The end-of-year article by Mosadoluwa Fasasi is followed by an extensive collection of quotes to help us think about the multiple aspects of money and value, and how to transform them.
This lands for me because it treats money as a measurement system before it treats it as a moral system, which is where the real lock in seems to live. If the unit can only see private exchange and can’t register commons impacts, then extraction is less a failure of ethics and more a failure of semantic fidelity in what we’re able to count.
Precisely! And as it turns out, we have always been able to "count" other forms of value, most of them have just been inverted and repressed. That said, this is not a call for another re-inversion; there is no end to that path. Civilization will get more complex and with each level of complexity is an apparent demand to re-imagine multiple levers to contain [said] complexity.
This lands for me because it treats money as a measurement system before it treats it as a moral system, which is where the real lock in seems to live. If the unit can only see private exchange and can’t register commons impacts, then extraction is less a failure of ethics and more a failure of semantic fidelity in what we’re able to count.
Thank you, I let the author respond.
Precisely! And as it turns out, we have always been able to "count" other forms of value, most of them have just been inverted and repressed. That said, this is not a call for another re-inversion; there is no end to that path. Civilization will get more complex and with each level of complexity is an apparent demand to re-imagine multiple levers to contain [said] complexity.
From Kojin Karatani:
"In his youth, Marx discussed money, quoting Shakespeare’s “Timon
of Athens” as follows.
Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money:
1. It is the visible divinity – the transformation of all human and
natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and
distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it.
2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and
nations.
The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities,
the fraternization of impossibilities – the divine power of money – lies in
its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species
nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.
This is clearly Marx’s application of the Feuerbachian critique of
religion to money. And just as Feuerbach’s materialist inversion of Hegel
remained within the framework of Hegel’s thought, Marx also remained
here within the framework of classical economics, even as he criticized it
with great fanfare.
However, Marx in Capital is different. There were quite a few
thinkers who pondered the riddle of money. But Marx was the first to
trace it to the commodity, which appears so “obvious” and “trivial” that
nobody had really paid attention to it. “A commodity appears at first sight
an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a
very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological
niceties” (Capital 1, p163).
A commodity is not a mere object. It is a form that a thing takes
when exchanged. The thing is a “sensuous matter,” but “as soon as
it changes into commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends
sensuousness.” Something like a spirit attaches to the thing. “I call this
the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as
they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the
production of commodities.”( p165). “The riddle of the money fetish is the
riddle of the commodity fetish, now become visible and dazzling to our
eyes” (p187)."
- Kojin Karatani, Capital as Spirit
https://www.crisiscritique.org/storage/app/media/2016-11-16/kojin-karatani.pdf
Thank yiou David!
Modern Monetary Theory
https://fawesome.tv/movies/10637064/finding-the-money
Thank you, we have a very extensive article on it on the p2p foundation wiki as well: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Modern_Monetary_Theory
Thank you for such deep work, Michel! Honored to see my reflections woven into a much larger fabric of how we are rethinking this! ❤️
Thank you, I'm in full agreement!