Category: Money
I revisited my old college, St. John’s, Cambridge on 24th February 2009 to give a lecture on “International development: a historical perspective from Cambridge” for Cambridge University International Development on the occasion of the University’s 800th anniversary year. What follows consists of a short Introduction, the lecture in 5 parts and audience discussion in 4 […]
In 2006 Brian Holmes, an art critic, activist and social theorist who lives near me in Paris, wrote a wonderful essay on art’s financial futures, ‘The speculative performance’. This stimulated me to reply in a letter which is reproduced below. Dear Brian, I like your piece on financial speculation very much. The Goldberg example (an […]
The Memory Bank claims to be about making a more effective Commonwealth. So far I haven’t been very explicit about what that might mean. At the very least it means exploring the idea of what we have in common. And this short animation makes an excellent job of outlining what is involved.
Machines, money and people in the formation of a global society. A lecture in five parts given at Goldsmiths, University of London on 23rd October 2007. Filmed and edited by Ricardo Leizaola. Part 1 The rest of the lecture can be found here: Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5
One in a series of World Summits on Free Information Infrastructures (WSFII) took place 1-3 October 2005 at Limehouse Town Hall in London. A programme of talks, demonstrations and discussion on free networks, alternative currencies, civic information, infra-red networks, open geodata and mapping, was preceded by a week of workshop ‘streams’ including a book writing […]
1. LETS and Me All my life money has been an obsession. When I was 5, I was bewildered by the relationship between rationing coupons and pocket money. When I was 12, I took up betting on the horses. Gambling saw me through university. I even became an entrepreneur in the slums of a West […]
Has been published in a new open source journal created by the Association of Social Anthropologists, ASAOnline. See the original keynote lecture of the Rethinking Economic Anthropology conference held at the LSE on 11th and 12th of January 2008 here as streaming video. World society has been formed as a single interactive network in our […]
Is informal economy plus information technology a path towards economic democracy? This essay is frankly autobiographical. It is an attempt to excavate the intellectual and political connections between my early and later work in economic anthropology.
In the wake of market fundamentalism We have lived in the last three decades through an explosion of money, markets and communications and are now beginning to experience the consequences. Whatever else this hectic period of ‘globalization’ brings, it represents a rapid extension of society to a more inclusive level than the twentieth-century norm which […]
One Saturday morning in 1980, I found myself addressing a large, mainly black working class audience in Detroit on the subject of the Atlantic slave trade. I was claiming that, before the industrial revolution, relations between Europeans and Africans on the Guinea Coast were relatively equal. The Africans supplied the slaves and the Europeans bought […]
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.
