Download The Disintegrative Power of Money

Trends in Money & Finance
What is Money?
What is Wealth?
Debt, Waste and Scarcity
Financialization: Hijacking the
Information Revolution
Decommodifying Money
Redefining Wealth
Quantitative:
Money & Material
Accumulation
Qualitative:
Well-being
Regeneration
Money Basics
• Impersonal: allows transactions
to be extended over time and
space.
• Trust essential
• Most prominent initially in
external trade.
• Capital: money increased in the
process of exchange.
The Disintegrative Power of Money
• rooted in the impersonality of money
• internal concerns with alienation of land
& labour
• money-trading: long considered an
unsavoury occupation.
• related concerns with bourgeois
competitive individualism
• major breakthrough--Capitalism: the
means of production become forms of
money.
– increasing production means increasing
money—and vice versa.
• money becomes industrialism’s main
measure of wealth.
Main Characteristics of Money
1. Means of Exchange
money as information,
a symbol
2. Store of Value
a commodity, a thing-in-itself,
a source of power
The evolution of money: growing
importance of the means-ofexchange function
certificates of
deposit
coins
private & public
fudiciary currencies
“fractional reserve”
gold standard
Breton Woods
Currencies
metals
The Paper Economy
“gold-exchange
standard”
“Interest Rate Standard”
wheat, cattle,
tools
Casino Economy
community currencies
Money as Information: “Money is an
information system used to deploy human
effort.” (Linton)
The Dematerialization of Money
The Industrial Definition of Wealth
Money
Material
Scarcity & Class
... inequality & relative
scarcity:
1. control of scarce
resources & ...
2. monopoly of high
culture
...by a minority.
Industrialism: Accumulation
• Production-for-production’s-sake
• Invisibility of key factors
• Centralization of production, massive
upfront investment
• Focus on labour productivity : resources
substitute for human energy
• Cog-labour: humans as component parts
• Regulation: controls as limits
• Scarcity-based: role of waste since WWII
• Globalization: free trade & intellectual
property
Markets and Material
Connection between needs,
wealth & markets.
the Invisible Hand: worked...
1. for an economy focused on
meeting primary needs—
simplicity.
2. in a situation of relative scarcity
3. in the absence of sophisticated
information technology
The Threat of Abundance
• Productivity boom of the Roaring Twenties
– output outdistances worker wages
• Crisis of effective demand & structural
overproduction: Great Depression as a
reaction to potential abundance.
• White-collar work, universal education: the
threat to cultural monopoly.
– increasingly social character of production; rise of
industrial unionism
Fordism & the Reinforcement of
Industrial Wealth
Matter
Money
Waste
Debt
Fordism
Keynesianism
Suburbanization/
Consumer Economy
War Industry
Paper Economy
Planned Inflation
New forms of creditmoney
“The greatest misallocation of resources in
human history.”
…James Howard Kunstler
Keynesianism & the
Crisis of Effective Demand
• Baran & Sweezy: crisis of profitable investment outlets
for capitalism.
• Money: a tool of national economic planning. Strong
domestic multipliers.
• The Paper Economy: growing disjunction between the
real & financial economies
• Planned Inflation & Purchasing Power
• re-redistribution of income: offsetting wage hikes in the
unionized sectors
• Debt & the Economic Treadmill: Work-and-spend
1970s: End of the Line for the
Fordist Waste Solution
• saturation of markets
• social & environmental costs coming due:
fiscal crisis of the state
• limits to inflationary strategy
• Vietnam war, decline of the dollar,
German/Japanese competition
• OPEC & the energy crisis
– Petrodollars & Currency Crisis
Post-Fordist Casino Economy
• floating exchange rates: “interest rate standard”
– Eurodollars & Petrodollars
• new technologies & Megabyte Money
• financial sector: 30-50 times (?) larger than the
material economy
• Speculation: Stomp the weak / Get rich quick
• Empty wealth creation: de facto redistribution of
wealth.
• The End of Mass Consumption & rise of new
“producer services”: new forms of ‘effective
demand’.
• Polarization of work and society
– end of social contracts: attack on Welfare State
– the growing gap between rich and poor
Debt & Forced Economic Growth
1. Competition for
money
2. Lack of purchasing
power
3. Wage dependency
equals
Export warfare
“The main point that needs to be
understood is that in order for money
to come into circulation, someone
must go into debt to a bank. If there
were no bank debt, there would be
virtually no money—it’s as simple as
that. Since banks charge interest on all
this debt, and since the money to pay
the interest can come only from further
debt, debt grows like a cancer within
the global economic ‘body.’ This debt
imperative creates a growth
imperative that is forcing us to destroy
the life-support systems of the planet.”
– Thomas Greco
Debt in the US Economy
• 1970s: debt 1½ the size of GDP
• 1985: twice the size of GDP
• 2005: 3½ times the size of GDP
Source: Magdoff , 2008: calculated from tables L.1 and L.2; Flow of Funds Accounts of the US; and table B78 from the 2006 Economic Report of the President
The Global Casino: Hijacking the
Information Revolution
• expansion of employment in
speculative industry
– Wall St.: more advanced technologically
than the military.
• Bubble Economies: last ‘frontiers’ for
capitalist growth.
-stock crash of 1987
-tech stock bubble of late 90s
-housing bubble of 2001-07
• Housing speculation: most destructive
& exploitative of the poor & average
people.
Decommodifying Money
•
diversification of forms of everyday
exchange
– supporting the informational character of
currencies.
– undercutting the scarcity-power of money.
•
financial industry restructured as public
utility and/or service industry.
– money directed to priority areas of green
development
– transition: green Tobin tax
•
new forms of remuneration
–
•
direct consumption; basic incomes; accountmoney; free food, health care & housing
gradually enlarging the sphere of gift
relationships
–
consistent with new productive forces based in
mass collaboration
...or turns them into service workers
Living in De-Material World
Redesign not controls
Direct focus on human (& environmental)
need
The Service Economy:
Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)
encouraging provision of services not
stuff.
Servicizing (voluntary EPR).
The “Lake Economy”: economic biomimicry:
sectoral orientation: regenerative food, energy,
manufacturing, c ommunications.
New forms of economic security
Conscious support of the Commons
Disarming the autonomous power of money
Building a community/ecosystem base:
localization.
Security in Gift Economies
"In that way, the giving of surplus to
friends and neighbours is not very far
from the giving of surplus to the
cashier in a bank. The quality of
integrated society, like the legal rules
of banking, guaranteed that the gift
would not be forgotten and a future
claim ignored.”
--Hugh Brodie on Irish rural life