Fully Political Money

Discussion

Adam Tooze, interviewed by Evgeny Morozov:

"EM: Could you expand a bit more on what this “fully political money” might look like, perhaps by contrasting it with the money that we have now?

AT: I should admit upfront that the idea of a “fully political money” is nothing more than an aspiration, a telos, a direction of travel. Indeed, you might ask whether we can live with anything that is “fully political.” After all, our politics regularly lurches into anti-political foundational gestures, not dissimilar to the gestures that we make when we try to found money on gold, or central bank independence, or a mechanical monetary policy rule, or an algorithm.

In this sense I absolutely agree with my friend Stefan Eich when he says: “there [have] always been hysteric pronouncements about the fragility of fiat money, but… we might actually want to look at these voices as themselves part of the politics of money.” The politics of money includes an anti-political strain.

After all, the same goes for the law, which I would think of as the closest we have to a fully political architecture of social organization. In the limit, all too often, legal structures seek to anchor themselves in some more solid foundation than that provided by more or less widely accepted and deliberate societal agreement. Constitutions reach for god, or nature, to do the work for them. Perhaps we cannot do without such gestures. But that is what I am gesturing to: the possibility of organizing ourselves around money that is accepted for what it is, i.e. a conventional set of arrangements ultimately arising out a complex of social and political interactions, part of the material constitution of our society, warts and all."

(https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/adam-tooze-on-macrofinance/)