Nelson, Anitra. _Beyond Money: A Postcapitalist Strategy_, 2022. [http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6841380](http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6841380). # Progressive Summary Money is at the hub of the capitalist system, the spider spinning the web. Solutions such as co-operatives and the commons are flawed to the extent that they involve money and markets, because they will eventually replicate the same diseases. The problem with money is that it incentivizes us to produce for exchange and to accumulate, thus hiding social and environmental values, which Nelson calls "real values". # Key Points ## Post-capitalism and real values Nelson asserts that the main reasons we should think of money as a "problem" is that it contributes to: - divisive economic, social and political inequalities - planetary environmental unsustainability She advocates for a "nonmonetary postcapitalist local–global commons". Her influences are "women’s liberation, nonviolence, political ecology, ecofeminism, Indigenous perspectives and ecosocialism." She prefers "collective decision making based on real values and human relationships, in contrast to money-oriented decision making." > Moving beyond money allows us to build a world based on social and environmental values appropriate for humanity and planetary sustainability. Material and conceptual keystones of capitalist practices, monetary value and monetary relations block system change in a postcapitalist transition. Monetary value and relations offer capitalist forces a strong practical base and discursive frame of reference. Given that capitalist practices, ideology and institutions require money in order to exist, acts of nonmonetary production and exchange have the potential to disable and dismantle capitalist forces. Instead of a world built on ‘exchange value’, monetary value and prices, we can create a world based on ‘real values’. > The concept of ‘real values’ has certain similarities with the concept ‘use value’, in as much as both relate to qualities and purposes of things. Yet, real values go beyond mere use values to refer to actual and potential diverse values of living things, plant, animal and rock in landscapes and the atmosphere relevant to actual and holistic human and ecological needs." > [!Note] Why rock? > I was curious about why she would include rock in this very small list of real values. This might be a reference to James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, in which he claims that the Earth's living matter, air, ocean and rock form a living system that keeps the Earth in homeostatic balance. ## Money There are different theories of money: - State theory of money - Commodity theory of money (grounded in gold, for example) - Credit theory of money (money acts as a claim) Nelson expounds a credit theory of money. > Money is best understood as a claim to future goods and services that have been produced for, and are available in, the market. She considers the primary function of money to be as a "unit of account" which facilitates trading. It is a universal equivalent, to use terminology from Marx. This is in contrast to Karl Polanyi, who considered the main function of money to be a "medium of exchange". Money is a strange unit of measure. Unlike measures such as weight, distance and time, it is neither precise nor standard. $100 will buy different baskets of goods depending on "a vast range of complex human and nonhuman forces, factors and relations extending to the political stability of the nation." She asserts that "money as we know it" is not a tool like a spade or gun, which would have been useful in any society or culture. Money is a specific structure of social relations that we do not see in noncapitalist societies (eg in Indigenous cultures, shells and other objects that were traded are not to be understood as "money equivalents".) Her working definition of capitalism: > Capitalism is characterised by people who exchange human effort, skills and knowledge for monetary remuneration, who work for managers and owners who, in turn, make the decisions about what is produced, how it is produced, where it is produced and for whom – decisions all made with reference to the market. A worker’s income is typically spent on essential needs and wants purchased in the market. Money, in this society, is the standout defining principle of what constitutes ‘work’ within capitalism. ‘I don’t have any work’, generally means ‘I can’t find a paid job’ rather than ‘I can’t be purposively active.’ Evidence from 3000 BCE Egypt suggests that the introduction of money was coincident with a shift from an egalitarian to a stratified class society: - [*Henry - 2004 - The Social Origins of Money The Case of Egypt.pdf*](zotero://select/items/1_276TZIEI) This paper extends the argument to ancient Greece: - [*Semenova_Wray_2015_The Rise of Money and Class Society.pdf*](zotero://select/items/1_V8UPRGLB) ## Capitalism, profit and growth > Profitmaking is an essential buffer systemically created within production for trade to enable enterprises and associated individuals to operate. > Profitmaking and growth are not optional but rather mandatory in the ordinary daily operation of capitalism. > Capitalism is impossible without profitmaking and its twin, economic growth, so imaginaries of reforming market activities to operate without profitmaking or growth are doomed to fail. > Market-based societies are characterised by conflicts between capitalists and workers. Yet, perversely, their clearly opposed interests both appear to be satisfied under conditions of strong growth. Economic growth is attractive to capitalists as their normal mode of operation, and appears to offer more job opportunities and the potential for rising wages. This seeming coincidence of workers’ and capitalist financiers’ and managers’ interests is, in turn, another systemic pressure to make profits and grow the economy. > Capitalism has no operating processes to either stabilise or reduce production: the compulsion to reproduce beyond itself is a systemic necessity. > Capitalism is the epitome of a monetary economy; growth is not only a