Laboratories of Worldmaking
Contexttual Quote
"I would want to add to that historical point the genuine philosophical difficulty of thinking through the possible meaning of democracy beyond the nation-state. We are still laboring under the mismatch between our domestic democratic institutions and the global nature of capital. Any left vision for global money would have to overcome that contested impasse."
- Stefan Eich [1]
Discussion
Beyond the Domestic Democratization of Central Banks
Stefan Eich:
"As a starting point, I would perhaps point to the kind of history set out in Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists, which captures the way in which it was neoliberalism, after all, that cast itself in the mantle of globalization – and in the process also defined globalization in economic and financial terms. The left has found itself contesting this kind of globalization, but it has been much harder to articulate alternative visions of left internationalism after 1989. And it’s not clear that cosmopolitanism has been able to fill that gap, certainly not on the money question.
It is precisely for these reasons and in light of the enormous obstacles in our way that I find the idea of creating “laboratories of worldmaking” so productive. Not because we have all the answers, but because we don’t. We can’t even be sure we know the right questions to pose. So it is in laboratories – institutional and intellectual ones – that we need to engage in playful experimentation.
And I think one obvious place to start is by thinking of central banking as one such possible “laboratory of worldmaking.” Most immediately, that would mean creatively considering how we can democratize central banks domestically. But in doing so, it would be tragic if we simply end up pitting one national central bank against another. Instead, we have to explore the place of central banks – and indeed of a central bank of central banks – in a more global vision of democracy. The one thing that is clear is that the current global monetary non-system fails us and that we ought to try to improve on it.
Now I don’t kid myself to think that we will see some kind of Bretton Woods 2.0 anytime soon, or that the Bank for International Settlements in Basel can be turned into a democratic vanguard of global solidarity. But we have to pose the question and we have to be open to more institutional experiments. I don’t have a ready-made recipe in my drawer for what the solution would look like. But I do think appreciating the political logic of Keynes’s bancor proposal that was rejected in 1944 is not a bad place to start. If only because it can point us to the constraints of our moment. I also take inspiration from those – such as the 1980 Arusha Initiative – who have in the past called for the need for a more democratic founding of the global monetary order. It is tragic and unacceptable that these calls have fallen on deaf ears.
Our own impasse today is arguably even worse than the crisis of the late 1970s. Even as we go back and marvel at Keynes’s bancor or recover the Arusha Initiative, we find ourselves today in the midst of a violent storm of essentially unconstrained global capital mobility and climate catastrophe. And yet it is precisely this – the globality of our problems from climate to currency – that makes it absolutely inevitable to think about what new democratic solutions and new left global and international visions could look like that would be able to rise to the challenge. We have to embrace experimentation as an acknowledgment of our lack of answers at the moment."
(https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/stefan-eich-on-hayek-and-money/)