Money is a system of arbitrary tokens used to facilitate exchange, but it’s also a good deal more than that. It’s the framework of laws, institutions, and power relationships that creates the tokens, defines their official value, and mandates that they be used for certain classes of economic exchange. Once the use of money is required for any purpose, the people who control the framework—whether those people are government officials, bankers, or what have you—get to decide the terms on which everyone else gets access to money, which amounts to effective control over everyone else. That is to say, they become the primary intermediaries, and every other intermediation depends on them and the money system they control.
This is why, to cite only one example, British colonial administrators in Africa imposed a house tax on the native population, even though the cost of administering and collecting the tax was more than the revenue the tax brought in. By requiring the tax to be paid in money rather than in kind, the colonial government forced the natives to participate in the money economy, on terms that were of course set by the colonial administration and British business interests. The money economy is the basis on which nearly all other forms of intermediation rest, and forcing the native peoples to work for money instead of allowing them to meet their economic needs in some less easily exploited fashion was an essential part of the mechanism that pumped wealth out of the colonies for Britain’s benefit.
Watch the way that the money economy has insinuated itself into every dimension of modern life in an industrial society and you’ve got a ringside seat from which to observe the metastasis of intermediation in recent decades. Where money goes, intermediation follows: that’s one of the unmentionable realities of political economy, the science that Adam Smith actually founded, but was gutted, stuffed, and mounted on the wall—turned, that is, into the contemporary pseudoscience of economics—once it became painfully clear just what kind of trouble got stirred up when people got to talking about the implications of the links between political power and economic wealth.
There’s another side to the metastasis just mentioned, though, and it has to do with the habits of thought that the money economy both requires and reinforces. At the heart of the entire system of money is the concept of abstract value, the idea that goods and services share a common, objective attribute called “value” that can be gauged according to the one-dimensional measurement of price.
It’s an astonishingly complex concept, and so needs unpacking here….The Archdruid Report
Dark Age America: The Hoard of the Nibelungs
John Michael Greer
6 comments:
He's missing the point.
No point in trying to reject the "money economy."
Face it. Parasites & their methods have existed since the dawn of time.
Progress involves endorsing the methods of parasites, and co-opting them to novel, greater system use.
That's how we domesticated everything from the virus to the dog to the barbarian at the banks gate.
Just domesticate the NeoLiberals, before that tail end wags our dog back into the dark ages.
No point in trying to reject the "money economy."
"No point" in what sense? His point is that "progress" is the myth, and I suspect his view of the Christendom of the so-called "dark ages" would be radically at odds with yours.
no point as in just what I said;
adaptive systems do not "reject" parasites; they co-opt and re-direct them, along with their methods
The basic premise that unites most against neoclassically based economics and its consequences is the equating of actual value with economic worth expressed as money price.
Of course, most neoclassical economists would claim that this is not what neoclassical economics does and they would be right. However, when they talk about economics they doesn't explain that for them "value" means economic value, that is, the relative value that various resources and goods exchange for in terms of a numeraire like labor time, and that in a monetary production economy, economic value is measured as worth in the market expressed as money price. They would say that of course they realize that there are other values in life, but these don't have any significance in economics.
This gets translated in neoliberalism as a political theory where policy is based on neoclassically based economics. Non-economic values like "freedom" are only brought in to the degree that the promote neoliberal policy. Other values are considered irrelevant to policy debate as well as excluded from economic discussion.
In other words policy is fixed, and conventional economics is a dogmatism that contributes to fixing it.
adaptive systems do not "reject" parasites; they co-opt and re-direct them, along with their methods.
Tell you what. Drink some contaminated water, and then just try adapting to the parasites. Redirect them. Whatever you do, don't try to get rid of them.
You're talking ultra short-term. Projecting that to long term is another fallacy of scale or composition.
Long term, hosts definitely DO co-opt parasites. That's how we ended up with most symbionts, from viruses to mitochondria - not to mention all the species our cultures have domesticated.
It's important not to be rash, and instead to always define your terms. We gain most by avoiding frictions, not adding to them.
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