goal, tendency, or achievement of capitalism but an essential requirement that makes capitalist processes incapable of delivering socially and environmentally appropriate production. Paradoxically, pro-capitalist ideologies such as neoliberalism convincingly promote growth as capitalism’s strength. In fact, especially apparent in the current conjuncture, growth is capitalism’s critical weakness; if we are to preserve a place for ourselves as a species on this planet, then capitalism has no future. ## Can money be fixed? Today, various proposals have been offered to fix the inequalities arising from the use of money, but they all assume the central place of money as the hub of the system: - workers’ cooperatives (19th century Proudhon) - guaranteed minimum income (or services) schemes - local community-based currencies (alongside formal legal tender) - modern monetary theory (‘MMT’). > Underlying many reformers’ misconceptions is **the assumption that monetary exchanges embody an ideal of ‘equal exchange’**, a notion that informs their search for ways to represent diverse social and environmental values within an imagined marketplace characterised by equitability, effectiveness and efficiency. Her argument is that money is the root cause of inequity, and that no system which involves money can have relationships of equivalence. > [Karl Marx] roundly critiqued monetary proposals for remedying the ills of capitalism. Marx believed that the ideal society was one in which each person contributed to fulfilling communal needs to the extent of their abilities, and took what they needed from the communal product. > "From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations." > – Karl Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy*, Volume III, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981, p. 911 There is some evidence for an ecosocialist interpretation of Marx: > He was deeply aware of our need to conserve Earth and of our reliance on Earth, writing: ‘Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.’ This position and other works by Marx support ecosocialist interpretations of his work and the ecosocialist movement that has gained ground in the last few decades. ## Trade and property > Where a society only offers members use rights to enough land for self-provisioning, exchanges of the products of such land use tend to be minimal and generally based on nonmonetary customary logic. For instance, John F. Henry points out that: ‘Tribal society is a non-exchange, non-propertied society that follows the rule of hospitality – all had a right to subsistence that was collectively produced by its members on collectively held means of production.’ In contrast, private property is not only the result, but also the premise, of trade. Logically we cannot sell something we do not own. > > Thus, the idea of private ownership is a fundamental assumption of trade, of monetary exchange. In other words, the exclusive use right that private property conveys is implicit in the logic of monetary exchange because only by owning property can we have the power to give it away in exchange. Markets arise as the transferral of personal use rights to goods, means of production and services increases. As such, trading automatically disrupts and diminishes collective and individual self-provisioning. **Trade disables practices of commoning and sharing even as it is touted as enabling freedom, free movement and free activities**. We can't trade what we don't own. Therefore, trading necessitates a process of enclosing the commons. ## Trading creates dualism Trade and exchange can be used interchangeably here. > Monetary and market-based practices undergird, and highlight, a socially constructed duality between humans and nature. Such dualism is often misconstrued as philosophical and cultural rather than appreciated as a material result of daily activities within capitalism. Capitalist practices assume and embody abstraction from nature, human nature as well as nonhuman nature. Every exchange embraces people and things as if extracted from their natural environs, Earth, and abstracted within a wholly socially constructed matrix of credits and debts determined by an ideal and material set of rituals referred to generically as ‘the market’. As more and more activities and relationships are market- oriented and defined in terms of monetary valuation (prices), the market becomes the environment par excellence, submerging Earth, the natural environment and its real values, on which the market is actually based. > > Today, exchange value is the most obvious and the most obscure value. Monetary value is unstable, is nothing in and of itself. Rather, money’s worth is mirrored in what it purchases. It is unreal value compared with well-defined, visible and functioning social and ecological values. If money seems to represent social trust because we use it as our common medium of exchange and unit of account, at the same time monetary exchange essentially heightens distrust and untrustworthy behaviour in practices of calculated self-interest. > > Exchange value is distinctive and unreal because it abstracts from social and humane worth and the ecological qualities of Earth, all of which are best referred to as ‘priceless’. Omnipresent and omnipotent exchange value, so often regarded as social and natural, is really anti-social and unnatural. Money is derided, reviled and despised even as it is revered and coveted. Most significantly, separation from nature today is generated in trade and production for trade. ## Perceived superiority of trading > Trading and production for trade is often presented as a sophisticated and pluralistic mode of free and equal exchange. The apparent freedom of impersonal and impermanent trading relations is contrasted to explicitly unequal exchange as in a serf’s offering to their feudal lord, the peasant’s tribute or tax to a state, and the slave’s servitude with respect to their master. Such perspectives regale capitalism for its ‘equal exchange’ and ‘one-vote one-value’ representative democracy. Democracy is often considered intrinsic to capitalism even if