Category: Money
Is it possible to institute a moral politics, moral law or moral economics that would help most people to humanise the impersonal social forces that govern their lives? This question does not come to us out of nowhere and certainly not just in the circumstances of the recent financial crisis. It concerns the possibility of […]
A review of David Graeber Debt: The first 5,000 years (Melville House, New York, 2011, 534 pages) Debt is everywhere today. What is “sovereign debt” and why must Greece pay up, but not the United States? Who decides that the national debt will be repaid through austerity programmes rather than job-creation schemes? Why do the […]
Europe in the global economic crisis I have been writing about the euro for a decade (Hart 2002, 2007a, 2012), always from a critical perspective, since I have long believed that a single currency cannot address the needs of a large and diverse region. Moreover, the European Union’s ambition to transcend national capitalism by becoming […]
This is a more polished and hopefully accessible version of the essay below. Go to openDemocracy for the link here.
The global economic crisis is not merely financial, a moment in the historical cycle of credit and debt. The removal of political controls over money in recent decades has led to a situation where politics is still mainly national, but the money circuit is global and lawless. Events since 2008 should be seen as the […]
A letter to Ed Philips on nettime in the thread, Debt Campaign Launch, 10th December 2011. Well, Ed, that was worth waiting for, as Brian said. It may seem churlish, after your generous remarks, to harp on the one point of apparent difference between us, but I do so because, while I share many of […]
We all began by talking about a financial crisis and now we fear an unprecedented global economic crisis. At the centre of the second, but initially not of the first, lies the potential collapse of the euro as a regional single currency and rival to the dollar as a world currency. The link between these […]
In March 2011, I attended the annual Digital Money Forum organized by David Birch of Consult Hyperion in London. At some point Dave and I recorded this exchange as a podcast in the Tomorrow’s Transactions series.
BBC Radio 3 talk by me (15 minutes) 13 June 2011, 22: 45 Listen here The written text may be found below, but look at this description by the producer: “Money. You don’t know where it’s been, But you put it where your mouth is. And it talks.” (Money, by Dana Gioia) The […]
Abstract Marcel Mauss was a prolific financial journalist, writing about the exchange rate crisis of 1922-24 at the same time as he was writing The Gift; but he kept them in separate compartments and economic anthropologists have been content to ignore his political writings. The recent emergence of the ethnographic study of finance promises to […]
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
