I know I said that I was going to blog on a lighter topic today but I got a bug up my ass and I want to talk about money. More to the point, I want to get down some ideas about what I want to investigate in regards to money. My main interest is how money works as a method of persuasion-cogency-coercion. The reason I’m writing this is actually because I’m not finding a lot of literature on this already. I’m hoping that by laying out what I’m looking for, it’ll help me investigate further. And if it gives you any ideas on where I might look, let me know!
One process or phenomenon that I’m especially interested in looking into is what I call “financialization.” This probably already does have a name but I haven’t discovered it yet. What I will say is that this financialization is not financialization as typically thought of. I’m not talking about the creation of credit instruments right now. When I say financialization, what I mean is the process by which more things become accessible by (and in some ways interchangeable with) money.
The broadest example of financialization is the capitalist revolution, which is to say the shift in societies from patronage-based economies to wage-based economies. That is to say, at some point in the past in every part of the world, there was a system in which subjects of an authority would be given possessions by the authority rather than purchasing them, but this was eventually overturned for a system in which every person is expected to buy and sell for their own needs. This process financialized goods like food, drink, shelter, clothing, and so on. In the earlier periods, the fact that a person had certain essentials was never a product of whether or not they had money, even though those things could still be bought for money.
Financialization causes its own pressure. As more parts of life are financialized, the demand for each person to gain money increases. This forces interaction with those who have the ability to grant money, whether by issuing it or by transferring some of their owned money. This allows those who have that ability to dictate terms to those who do not, as without money the have-nots will not be able to survive.
This is how money comes to have cogentic-coercive power when it didn’t before: a situation is created where money is the most obvious and effective means of getting a solution, creating a need which acts as leverage for someone with money.
Almost everything can be financialized and therefore turned into money value. This is because financialization is not a fact of life but a social relation. If we therefore decide to recognize XYZ Corp. as the sole owner of all the world’s air, they can then make claims on that basis, even though they could never literally possess all of the air in the world. Therefore the logic of financialization means that more and more things will become financialized in order that money can be extracted to use in other exchanges. Financialization can itself be financialized, the creation of claims given their own separate value, and so theoretically this process could continue infinitely.
The nature of money as debt or as commodity value isn’t extremely important to me here; I personally ascribe more to the debt theory, but they both appear to operate identically here. Also, I don’t believe that I will look much at specifics of pricing etc. Money is usually thought of as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value, or a standard of payment. I am interested in a fifth function: money as the medium of societal agency.
In these terms, part of the reason that money is desirable is that money can pay for needs which have been financialized. Another part is that money can be used to enact one’s will on others, largely due to that first part. As more of life becomes financialized, more of it can be acquired by purchasing and less by other means, and one can transfer the money one has in exchange for certain favours or gifts, and thereby achieve results that previously couldn’t have been achieved. Once, in order to get a silk shirt, one had to be able to make it oneself or one had to know someone with a silk shirt to give and convince them to do so. Now that all things are financialized, any person can possess a silk shirt simply by having enough money.
I have talked before about the concept of luxury politics (on Journal of Cogency), but that is the end goal of ideological capitalism, and it reaches that goal through hyperfinancialization. By this means can those who hold capital use that alone as their basis to exert unlimited influence power. All ability and experience becomes theirs by the virtue of having money. This – the ability to satisfy one’s every wish without difficulty, interference, or acknowledgement of others – is luxury.
The desire for luxury is why the rich always demand more and more money. They do not seek enough money to purchase goods which will keep them fed, entertained, healthy, etc. They seek enough money to be able to buy and sell as many other people as they can. If there are other rich people in the world, each rich person wants to get richer so that they can command even their fellow rich.
In my view, much of life has to be de-financialized. A clear front in this financialization war is leftovers from grocery stores, bakeries, restaurants, and so on. In the United States, at least, it’s very common to hear about food being purposefully destroyed when deemed unsalable rather than being given out to people; it’s probably important to know that a lot of times the issue isn’t one of ingredient quality but often because an item hasn’t sold in a while and is considered stale, packaging has been messed up, it was returned unopened but the store doesn’t want to restock it, whichever. But this destruction is an attempt to maintain the financialization of food by refusing to allow those without money to be fed. The fact that the government does not fully feed all of its citizens is another aspect of financialization of food. The result is that people must become even more captured by and susceptible to money than before in order to eat and survive.
Money therefore acts as a cogentic-coercive agent only in cases where the society has been sufficiently financialized that money is exchangeable for debt and for nearly every kind of good or service. As this type of agent, however, the effect is not absolute but instead statistically probable. That is to say, even though money can pay for almost everything, the fact that a person can refuse money (even a vast amount of money) does not refute the overall function of money as societal agent. Instead, money can still be thought of as having force if someone is willing to provide what is desired in exchange for money, even if not the specific person in question.
This is where my thinking is at on money so far. I do intend to write up something longer and post it on Journal of Cogency, but I need to do some reading first. Here are things I’ve read so far that have influenced me on this topic:
- Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
- Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari
- The Accursed Share, Vol. 1 by Georges Bataille
Here are works that I’m planning on getting to for this, and I’m always up for suggestions:
- The Nature of Money by Geoffrey Ingham
- Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler
- The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (read part)
- Capital by Karl Marx (read part)
- A Theory of Semiotics by Umberto Eco (read part)
- The Accursed Share, Vols. 2 & 3 by Georges Bataille
And here are some related works I’ve written over at Journal of Cogency: