Case 2: Money

Case 2: Money of the Future.

What else is money but a punt on the future? Or Better it is our belief about the future- what it will be and what will look like. If we all have confidence in the bright future, then money bubbles up everywhere – but if that confidence dies, the money, like confidence and hope becomes the scarcest or resources. It is in sense one of the most complex things a society with a large population does - move into the future. Get this wrong or dis-co-ordinate the future, and war and anarchy result. We need to keep on believing the same dream, or at least existing within the same axis, so our dreams can be coordinated one angst the other. Or perhaps we need at all times to feel we have the right to evaluate the dreams others have, and even decide whether they the right to get them or no - money is in a sense the expression of this collective future. In money we create an axis of possibility, giving ups all the same access point to a future (we all need money), and then creating within that access point very different rights and options on that future. To have money is then to have an open set of possibilities, while not to have it closed what one can do right down. And of course is the triumph of capitalism that we simply accept this axis as the norm, and even attempt to justify it, and all its inadequacies as better that all the rest (or even the best possible in a fallen world, whatever that might mean). At best we then criticise its excess, and yet do so without any real hope or dream about what we can do to stop it.
However things are seldom this simple. What has been very clear over the last few years, is that there is little or no consensus about exactly what the future money describes actually is. So that we all can agree that money will get us there, and yet none of us can really agree where that destination is. Or better how we understand that destination has distinct fads. We have moved then from the unlimited future of technological innovation, through the one delimited by the eco-system and scarce resource, through the dream of the state future, and back again to the most debased currency of the lost, the personal future of thrift and saving. What enables us to dream is then one and the same, the index of monetary possibility, and yet what supports that dream, and where it is going, jumps around like a flea. Each of these epochs in finance has it own expectation and dreams about the nature of the future, and so creates it own money accordingly. And yet each of these dreams are not actually separate. They all deal with money. Or better the all need to engage with the world that other epochs have created (or more specifically with the monetary world the collapse in the faith of the other epochs created). To paraphrase Marx -. each epoch is then its own dream, and yet never dreams in the circumstance of its own chosen: the consciousness of other dreams weighs like a nightmare of the mind of the monetary visionary. We can the arrange the dreaming epochs in a little drama of their own where each epoch gives way to the next.
The first of these epochs of recent times, was clearly the dream we had four or five years ago about unlimited money. Somehow ‘we’ thought technology had changed one of the deep givens of capitalism. The one that meant that bursts followed booms as night followed day. May be it does not, we reasoned (like Good Marxists might) in a world of unlimited technological innovations. If what we can do, how we can relate is constantly open and flexible, then maybe money really did grow of trees, we wondered. Or better maybe the amount one really could grow to keep faith with the technological world that money was mean to be servicing. The result was then an unlimited growth in the amount of money we felt we had a right to. Or had ready credit, and the right to take out loans to do anything and every, in this crazy world of finance. Added to this fact that capitalism seemed of the verge of doing something it had never managed to do before – namely expand into the third world, and actually enrich (rather than impoverish) lives, and things looked rosy and open ended indeed. A virtual future fairly bubbled up for the financing.
So far so good, and is certainly true that in a world of open ended technological innovation, Money does need to be as flexible as the world it fashions or at last will always feel the strain to be that flexible. And yet there is a problem. Money is of course tied to more than the pen ended virtual world. It is also always tied down in some form or other to the matter of the world. To have more money is then to have something in the world, almost always land (or gold) cost more. To create endless more money is then to hope up something in the real world, and to necessarily start not only to overvalue it, but also assume that its value will keep on rising. That is it is to assume that actual world were money buys real stuff, will somehow keep pace with the financial and virtual old, where all is change. This confidence is normally expressed in a belief in the rise of property prices. The trouble of course is that while this assumption actually can be justified in a world as it emerges from the virtual sphere (this ought to be the effect of technology-made money) when the same assumption is seen in itself, in the actual world, there can be no justification of the belief that prices will continue to rise, and once that fact is accepted then all hell breaks loose.
What is more the problem went deeper that this crisis of confidence in property prices. It was tied also to two deep limits that appear within our current system, limited technology can at present do nothing about (and appears to be able at the moment not to avoid). The first is the old Darwin story of lack. Our population will (and possibly has) hit the limited about the amount of resources it can extract from the world easily. Once that limited is reached (if it ever has), then we will either need to devise very quickly new ways to consume the same amount energy (and so waste it less) or else we will be simply stuck where we are. There exists then at any one time a theoretical limited to the amount of energy that can be easily extracted, and unless innovating push that limit up and does so at the rate of demand), the hard laws of supply an demand kick in. That is resources be they oil or food become expenses, ad the open ended world of [possibility is closed down. It becomes simply too costly to restless innovate or else only the very cheapest can be developed (or those sponsored by the richest people). One moves then almost immediately from a world of bubbling plenty into a world of projected lack (that may or may not be real).
The essence of finance then shifted What mattered was not the dream of the future, so much as the presence or absence of resources. Money followed oil or grain and those who made money from its sale. They became the great superpowers, and the rest of us were poor second class citizens in the face of this oligarchy. States stated to looks to their resources and close their borders to migrants, fearful that their energy would run dry or their money would run out. Money became very like the world we dreamed of, the world of limited resources, located unevenly across the globe.