the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2020 classifies a miniscule 8.4 per cent of the world’s population living in full democracies, with the rest in flawed democracies (41 per cent), authoritarian regimes (35.6 per cent) or hybrid regimes (between authoritarian and flawed, 15 per cent). > > Indeed, production for trade ends up with inequitable societies where those with money have the most power and speak loudest. Meanwhile, due to the severe ecological unsustainability resulting from production for trade, we have a dying planet. The sting in this tail is that this planet is our host, putting paid to any sense of superiority. ## Ecofeminists and degrowth Ecofeminists such as Maria Mies and Carolyn Merchant anticipated the degrowth movement of the 21st century. Mies: "the aim of all work and human endeavour is not a never-ending expansion of wealth and commodities, but human happiness (as the early socialists had seen it), or the production of life itself." > Women’s caring roles mean that they develop intimate knowledge and skills associated with core subsistence tasks essential to fulfil basic needs of humans for food, clothing, shelter, respect, concern, mutual care and support. > Ecofeminists have highlighted women’s and Earth’s unaccounted-for contributions to capitalist (exchange) value. Mies’ iceberg economy displays capital and labour atop, such that poking out of the sea, for all to see, are the chief concerns of capitalist manager-owners and economists. Still, holding up the whole and hidden underneath, in the ocean below, is the larger mass of unaccounted-for contributions to value: ‘women’s unpaid housework, the work of subsistence peasants, the work done under colonized conditions, and nature’s production’. Invisible work amounts to the greater part of necessary everyday activities keeping humans alive. But, what does this insight mean? How might such work be authentically valued given it does not exchange for a price in the capitalist market? > > Here, we find ourselves in a similar place to ecological economists who seek to integrate the worth of nature into the reproduction of capitalism. Efforts to acknowledge and remunerate the contributions of housework and care to total production have clear parallels with efforts to integrate nature within capitalist accounting systems (see Chapter 4), and raise similar questions. > When Marx analyses ‘value’, the multi-dimensional core of exchange value, he analyses the engine of capitalist development. He does not like this value, he does not defend it. Marx exposes this value as absurd. He calls us to revolt against such value. In a complementary way to Marx’s understanding of capital, and its heart ‘value’, Maria Mies hits the nail on the head when she de- clares: ‘Women should never forget that it is we who produce life, not capital.’ This line thrusts in the anti-economic, anti-capitalist direction that we need to take, rather than work towards a deep and broad reform of capitalist exchange value accounting that would ultimately incorporate every human and nonhuman factor associated with production by giving it a real or nominal price. Since everything is ultimately connected with everything else, it would be both impossible and a waste of time to monetise all relations. Why not totally re-define and substitute value in real, nonmonetary, ways? # Resonances # Oppositions # Questions / Comments # Quotes ## Capital and Crises > 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. > 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. > 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 nonessential 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. > Reformist approaches assume that markets could operate in more equitable and environmentally reasonable ways, and that a market is the most efficient option available. Yet the logic of market efficiencies generally rotates on purely monetarily calculations, effectively reasoning in a hall of mirrors and marginalising real social and environmental values. Familiar examples are conventional food retailers, such as supermarkets, which purchase fruit and vegetables as cheaply as possible. Inexpensive produce might be grown using soil- and water-damaging fertilisers, by poorly paid illegal migrant workers, and transported long distances using more cheap labour and environmentally damaging practices. However, organic farmers can only follow ecologically sound practices and make sure they pay their workers fair wages if the food costs more, meaning supply for an elite demand. By its very nature, one never manages to escape the conundrums that production for trade entails. Real social and environmental values involved in caring for people and Earth highlight the inequities and damage of market-oriented activities. > Perversely, even if a rich elite is most influential within the market economy, in reality no one in particular manages any market. The market is a freewheeling and all-encompassing set of flows and activities stitched together by price signals and other monetary relations. In this market-based wonderland, money is a quasi-god. Even the power of multi-billionaires and monopolies is limited to being simply more influential in, rather than driving, the system. > > In short, we have all handed over control of our livelihoods to money, to monetary calculations that are irrational in terms of social and ecological values and outcomes. As such, the universal equivalent, money, is fatally implicated in inequalities and unsustainability. The existential threat of contemporary environmental crises suggests that we might commit species suicide if we don’t immediately get into the driver’s seat and collectively move away from monetary practices. ## Money: The Universal Equivalent > Whether a pound, euro, or dollar is used to price things that we sell and buy, this unit of account is often referred to as a standard of value, and money is seen as a ‘measure of value’. However, unlike measures of weight, distance and time that represent specific, permanent and standard units of measure, the monetary unit of account is neither a precise nor a constant standard. Indeed, the economic state of the market