Brazilian Bank Tellers

Abstract

Bank employees, whose object of labor is commodity money, live out day to day a fetishized representation in which money seems to generate more money without any mediation of productive activity. In the volatile form of electronic impulses, money capital circulates quickly around the world as the financial sphere develops and grows. In a context of hegemony and with the increasing internationalization of financial capital' in the contemporary movement of capitalist accumulation, bank employees handle increasingly abstract symbols of value but have ever less control over the purpose or the product of their activity (Jinkings, 1995; 1998). In effect, bank employees experience in a dramatic way the tensions and contradictions of capitalist development led by the financial sphere. In their daily activities, with computerized support, these workers perform a set of registration and control operations, transferring and redistributing surplus values created by the capitalist process of production. In this manner they make possible the transformation of commodity money into interest-bearing capital in a process that takes on the appearance of money creating more money. Though interest may result from the surplus value extorted from the worker in the production process, it presents itself to the eye as a commodity produced independently by capital, without the mediation of labor. This is, according to Marx (1909: 460), the most exalted, most fetishized form of capitalist relation: