Money, power and gift: a very short treatise on capital

A provocative new theoretical paper argues that capitalism is best understood not primarily as a system of production and exploitation, but as a structure of credit, debt and power—and that the way out of its contradictions lies in recovering an older vision of money as gift. The essay, “Money, power and gift: a very short treatise on capital” by John Milbank, emeritus-linked scholar based at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, was published open access on 6 March 2026 in the International Review of Economics, appearing as Volume 73, article number 10. Written as a single-author research article with no datasets or empirical analysis, it is a work of intellectual synthesis spanning the history of economic thought, sociology and theology, and it closes with concrete proposals ranging from local currencies to shared-risk banking.

Milbank begins from what he calls capitalism’s “paradoxical oscillation between stasis and flow.” The modern market economy, he writes, must constantly increase its static accumulation of wealth while simultaneously risking that accumulation through continuous circulation. He illustrates this with two contrasting images: the privileged economic enclave such as the City of London, a bounded physical site where the normal writ of the state scarcely runs, and the ceaseless day-and-night circulation of global transport, both real and virtual. Flows require hubs, but flows alone secure the power and permanence of the hubs—much as medieval castles housed troops, yet depended on those troops’ forays for their own security.

From this tension the paper derives a threefold account of what capital consists in. First is the “geographic” ownership of terrain and equipment, which in modernity has become more absolute because it is decoupled from the relationships between people that once delimited ownership through conditional obligation. Second is the “mathematical” ownership of money in abstracted forms such as shares and dividends. Third—and most polemically—is what Milbank describes as the effective ownership of people. Although slavery has been commuted into wage and salary dependency supplemented by welfare, he argues that for the vast majority who own few assets, a mode of semi-serfdom persists: people have been “capitalised,” treated as economic resources rather than as spiritual creatures or citizens, stored in precariously owned housing and constantly retrained and redeployed lest they escape into what he calls enclaves of neo-primitive anarchy.

The paper’s central theoretical move comes in its treatment of money. Against the classical picture—shared, Milbank argues, even by Marx—of money as a neutral mirror or representation of exchange value generated by labour, he aligns himself with a minority tradition in the sociological and Keynesian camps, drawing on eighteenth-century figures such as George Berkeley and Sir James Steuart and on modern writers including Philip Grierson and Geoffrey Ingham. On this “unit of account” view, money is before all else the attribution of an abstract, free-floating quantity of number to people: a register of credit and debt relationships, and therefore of unequal power and ultimately coercion. This tradition is sometimes called the “Cambridge” theory of money in the paper.

It is this credit–debt register, Milbank contends, that makes financialisation primary rather than secondary to capitalism. The conversion of people into capital is not only a matter of exploiting their labour or their consumer desires; it is the reduction of persons to docketed numbers standing in relation to finance capital as borrowers and lenders, to the state as taxpayers, and to landed capital as rent payers—a nexus in which financial and landed capital secure each other, and whose instability was exposed by the 2008 financial crash. Historically, he argues, the decisive “shift at the top” was not the creation of a wage-earning class at the bottom, which was only partial in early modern England and in proto-factory islands of Italy and the Netherlands, but the emergence from around 1300 onwards—and at a new pitch in eighteenth-century Britain around the Bank of England—of a complex relationship between extended state debt, private banks and the tax-paying landed class. Banks began to create money out of nothing through speculative loans backed by central banks and Crown debt, which in turn was underwritten by the tax returns that such speculative investment itself generated.

On this reading, contemporary phenomena that look like capitalist decline are nothing of the sort. Milbank invokes Robert Brenner and others on slowing profits, rentiership and the shift to services, but insists that capitalism has never been interested in physical wealth, innovation or even profit in isolation from class domination. A quasi-feudal, “vectoral” extraction of surplus information is not an anomaly but the revelation of capitalism’s financial core, which from its English Whig outset was about maintaining the power of a political, banking and landed elite. He even suggests this reframes populism: rather than an aberration beside class struggle, populism is the assertion of petty producers and workers against elite financiers, as with the Trump constituency in the United States or the Peronist regime in Argentina, undone by capital flight and consequent inflation.

Yet the paper does not rest in this grim diagnosis. Milbank notes that the same German sociologists and Cambridge theorists who established money’s debt-based origins—Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Grierson, Ingham—still, in his view, share one classical assumption: that earlier tribal economies were barter economies. Against this he appeals to Marcel Mauss’s account of gift-exchange, in which economic exchange is also a symbolic mutual binding, carrying a triple obligation to give, receive and give again. Even David Graeber, who invoked the gift, is criticised for reducing it to spontaneous communist sharing and treating the “indebted” dimension of gift-exchange—the owing of a counter-gift—as an anachronistic economistic projection on Mauss’s part, when Milbank takes that dimension to be empirically well attested and inseparable from gift-exchange’s ritual symbolism.

