View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Lauda 8IVS%YZMRIR 3R1SRI] %OEXIIQMRIRZÈMXÚWOMVNENSOE0ETMR]PMSTMWXSR ]LXIMWOYRXEXMIXIMHIRXMIHIOYRRERWYSWXYQYOWIPPE IWMXIXÈÈRNYPOMWIWXMXEVOEWXIXXEZEOWM 0ETMR]PMSTMWXSR)WOSNE%WOSWEPMWWE OIWOMZMMOOSREOIPPS %GXE)PIGXVSRMGE9RMZIVWMXEXMW0ETTSRMIRWMW 9RMZIVWMX]SJ0ETPERH *EGYPX]SJ7SGMEP7GMIRGIW 'ST]VMKLX8IVS%YZMRIR (MWXVMFYXSV0ETPERH9RMZIVWMX]4VIWW 43&S\ *-6SZERMIQM XIP JE\ TYFPMGEXMSR$YPETPERH [[[YPETPERH PYT 4ETIVFEGO -7&2 -772 THJ -7&2 -772 [[[YPETPERH YRMTYFEGXERIX 3 Abstract Auvinen Tero On Money Rovaniemi: University of Lapland 2010, 324 pp., Acta Universitatis Lapponiensis 175 Dissertation: University of Lapland ISSN 0788-7604 ISBN 978-952-484-351-5 The study explores the political choices and confl icts inherent in the “technical” specifi cations of any monetary system and some of the social scientifi c implications of the prevailing forms of money in the widest possible sense of the terms. As a constantly evolving social relation, no single theory of money is likely to capture its tremendous capacity for self-transformation. It is argued that the precise manner in which the prevailing forms of fi nancial capital in general and money in particular are socially constructed creates a privileged reality for fi nancial capital which distorts competition among the diff erent factors of production and eliminates money’s capacity to accurately capture and reproduce real world economic phenomena – if possible even in theory. Contrary to some of the traditional economistic legitimating narratives for money, it is suggested that control over the issuance and circulation of money may render various aspects of the human governable with a fraction of the resources that might be required to implement comparable combinations of coercion and rewards through alternative institutional mechanisms. While it is far from clear that money can ever be specifi ed in a manner that would solve its inherent political and social confl icts to an extent that would permit “economic” analysis to begin, some of the social and political implications of diff erent types of monetary institutions are often not beyond the reach of public policy decisions. A combination of a seigniorage-based unconditional basic income and a demurrage tax on money is introduced as an example of a specifi c public policy program that could rectify or mitigate some of the polarizing consequences of the prevailing forms of money as well as illuminate the spectrum of political choice inherent in the design of any monetary system. The study explains the continuing signifi cance of a wide spectrum of explanatory frameworks for the nature of money as a function of their strategic political utility rather than empirical accuracy and identifi es four main issue areas as particularly fruitful for further research. Key words: money, unconditional basic income, demurrage tax, governmentality, biopolitics 4 Contents Preface and Acknowledgements. 7 1 Introduction . .25 2 On Methodology . .33 3 The Sovereign Factor of Production? On the Social Construction of Financial Capital . .40 3.1 The Social Construction of Financial Capital . .40 3.2 On the Politics of the Political: Some Selective Structural Depoliticiza - tions Arising from the Privileged Reality of Financial Capital . .48 4 A Theory of Socially Neutral Money . .59 4.1 A Fool’s Paradise: Some Meditation upon the Nature of Money . .62 4.2 Snapshots of an Evolving Pendulum: Shortcomings of Monocausal Theories of Money . .65 4.3 The Monetary Implications of an Absence of Trust: Gold as a Form of Unspecifi c, Non-redeemable, Perpetually Circulating Debt . .69 4.4 Measuring the Social Footprint of Money: A Matter of Distribution. .71 4.5 Towards a Theory of Socially Neutral Money: Equitable Distribution as a Facilitator of Social Agency . .77 5 On the Feasibility of an Economic Conceptualization of Money . .85 6 Money as a Commodity: On Money, Property Rights and Freedom . .96 6.1 Property Rights for Money vs. Real Assets: Substitutes Rather than Complements . .98 6.2 Can a Monetary Commodity Ever Circulate at Its Intrinsic Value? . .102 6.3 Money, Property Rights and Freedom in Current vs. Intertemporal Exchange . .105 6.4 Redefi ning the Politics of Monetized Market Exchange . .111 6.5 Concluding Remarks . .115 7 Money as Debt: On Endogeneity, Redeemability and the Informational Implications of Centralized Money Creation Powers . .117 7.1 Endogenous Money, Exogenous Incentives? . .118 7.2 Repayability through recycling? . .123 7.3 The Impact of Centralized Money Issuing Powers on the Informational Content of Monetary Calculation . 130 7.4 Complexity as a Political Strategy: The Cases of Semantic Traps and All or Nothing Cognitive Gatekeepers . 