A New Commonwealth — Ver 5.0
Edited transcription of an improvised talk for a seminar, “Social movements and the solidarity economy”, organized by Jean-Louis Laville and Geoffrey Pleyers, EHESS, Paris, 2 February 2012. I was asked to report on the project I am involved in which has the same name as The Human Economy book; but, given this course’s focus on […] →Read more
The first Goody lecture given at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany on 1st June 2011. The lecture is available from the Institute in a handsome print version. I am grateful to Chris Hann for the chance to reflect here on the debt I owe to my teacher. Part One Jack Goody’s […] →Read more
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 […] →Read more
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 […] →Read more
Over on nettime-l, a list for those who once thought “tactical media” was the way forward, the old question of men and machines has been revived with due acknowledgment to Marshall McLuhan. One contributor exclaimed that “of course the machines won” and another said this was “simplistic Luddite rubbish”. This was my response. I can’t […] →Read more
The governments of the Soviet Union and its East European dependencies fell in 1989-90 with almost no loss of life. How could the most powerful and coercive bureaucracies the planet has ever seen collapse so quickly and utterly? They ruled in the name of equality through surveillance and fear, but their structures had been hollowed […] →Read more
The story about voting giving the people democratic power is an example of the cover-up that passes for education at every level in our societies. Politicians need money and money men need political cover. Central banking was invented to institutionalize their partnership. The Bank of England, Banque de France and Federal Reserve are all private […] →Read more
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. →Read more
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 […] →Read more
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 […] →Read more
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.