The second main delimiter of resources is of course the deep concern we have about our effect upon the planet’s ecosystem. That humans are creating global warming is not really controversial. We are. The trouble is though what this then means is rather complex. For it is clear that is an ethical push to bury this simple scientific fact within visions about what this means for humanity that is how we are a specifies should respond to this fact, and possibility learn o live with eh scientific world we have created. The debates about global arming, becomes then enmeshed within the old old debate about how a global society looks. A society that needs to face not only the mass articulation of very different people all of whom have an affect upon one another, but also includes increasing, technological effects, and the effects of those effects. What does it mean then to live in a world where one can no longer predict where ones action will lead. The innovation of yesterday is the pollution of today, and the pollution of today might by elsewhere and in another time resources.
We are then caught in a world where in a sense open ended development is something we so not control any more. It will happen with or without us. That is it is merely an effect of being part of something else, being part of the globe. As such it steps being the endless froth of confidence that it had been, and becomes something with a darker side. Endless change might echo across a globe and destroy us all yet. The trouble of course is that capitalism has actually been rather bad at describing this world. It is caught between to poles. The finical can only either describes the world of lack and so set up a network or target (and potential fines); Or else it pitches in to try to create best practise and immunise pollution, but making it expensive (carbon option trading scheme),
Neither of these moves are particularly successful. The result is that we have overhanging a future we simply have quiet worked out how it ‘finance’ that is how to describe with the currency we see for portraying the future, money. At which point of course numerous finical folks start to suspect that global warming is merely trick being pulled on them. Some one, somewhere has invented deliberately a future they cannot comprehend; It must then be a mere invention, and can be dismissed as if it cannot be rationalised. The problem here of course is that this accusation is in part true. It is certainly the case that us of the western left have jumped on global warming, and revel in the fact that capitalism appears not to be able to comprehend at all well.
However it also goes without saying that this Western-Leftwing glee is misplaced For Capitalism can cope with almost anything throw at it. Money is tricky like that. It simply falls back on its ultimate ruse– namely the laws of supply and demand. It then clothes this future in a sequence of shifting values, values that combine within them both, on terms dreams and thoughts about the future (investors in technologies for the long game) and very short terms bets. Money then pulls the future it cannot otherwise describe into the market place. It does so because that is all it cannot do. It does irrespective of whether this is the best place to comprised such a future to mitigate against its negative effects, It simply does it.
In short the old confidence in the boundless effect of the virtual world to create money has collapsed. The problem then of course is how to cope with this fact. Here there are two main models one the one hand there is the old Keynesian approach. Maybe when faith in technology, collapsed states should take over. States need then a faith in their own future. They need to invest, n themselves (and can borrow to do so). The result the logic runs will be a short term increase in debt but a long-term future that is brighter, and new possibly are made and jobs not lost. Well maybe. The problem of course rich this model, is that we have to trust the state to be able to do this. Or perhaps better we have to trust that fact that the investments made are effective ones, and really do in the sort term increase our chances of being wealthy (and so pay of the debts we make in getting that weath.) We have then to trust in education or health or roads to make us richer (and have faith that there are built and built as cheaply as possible). The trouble is that our belief in the state to do things has collapsed. We simply do not trust the state to build effectively and cheaply. A lack of trust, which in part is based on experience (government ware not great at commissioning things) and part mere mistrust of rulers. The result is that while are prepared to take out loans on our own future (the student loan) a gamble that our future will be brighter for the debt we saddle ourselves with, we are not prepared to trust the state with the same move.
What is more our own trust is secondary here. For if the sate is really going to borrow money then the power relation between it and the bank if reversed. Where, when the banks collapsed the states did the saving, it is now the banks that will feel at least that they are the money financing the state. They are then the true master of the money. And start to flex their own muscles. That is they immediately assume the future is all about them, and that money is their concern, The future then slips from something the state can make a bid for to something the banks and the international monetary system already necessarily owns. It becomes then all about the kind of economic models that such organization have a tendency (and it is a tendency only) to assume – namely monetary theory. In short we hand power back to the very organizations that ruined the system in the first place, and ruin the one organization that saved us, namely the state.
Why? - because put simply the finical organization talk a language that easy to understand in its essentials (irrespective of whether it is true or not). They talk the language of individual responsibility, thrift and greed, a language that not only is so easy, but also flatters us all ( as we all dream that we might be the ones to make it big, and want the system there to support us). The economic system is then reduced to being all about thrift. We are right back in the rightwing future where ones individual thrift and greed define ones rights or not to have money (and we really worry about who does not have the right as much as who does). A world where all those who allow on any future beyond individual thrift and greed for their money (that is those who work for the state) will be penalized and those who rely only on themselves and their won action (or at least appear to according tot the rules the system invents) will be lauded and rewarded. The system then becomes located in the tradition rightwing twin sources for money- namely individual responsibility (and right), and global finance. These two between then define who has the right to money and who has not. A word the where individual action can be over rewarded, while collective responsibly are not necessarily rewarded at all (what else is the big society, but a finical assertion that virtue is it own reward) . The immediate appeal of this world is that it is easy to understand both in terms of it rationalization (we understand thrift) but also its greeds (we can all dream it might be us). This ease then blinds us, for a while for the sheer injustices and poverty it also creates, and the double thinks we need to justify the unjustifiable (if you are poor it is your own fault, it must be, because otherwise we all might be guilty and that would be bad) In short we are back to a world we had escaped from, and partially clearly forgotten – so let us hope remembering it (with all its inadequately and pain) will not be too traumatic.
In conclusion then many is very much a painter of the future. We give then in its, we express through it, our belief abut that the future is, and what powers it will have, more than that money coordinates these different dreams, but being the sole pigment allowed for their expression. Dreams that might be different from one another are then forced up one against the other to jostle and comp(l)ete. The world we create, the future we actually live is then the reflection of this comp(l)etion, for good or ill.