Beyond Money

A Postcapitalist Strategy

Anitra Nelson

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781786807816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Environmental Economics
• Index: Economics

'A fascinating portal into arguments about why we need to get beyond money' - Harry Cleaver

What would a world without money look like? This book is a lively thought experiment that deepens our understanding of how money is the driver of political power, environmental destruction and social inequality today, arguing that it has to be abolished rather than repurposed to achieve a postcapitalist future.

Grounded in historical debates about money, Anitra Nelson draws on a spectrum of political and economic thought and activism, including feminism, ecoanarchism, degrowth, permaculture, autonomism, Marxism and ecosocialism. Looking to Indigenous rights activism and the defence of commons, an international network of activists engaged in a fight for a money-free society emerges.

Beyond Money shows that, by organising around post-money versions of the future, activists have a hope of creating a world that embodies their radical values and visions.

1

Capital and Crises

Money as we know it is capitalism’s sine qua non, its essence. We cannot describe or define either capitalism or capitalist management and capitalist work without recourse to money. You might respond, ‘Just because capitalism relies on money, money might not always lead to capitalism’, or state that the real problem is ‘capital’ and/or ‘commodification’. Indeed, these positions typify leftists, environmentalists and anti-capitalist theorists and movements today. Consequently, modified forms of money and markets are included or inferred in practically all visions of postcapitalism. So, if you’re thinking money is not really that much of a problem, that we could mould money to progressive ends, consider this book my answer to you.

INEQUALITY

Today, production for trade – which requires monetary calculations, relations and exchanges from start to finish – supplies most of our basic needs and wants. Monetary practices are so widespread that they construct our everyday relations. We work for, and with, people in order to get money to buy our means of existence. We make purchases of goods and services made by lots of other people whom we will never know, just as we cannot know the terms on which, and conditions in which, they work. Similarly, we do not know the ecological implications of the techniques used to make such commodities. Living in market-based economies means that we are alienated from, cut out of, making decisions over what is produced and how it is produced.

This omnipotence of monetary practices tends to obscure, suffocate, or sideline those nonmonetary social and environmental values, relations and activities that we hold dear as marks of friendship and solidarity. We enjoy sharing, caring and receiving others’ care and attention, both in slow time and convivial contexts. Such relationships offer us a deep sense of security. In contrast, it is only money that offers the ultimate security within capitalism and, even then, we are vulnerable to the hand-tomouth culture of just-in-time supply chains as many have experienced in the context of coronavirus (COVID-19) restrictions.

Beyond being a standard of value in price and medium of exchange in cash, money creates and re-creates our social substance and being in subtle and complex ways. Significantly, money operates to compare and contrast: it is divisive. We are surrounded by winners and losers. If some profit and save, others lose. Our monetary system patterns and generates inequality. We might feel angst about diminishing such inequity and advocate for redistribution or develop policies to address disadvantage, but inequity is generated by capitalism and achieved in the first and final instance by money.

The 1% and the 99%

Today, most people right across the globe live in societies that are inequitable within their borders and in comparison with other countries, due to inequitable work and living conditions and unequal exchange. We witness flagrant overconsumption, massive waste and obesity alongside food shortages, starvation, famine and absolute poverty both within and between nations. The Occupy Wall Street protests starkly portrayed the ‘99%’ who cannot enjoy the full benefits of their everyday work and have little say in how they live or work. There are deep inequities within this 99%, with people at one end of the spectrum living in comfortable over-consumption while marginalisation, precarity and poverty characterise those at the other end. Still, all those within the 99% share a low level of substantive, real, democracy.

Beginning in 2011, the Occupy movement spread rapidly in the United States (US) ‘where inequality has soared in recent decades’.¹ Using data from the late stage capitalist states of the US, the United Kingdom (UK) and his home country France, economist Thomas Piketty has argued that ‘global inequality of wealth in the early 2010s appears to be comparable in magnitude to that observed in Europe in 1900–1910.’ That first decade of the twentieth century was a period of notoriously stark distinctions between wealth and poverty, as described in novels by E.M. Forster and John Steinbeck. But Piketty estimates that even in the early 2010s, the elite ‘1%’ owned around half of total global wealth. That left around 50 per cent to be, unequally, shared amongst the remaining 99 per cent. In fact, half of the world’s population do not even own 5 per cent of total global wealth. Similarly, while the top 10 per cent monopolise 80–90 per cent of global wealth, an extraordinarily tiny elite within that elite – the top 0.1 per cent – enjoy 20 per cent of total global wealth.² Moreover, the ‘1%’ comprise an international bourgeoisie from which many of our political leaders are drawn. Piketty is no anti-capitalist, yet he has argued that ‘it is an illusion to think that something about the nature of modern growth or the laws of the market economy ensures that inequality of wealth will decrease and harmonious stability will be achieved.’³

Furthermore, there is a global divide referred to variously as developed versus un(der)developed countries, First World versus Third World, global North versus global South and, most recently, the minority world versus the majority world. From a world-systems perspective of regions categorised as centre, periphery and semi-periphery, such spatial distinctions highlight an uneven and inequitable operation of global capitalism.⁴ As such, Piketty points out that while global per capita income increased more than ten-fold between 1700 and 2012, wealthy country per capita income increased much more than twenty-fold.⁵ Moreover, financial globalisation means ‘that every country is to a large extent owned by other countries’, which undercuts any sense of substantive democratic state-based citizen control and supports the concept of an international bourgeoisie.⁶ Inequalities of material well-being and political power are replicated within states spatially, with cities typically dominating and marginalising regional hinterlands even as the city is demarcated by advantaged and disadvantaged zones.