Reading money through the gift allows the paper to mediate the old debate between money as commodity and money as unit of account. Unlike a bartered object, a gift is at once a thing, a value, and a participatory stand-in for the giver—quasi-personal, as persons themselves can be exchanged as gifts in marriage. Very early token money, in Mauss’s account, arose in symbolic and religious contexts and was both a representative commodity and a recorder of social credit and debt, but debt in that context was largely positive and binding. Drawing on Lewis Hyde, Milbank observes that a gift creates a relationship one did not already have and increases the giver’s power—strangely akin to a modern bank inventing money through credit it does not really possess. Token gifts were even “usurious” in an old sense: through circulation a gift’s value increased, part of which returned to the original giver, though the increase could itself be passed on further. In Latin, usura long meant precisely this positive increase of things through use—the barley seed that grows into a bushel, the ancestral ring that acquires meaning. Modern usury, by contrast, lets the increase accrue only through foreclosure and repossession.

This yields the paper’s most striking reinterpretation: modern financialised capitalism is a parody of gift-exchange, not an escape from it. Mauss’s “total social fact”—the inescapable obligation of reciprocity—cannot be exited, so late capitalism remains within it, distorted. Its reduction of money to pure credit returns money, perversely, to direct power relations between people; its insertion of debt into every corner of life binds persons together, however etiolatedly; and its fiat money, dependent wholly on trust, promotes once more the truth that human beings endlessly create meanings and things out of nothing. Even paying a restaurant bill, Milbank suggests, is a constrained counter-gift, and the possibility of general defaulting reveals an element of free spontaneity in everyday consent.

From here the paper turns to policy and what Milbank calls the choice between the “infinite line” and the “infinite spiral.” The infinite line is the straight, asymmetrical accumulation of abstract capital by a few; the spiral is infinitisation bent back into regional, national or local circuits of mutual support, where gain is endlessly passed on under a mutual-insurance principle and debt guarantees a promised reversal into credit. Examples he offers include strictly local currencies not exchangeable beyond certain limits, and rethought banks and building societies in which borrowing is reconceived as taking shares in ventures, with the bank sharing in the risk of lending—a mode of non-usurious investment. He cites precedents ranging from leaving the gold standard, which enabled the New Deal and the Keynesian era, to mutual-protective arrangements like Bretton Woods. Conversely, he argues that the infinite line must police its own limits—the gold standard, then the dollar-gold link, then the dollar, euro and yen, and today international bankers’ demands for fiscal prudence—to prevent illegitimate exits into the spiral. He points to the rapid fall of British Prime Minister Liz Truss as a dramatic illustration of finance’s power over democratic economic choices, and to more than five thousand special economic zones worldwide, joined by deregulating states such as Javier Milei’s Argentina and Donald Trump’s America, as castellated enclaves hollowing out the national “spirals.”

The limitations of the piece are evident and, in a sense, acknowledged: it is a philosophical and historical essay, not an empirical study, and its prescriptions are sketched rather than modelled. Milbank concedes there is no inevitable good synthesis; things can grow darker, with land rendered uninhabitable and human capacities—knowing, willing, being able, in the triad he borrows from Tommaso Campanella—eroded. He also notes that a genuinely reforming British government would likely have to compromise with current global financial circumstances. The proposed “new sort of socio-political action” is candidly described as yet to be invented.

Still, the implications are considerable. If money’s anarchic, created quality can be interfused with social, ethical and religious value in spiralling, gift-exchanging forms, then the contemporary dominance of debtor–creditor relations unmoored from production might be reinfused with generosity, with all lending becoming real investment in physical, cultural and personal processes. Milbank ends on a deliberately expansive note: ours is not, as many suppose, an age of rediscovered limits but of the infinitely open—renewable energy replacing exhaustible fuels, money freed from gold—and this infinity offers either a Faustian power for elites, as Goethe’s Faust Part Two intimated through the creation of paper money, or an “infinite-finite spiral” of reciprocal recognition and encouragement. His final claim is that only such a spiral, not the infinite line of consolidation and extraction, can be forever sustainable—an argument likely to provoke economists, though one grounded, unusually, in theology, gift theory and the long history of money itself.