135 8 At the Intersection of Sovereignty and Biopolitics: The Di-Polaric Spatializations of Money . .144 5 8.1 The Origins of Money’s Institutional Power, Multiple Potential Spatializations and the Capacity to Act as an Incubator of Agentic Subjectivities . .146 8.2 A Spectrum of Spatializations: Some Structural Social Hierarchies Shaped by Modern Credit Money . .156 8.3 Rendering the Logic of Financial Capital Biopolitical . .160 8.4 Decentralized Human Agency and the Structural Power of Modern Credit Money: The Empire as an Open Source Incentive Structure . .165 8.5 Reterritorialization, Social Restructuring and the Administration of the Permanent State of Exception: Towards a Theory of Territorial Projection of Monetary Power . .176 8.6 Can the Chessboard be Discarded? . .186 9 A Brief Introduction to Monetary Reform . .196 9.1 A Case for Reform . .198 9.2 Alternative Approaches to Monetary Reformist Discourse: Globalism, Religion, Foucauldian-Inspired . 203 10 A Road to Another World . .219 10.1 Retuning the Amplifi er: Seigniorage-Based Basic Income and A Demurrage Tax on Money . .222 10.2 On the Monetary Implications of the Formal and Substan tive Rationalities of Capitalism and Its Alternatives . .232 10.3 Liberating International Transactions: An Open-Ended Clearing Union . .237 10.4 Potential Complementarities with a Land Reform . .244 10.5 Some Politically Incorrect Attempts to Politicize Political Incorrectness: The Role of Blame Games and Religion . .249 10.6 Are the Rumors of the Death of Money Greatly Exaggerated? . .271 11 Refl ections on Unconditional Basic Income, Employer of Last Resort, and Infl ation . .280 11.1 What is Infl ation? . .281 11.2 Does Universal Basic Income Cause Infl ation? . .282 11.3 Productive Relativism: On the Perspectival Nature of Working and Shirking Under “Because I Say So”-Economics . .287 11.4 Potential to Illuminate the Inherently Political Nature of Any Monetary System? . .290 12 Theorizing Hypocrisy: Critical Surrealism . .293 12.1 Critical Surrealism and the State of Exception . .300 Conclusion . .305 References . .313 7 Preface and Acknowledgements Th is study began as an inquiry into market populism – the functions, processes or outcomes that are sometimes attributed to market-mediated social interaction for utilitarian purposes, which could maintain their instrumental rhetorical value in the pursuit of particularist political strategies only through gross simplifi cation or misrepresentation of the underlying reality. Nonetheless, it soon became clear that publicly professed understanding of the political signifi cance of one of the central institutions which contributes to the discrepancy between the rhetoric and practice – the social relation of money – was insuffi cient to continue with the selected method and scope of analysis. At the risk of potentially dire professional consequences, the process of specializing in a progressively narrower fi eld of study until one knows everything about nothing was halted at a stage that might be described as an inter- or post-disciplinary inquiry into money as an institution. Basing economic decision-making on monetary calculation may not be entirely unlike reading the future from tea leaves: with a suffi cient number of leaves and properly encoded sizes, shapes, positions etc. the leaves may have the technical capacity to act as an information system, but to render such pursuits meaningful one would also need some kind of a mechanism which ensures that future events do indeed get encoded into the system. In the absence of a causal relationship between the tea leaves and future events or money and real world economic opportunity structures that goes beyond socially constructed beliefs, the respective “information systems” are entirely self-referential – perhaps suitable for academic model building or political rhetoric to advance one’s relative position in each historically specifi c or governmentally contingent power structure, but hardly appropriate for the purposes of disinterested observers aiming to analyze real world phenomena. Such a mechanism is conspicuously absent from the monetary system. Monetary calculation is used for allocating resources – for determining who will do what in the future. In order to perform such a task accurately, money should have the capacity to perfectly capture and reproduce the production conditions in the real world – the natural laws that govern the physical reality. Yet there is no mechanism that could replace the self-referentiality 8 of money – money’s tendency to refl ect the logic built into its “technical” specifi cations rather than to measure some external opportunities or constraints – with a perfect capacity to reproduce real world conditions. It is in fact far from clear