Another book, based on widely acknowledged international data by Californian Seth Donnelly, reveals ‘the epidemic of poverty that is the real and persistent fruit of capitalist development’ in flagrant contradiction to widespread propaganda of ‘a dramatic decline in global poverty’.⁷ Donnelly unpacks spurious concepts and dubious practices underlying World Bank data by drawing, instead, on the UK Multidimensional Poverty Index. Significantly, this index is based on real social values not monetary or monetised data, to show that 1.45 billion people (almost half of them children) experience seriously poor health, educational and/or living standards.⁸ Is this ‘just’ relative or comparable poverty? No, it is absolute poverty in terms of people’s basic needs. In fact, 1.5 billion go hungry and yet another 1 billion do not eat enough food to enable ‘intense activity’.⁹ We are talking undernourishment of around one-third of Earth’s people.

Money generates inequality

The data on inequalities at every scale strongly challenge the politicocultural messages and assumptions iterated by the mainstream media that global capitalism represents the best of all possible worlds, and that all we need to do is to tweak the system to overcome its weaknesses.

Many of us have lived in capitalist societies for generations and have no other point of comparison except for analyses of certain national experiments with communism, such as the Soviet Union, Cuba and China in the twentieth century. Such experiments never represented ideally functioning socialism because they were ruled by elites who continued production for the market, even if in modified, state-planned, ways. Money remained a tool of control. By maintaining money and markets, or some kind of substitute indicator/s enabling calculation, such elites undermined efforts to achieve real and direct democracy and the real sharing of responsibilities for satisfying our collective and individual needs that are essential principles of both socialism and communism. For reasons made clear in Chapter 6, the initial adaptation of capitalist technologies was determining and such ‘revolutionary’ elites increasingly adopted capitalist ways of operating.¹⁰

Capitalist dynamics produce inequities. In terms of enterprises, the carrots and rewards of competition play out as either more or less profits, even bankruptcy, all based on a firm’s monetary efficiency. There is more downward pressure on wages the more one is supervised; those most controlled tend to be paid the least. Similarly, at the top of the pecking order, owners and managers tend to put upward pressure to increase their absolute incomes as well as their share of total incomes. Having higher or lower incomes means either more or less access to the market, the main source of basic needs and non-essential wants. Haggling, calculating over whether to buy or sell and at what price, is a metaphor for life in which ‘more’ and ‘less’ are intrinsic points of reference. These social, cultural and economic dynamics of ‘more’ and ‘less’ all rotate around money that, by its very nature, compares, contrasts and divides.

Moreover, a citizen’s ‘social’ contract with the capitalist state is a profoundly monetary one. Strong tensions arise because, although the national government is often regarded as apart from the market, it is actually a part of the market.

THE STATE OF CAPITAL

Within mainstream capitalist cultures, trading and producing for trade, working for money, and making goods and offering services to sell are all considered natural and normal. Everyday practices and legal, regulatory and political structures coalesce around production for trade. Capitalism reduces to a socio-political system centred on markets, structured on private property, the dynamics of working for money and a general reliance on the market to operate and live. Negotiable private property is synonymous with market economies.

As such, capitalism spawns a unique political system with its own ideology of ‘freedom’, characterised simply as freedom of speech and freedom of choice, and associated concepts of an individual citizen’s rights and responsibilities, and representative parliamentary governance. Governments (states) and many and various state agencies operate on monetary principles of accounting, taxes and subsidies, and monetary calculations of so-called costs and benefits. Under neoliberalism – better referred to as late stage capitalism – the capitalist state is a structure formed by, as well as forming and reforming, capitalist ideals and efforts.

A planet of trading states

Global capitalism relies on international trade laws and conventions, on trading policies, relations, agreements and activities between and within states that are overwhelmingly capitalist. These international structures have evolved over centuries so that capitalist forces can operate across the planet, establishing and legitimating trade. The creation and upholding of universal human rights and environmental standards have struggled against such trade and investments, along with the commercial cultures and political structures that sustain them.

The rationale and functions of ‘exchange value’ – which refers to monetary value, prices, producing for markets and trade – oppose and undermine social values of mutual respect and sharing on the basis of need, expressed in terms of use values. In production for trade, the ‘use value’ of a commodity specifically refers to its qualities and purposes for users, in contrast to the commodity’s exchange value, as in its price. As they created an entire societal paradigm to produce for trade, capitalist forces derided pre-existing Indigenous peoples’ forms of production and exchange as well as women’s extra-market roles and perspectives, issues taken up in Chapter 7 and Chapter 5, respectively.

This capitalist world system, characterised by marked inequalities of power and influence between nation states, has led to the familiar periodisation of world history into stages of hegemonic power, for instance British domination in the nineteenth and early twentieth century giving way to US dominance during the twentieth century. In both periods, the dominant state’s currency became the international monetary currency and standard par excellence. British and US political, military and monetary influence facilitated economic advantages that, in turn, raised their political and military might. They ignited cultures of planetary grandness, dominance and extermination riddled with racial, patriarchal, violent and anti-environmental perspectives and practices.

Today, most nations are formal capitalist states based on some type and degree of representative democracy easily dominated by those with wealth, who have clear interests in perpetuating the capitalist system of private property and trade. The state develops policies that normalise and facilitate production for trade through financial incentives and policies, as well as economic regulations. States are critical for supporting bankers, manufacturers, farmers and retailers during endemic economic crises, such as the global financial crisis of 2007–08 and consequent national depressions and recessions. With the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis associated with health sectors already weakened by neoliberalism met restrictions of movements that limited work and trade to induce classic conditions for a generic economic crisis. As such, states came into their own, typically creating stimulus packages as shock-absorbers for certain inherent failings of markets.

The state as a bulwark against the market

Even if long just-in-time supply...