Marx's castigation of the capitalist can now be read in striking congruity with Dante's damnation of the usurer. Towards the end of the first volume of capital Marx writes: Except as capital personified, the capitalist has no historical value, and no right to that his-

torical existence which, to use Lichnowsky's amusing expression, 'ain't got no date. [...] But, in so far as he is capital personified, his motivating force is not the acquisition and enjoyment of use-values, but the acquisition and augmentation of exchange-values. He is fanatically intent on the valorization of value; consequently he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production's sake. [...] Only as a personification of capital is the capitalist respectable.²³

Within the framework of historical materialism, "the capitalist" is, for Marx, a vacant phantasm; an individual with no real value. His entire existence is predicated on the empty accumulation of value for value sake, the perpetual augmentation of value. Seen from an eternal perspective, this, too, is the damnation of the usurer: a soul who's value has been completely emptied into his now meaningless coin purse; it bears his meaningless "seal" of value. Dante, in his poetic brilliance, paints the only colors we experience in Inferno as devoid of vividness. The colors are so one-dimensional that they vanish beyond the horizon of any meaning that colors can possibly carry with them from the natural world (17.58-65). They are consumed into the void of each usurer's now infinite valuelessness. All the while, the usurer is stuck in an eternal liminal void between comings and goings because his own historical life was completely subsumed by the empty spirit of his fetish (17.67-73). It would appear that what Marx attempted to explicate with the benefit of a historical perspective, Dante may have prophetically illuminated from his own.

Dante's punishment for usurers serves as a historic conceptual link between the ethics of Aristotelian-Thomistic Scholasticism, and Marx's socio-economic critique of capitalism. The actions of Dante's usurers are certainly immoral primarily within the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, and with regard to scholastic critiques for the immoral basis of exploiting the theologically prescribed labor of man for selfish reasons. However, the significance of Dante's metaphysical logic, and his poetic rendering of the eternal damnation of the usurers is not exhausted by the existing traditions from which he draws on. Instead, he makes a valuable addition to the millennia old debate concerning the ethics of usury. Although they occupy different ontological position, many of the theological tropes found in Marx's critique of capital, can be identified explicitly in the metaphysical logic of Dante's usurers in Hell. The goal of this reading was not to prove that Dante evinces explicitly Marxist critiques of capital as such, but rather to show, in part because of his historic socioeconomic context, that Dante's Inferno is arguably a proto-Marxian critique of the detrimental effects of economic systems based on capital lending and the accumulation of wealth. In this way, Dante's condemnation of usury in the nascent capitalist economy of twelfth and thirteenth century Europe can be read as a transitional work in the critique of capitalism. And conversely, that Marx should be read in the shadow of Dante himself.