Acquiring a large sum of money is, at the outset of the novel, presented as a good thing, and when Roger Yount doesn’t acquire that money, his million pound bonus, he and his family begin to slide just a little faster towards the red. Where for Roger that sum amounts to more or less “maintenance money” for the Younts, when similar sums encroach upon the narratives of Freddy, Zbigniew, and Mary, they are sums that stilt or potentially reverse, rather than maintain, the flow of their individual economic narratives.

Freddy’s payout is reliant upon the agreement and the belief that he will never play again, Mary’s inheritance of her mother’s house ends up taking a large chunk out of her savings to pay for the inheritance tax and preparing the house for sale (Mary and Alan however refuse to take a loan out to cover these expenses for the sheer ridiculousness of the situation), and the case of money much worried over by Zbigniew is, once revealed to Mary, deemed useless not only for the legal trouble it would bring, but for its inability to function as legal tender and the likelihood of its depreciation or taxation.

Receiving a large amount of money, it seems, goes hand in hand with either losing a large amount of money concurrently, or forfeiting a larger influx of money that may be obtained over a longer amount of time – see Freddy’s situation and Albert’s refusal to invest his suitcase full of tenners.

I’d love to hear other thoughts on the uselessness of money, or of legal tender in Capital, as there were so many variations on the theme throughout the novel that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around a coherent way of framing it!