is the basic source of money’s generic worth. The market is composed of a vast range of complex human and nonhuman forces, factors and relations extending to the political stability of the nation. As such, the market value of a unit of account at any particular time is often represented by reference to a basket of commonly needed goods and services. So the unit of account varies, with $100 buying a different basket of goods and services at different points in time. In other words, a standard basket of specific goods and services can cost different amounts from year to year. > > In short, this measure of value, money, is such a peculiar ‘measure’ in terms of quantity that we have mainly been content if it simply fulfils its role as a quality par excellence, as the unit of account in which we express prices and, therefore, use in accounting records and commercial agreements and contracts. As such, contemporary governments sanction and support this legal tender as their ‘universal equivalent’. Still, given that capitalism is a global system, the value of any particular unit of account such as the UK pound oscillates in a comparative way, via exchange rates, with other currencies. Such exchange rates are subject to certain national policies and regulatory measures but are most strongly influenced by market-based activities. > In credit theories of money, whether we use a metal coin, plastic card, or paper legal tender as our means to trade, all simply represent or symbolise the quality of being a sociopolitical claim on future marketed goods and services. Money has no necessary physical being but is an entirely social construct and practical force arising specifically as a claim to marketed goods and services in a particular set of social relations and rituals that we call capitalism – a market society. In short, if the market is viewed as a wheel, money is its hub. > At the same time, opportunities and aspirations for personal advance in such an insecure system mean that trading and producing for trade mesmerise and entrap. In fully fledged capitalism, money – and its seemingly magical substance, exchange value – is supreme, akin to a god. > > Money is like an almighty god of the Old Testament, to be admired, revered and feared. All capitalist production starts with investments evaluated using money or bought with money; all enterprises operate on the basis of monetary calculations, exchanges and transfers, and accounting is central to every commercial arrangement and transaction. In capitalist societies, children get pocket-money and are taught to save money; most work is for money and, con- versely, work that is not remunerated in money, such as voluntary caring for others, appears secondary and less worthy (even if it is essential); most needs and wants are created specifically for markets; fulfilling most dreams requires money; monetary punishments and rewards are commonplace, while taxes are paid and even gifts made in (or with reference to) money. > > Monetary practices and monetary logic are ingrained in citizens of market societies. To question the legitimacy of money, monetary practices and monetary logic is akin to questioning the meaning of a religious god and the wholesomeness of a capitalist society. ## System Change Not Climate Change > All the components and aspects of ecological systems upon which we depend in order to live offer a host of both well-recognised and invisible or unknown real values. As such, our authentic and optimum position is to be at one with, to work with, nature. Yet, market-oriented approaches embody dualism between people and the rest of nature as an everyday practice. That market societies objectify nature is clear in the definition of economics as a study of allocating scarce resources for the singular purpose of maximising social welfare. Even more clearly, both the practice of trade (monetary exchange) and production for trade are anthropocentric – marginalising values of Earth. Retrofitting such values using market-based mechanisms, such as water and carbon trading, has proved either impossible or unwieldy and inefficient. ## Technology and Debt > We are ‘the other’. > > The technology of capitalists tends to overwhelm this ‘other’ of workers- cum-consumers. We face technology as sophisticated and expensive; giving form and functions to highly managed work and home environments, with private property restricting access to secret technological know-how, data and operations relating to both production and consumption. Patents make prop- erty out of inventions and discoveries, not only out of technological minutiae but also from seeds of Earth and human DNA. Copyright tangles umpteen printed words and images, and appliances are not amenable to do-it-yourself repair. Firms create brand names and symbols, patents for technologies, and productive techniques that no one else can use, or not without paying for it. ## Occupy the world > In Anti-Capitalism, Argentinian Ezequiel Adamovsky distinguishes current anti-capitalists by their focus on operating in ways that are antipower or counter-power, are autonomous, have immediacy and presence, use horizontalist structures, are de-centred, integrate a multitude of people and causes, strategically respond to specifics, learn through listening rather than laying down a general program, act in glocal rather than national or state-focused struggles against capitalism, use nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience, and develop constructive, creative, rather than ‘them–us’, cultures. > Marx’s analysis of capitalism was profound, based on a philosophical appreciation of the risks to humanity of being falsely alienated from nature and being forced to work for money and for capitalists. Indeed, Marx appreciated that capitalists were not necessarily intentionally nasty and greedy, but were forced to think and act in particular ways to operate their businesses success- fully. Instead, if we ditch the organising principle and power of money on which capitalism is formed, we can engage together directly and respectfully with nature, organising as commoners producing and exchanging for collective sufficiency.