Crises of Capitalism - Animated David Harvey

This is a great 11 minute video of David Harvey's recent talk at RSA in London. David is a great Marxist analyst and has written several books about capitalism and finance. I have to admit that I have not had a chance to read his books cover to cover, only snippets and listened to some of his talks. There are a couple quotes that I find to be fantastic.

The first one goes, "The whole history of capitalism has been about financial innovation, which has the effect of empowering the financiers.” This is a powerful quote for me. It really gets at my inner inspiration and is what drives me to explore the side of our political-economy that deals with this question. In my research I am attempting to highlight this financial innovation by showing how very clear political decisions were taken that would make money compatible with capitalism within the confines of an American style democracy that entrenches the rights of private property.

This thinking falls heavily on Geoffrey Ingham's understanding of money as having its own forces of production. David Harvey is essentially highlighting the same fact, as I am, by trying to highlight some of the historical evidence for understanding money in this way. Money needs to be seen as something that has been built and constructed so as to make it compatible with the functioning capitalist democracies of today (here I am borrowing a term from E.M. Wood).

I believe this is a powerful intervention that is been pushed by those that are exploring Community Currencies and other forms of alternative money. This brings me to the second quote, "We have a duty to change our mode of thinking". Here Harvey is throwing down a particular challenge to academics. He is telling us we have to bring a fresh perspective to our way of analyzing our political-economy.

I know that I am doing this. I know this because most people reject my thinking and assume that there is no real relevance to a discussion of money in terms of building a viable post-capitalist ecologically minded political-economy. My sense, and I think Harvey would agree (though I have not had the chance to ask him personally) that this is a good site for exploration. As Harvey points out, since the 1950's the US and the Bank of England have been siding with the financiers over manufacturing. This highlights clearly the way in which money has its own forces of production and is a tool in and of itself that is most clearly entrenched in our political system.

We have to understand money in a new way. We need to bring a fresh perspective to it. Both in terms of understanding how it got to the position it now holds, how changing it in meaningful ways challenges the entire conception of our current political-economy, and that it is not something that is a result of the economy but is constitutive of the sort of political-economy that we chose in the 18th century to entrench into today's capitalist-democracy.

I believe that the most important direction we can move our monetary system towards is one that is not focused on accumulation of money as a form of wealth, one that has a pricing mechanism that can respond to both abandunce in terms of supply and infinite value in terms of price. These are the innovations we need to think about incorporating into our financial system. Until then we will continue to battle a system that is both controlled, focused on scarcity and has two opposing forces 1) accumulation 2) velocity (aka movement) of money.

Here is the video.

This is the animated video:



And this is the full lecture video:

Comment on openmoney.ning

I have been exploring the writings and conversations on the http://openmoney.ning.com network and came across an article by Eric Harris-Braun

"But what our current monetary system cannot structurally decide at all is what wealth itself is. That question is not decidable within the monetary system, it takes it as an axiom"

I think this is the most critical element to understand. And this is where the meta-system concept really becomes clear. Part of what this talks to is the fact that people are not empowered in this money system. Value is a product of a reflexive relationship between all the members of society.

Hegel, the German philosopher, talked about how the concept of private property (which is used as the root of wealth creation in this current system) is only private property because others choose to recognize it as such. This is where the collective consciousness comes into play. If I say something is private property (or public property) and no one recognizes it as such then well - no matter how loud I yell - it still will not be private property until others recognize it as such.

I believe this same concept holds for value. Our monetary system does not have the ability to recognize value in things that we, as a society, have not yet created a viable value structure for. A system that includes and recognizes these sets of values. For me a concept of "infinite value" - a value that encompasses that which is so valuable as to prevent the possibility of ever actually putting a price on it, you can't buy it, you have no right to destroy it and it is non-tradable - is a critical part of the process.

The idea is to create a value that recognizes things that are abundant but critical - elements that are not driven by a concept of scarcity value. I believe the work of a new monetary meta-system is critical to this process as the current system does not have the capacity to incorporate this value structure.

I am excited to participate, watch and collaborate with all those that recognize this critical element in our society and economy.

Incentives

This is a quick post - but I just watched this very short video on CNN about pollution in China. This is a story that we have heard a few times and it is one of great concern with such rapid industrial growth.

My question ultimately is how do you build a different incentive structure into the economy so that there is no reward for pollution and the destruction of something as important as fresh water. I think that laws and policies are always just a band-aid and as long as there is incentive - monetary - that you gain from polluting and "reducing" costs then these things will keep happening.

This is why it is a much deeper question, a question that we have to truly explore and understand why our economy rewards this behaviour when it is so obvious that it is the last thing that should be rewarded.

I continue to explore this in a deep way through understanding our monetary system and our concept of value that our monetary system is set up to represent. I have been exploring such organizations as The Transitioner and other such groups. I think this is a very, very fundamental question we need to answer.