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Blogging around 05.02.09

by Paula | 2 May 2009 | permalink | comments
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Some interesting tidbids from around the web today.

• Fantastic infographic from NPR — Power Hungry: Visualizing the U.S. Electric Grid

• This writeup about Lewes Pounds includes a pretty fascinating aside: £1 Lewes Pound notes trading on Ebay for up to £35 each. I checked Ebay and there are indeed Lewes Pound notes trading there with prices ranging from US$1.47 for one up to US$66.84 for three. It looks like some people are treating them as a kind of numismatic paper.

• from BoingBoing: Craigbucks

• New Currency Frontiers blog has some interesting speculation about using social media as the basis for alternative currencies. In fact, such a thing already exists: Ripplepay

• Very, very interesting take on money at our current historical juncture from anthropologist Keith Hart, author of Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World:

The dominant social form of the last 150 years has been the nation-state formed through an alliance between capitalists and the military landlord class whose defeat was the principal aim of classical political economy. It was an alliance between big money and specialists in crowd control. They came together in a linked series of national revolutions in the 1860s, spilling over into the next decade, in order to secure industrial capitalism and the nation-state from the threat of the urban masses. These were the American civil war, the abolition of serfdom in Russia, Italy’s Risorgimento, Japan’s Meiji restoration, Britain’s second Reform Act and the formation of the Anglo-Indian superstate, German unification, the Franco-Prussian war and the French Third Republic. All of these moves by the main players in twentieth century history established a political framework capable of subduing and mobilizing people by a combination of capital, violence and the appeal to cultural unity. I call it national capitalism, the attempt to manage money and markets through central bureaucracy; but this has always been in dialectical tension with financial imperialism, a force for globalization that flourished for three decades before WW1 and for the last three decades, with disastrous consequences in the first instance and potentially for us too.

The economists understand money and markets exclusively through impersonal models, so anthropologists and sociologists have focused on how people make money personal and concretely social. But the economy exists at more inclusive levels than the person, the family or local groups. This is made possible by the impersonality of money and markets, where economists remain largely unchallenged. Money is the principal means for us all to bridge the gap between everyday personal experience and a society whose wider reaches are impersonal. As a token of society, money must be impersonal in order to connect individuals to the universe of relations to which they belong. But people make everything personal, including their relations with society. Money in capitalist societies stands for alienation, detachment, impersonal society, the outside; its origins lie beyond our control (the market). Relations marked by the absence of money are the model of personal integration and free association, of what we take to be familiar, the inside (home). This institutional dualism, forcing individuals to divide themselves every day, asks too much of us. People want to integrate division, to make some meaningful connection between their own subjectivity and society as an object. It helps that money, as well as being the means of separating public and domestic life, was always the main bridge between the two. That is why money must be central to any attempt to humanize society. It is both the principal source of our vulnerability in society and the main practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful.

If the proliferation of personal credit today could be seen as a step towards greater humanism in economy, this also entails increased dependence on impersonal governments and corporations, on impersonal abstraction of the sort associated with computing operations and on impersonal standards and social guarantees for contractual exchange. If persons are to make a comeback in the post-modern economy, it will be less on a face-to-face basis than as bits on a screen who sometimes materialize as living people in the present. We may become less weighed down by money as an objective force, more open to the idea that it is a way of keeping track of complex social networks that we each generate. Then money could take a variety of forms compatible with both personal agency and human interdependence at every level from the local to the global.

Unfortunately Hart goes on to recommend either replacement of 1940s-era global institutions or even a world government. His assessment is, in my opinion, largely correct; however, he seems to ignore the ecological realities underpinning those national revolutions that began occurring in the 1860s. Focus on global institutions or even one-world government is absolutely the wrong strategy. What we need is a world network of networks of networks of low-energy local and regional economies. Hart’s thinking looks like it might shed some light on the issue of developing this kind of economic structure.

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