Society after Money: A Dialogue

417 Pages·2019·3.581 MB·English

by  Bernd Herzogenrath, Patricia Pisters, Project Society after Money

Society Aft er Money
i
thinking|media
Series Editors:
Bernd Herzogenrath
Patricia Pisters
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Society Aft er Money
A Dialogue
Project Society Aft er Money
iii
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Copyright © Project Society After Money, 2019
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Contents
Introduction 1
Part 1 A Society Aft er Money?
1 A Society Aft er Money? Historical Position, Characteristics
and Perspectives of Current Approaches to Post- monetary
Economic Activity L ars Heitmann 11
Part 2 Concept and Crisis of Money
2.1 Th e Elephant in the Room: Th e Money Commodity and Its
Mysteries E rnst Lohoff 81
2.2 Monetary Mechanisms: Origins, Dynamics and Crisis
Tobias Aufderheide-Kohl 115
2.3 Trialogue: Money as Medium or as General Commodity?
Ernst Lohoff , Hanno Pahl, and Jens Schrö ter 145
2.4 On the Possibility of a Society Aft er Money: Evolutionary
Political Economy, Economic Subjectivity and Planetary-
scale Computation Ernest Aigner and Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle 181
Part 3 Money as an Alien
3 Money as an Alien: Post- monetary Elements in Utopian
Literature and Science Fiction A nnette Schlemm 207
Part 4 Mediation Aft er Money
4.1 A Critical View on the Criticism of Money Christian Siefk es 229
4.2 Categorical Foundations of a Post- monetary Society
Stefan Meretz 255
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vi Contents
4.3 Th e Post- Capitalist Feminism Cookie: Th e Main Course—A
Commons- creating Peer Production as a Possible Future
Friederike Habermann 285
4.4 Trialogue: Implicit and Explicit Views of Human Nature
Friederike Habermann, Stefan Meretz, and Christian Siefk es 301
Part 5 Mediality Aft er Money
5.1 Are We Approaching a Moneyless Society? Peter Karl Fleissner 325
5.2 M oney : For a Non- money Economy Stefan Heidenreich 349
5.3 Money and Digital Media Jasmin Kathö fer and Jens Schröter 365
Aft erword Anitra Nelson 387
Notes on Contributors 397
Index 401

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Introduction
Everything revolves around money. No individual or collective practice of
any kind, no technological or scientifi c development seems to be conceivable
without money. True, money has long been the object of criticism, but the
idea of a “post- monetary society” sparks resistance and unease. And yet
historical and anthropological studies (e.g. Le Goff 2011; Graeber 2012) show
that money has certainly not always occupied the role that it has today—
and that it could therefore change its position again. Th e project “Society
Aft er Money” (“Die Gesellschaft nach dem Geld”) was proposed in 2015,
and approved for funding as of January 1, 2016 in the framework of the
VW funding line “Original—isn’t it?/Constellations.” Th e aim was, fi rstly,
to initiate dialogue between heterogeneous areas of knowledge, allowing
their theories and critiques of money to cast light on each other. Th e
second aim was to think in an open- ended way about the possibility of
post- monetary forms of organization and production (cf. also Nelson
and Timmermann 2011) . But why did this seem relevant to us in the fi rst
place?
In the present time, two self-d escriptions overlap: on the one hand, there
is talk of a “digital revolution,” a “media society,” “networks,” “Industry 4.0.”
On the other hand, the present is described as particularly prone to crises:
“fi nancial crisis,” “economic crisis,” “planetary boundaries.” So on the one
hand there is the description of radical changes in technology and media, and
on the other hand, that of profound social dysfunctions. Th e project is based
on the hypothesis that there is a connection, which can be described as the
collision between digital media or digital technologies and the medium of
money (in addition to other, older confl icts such as that between monetary
accumulation and needs). Th is becomes clear in two respects. Firstly, it
hardly seems possible to represent digital media products in the form of
commodities. Digital goods are not scarce, since they can, in principle, be
reproduced at will. A knowledge or information society based on money
is a contradiction in itself. Secondly, there is increasingly urgent debate
about whether universally programmable and therefore versatile digital
technologies are not making so much labor superfl uous, in all industries, that
social reproduction by means of wage labor, i.e. labor in exchange for money,
1
2 Society Aft er Money
is becoming problematic (these problems are discussed in the article by Peter
Fleissner1 ). Th ese obvious problems with monetary mediation (and older
problems relating to this) have repeatedly inspired imaginative self-
descriptions of society, especially in science fi ction, which envisage a post-
monetary future (see the chapter by Annette Schlemm).
Aft er the crisis of 2008, a vague unease about “the fi nancial system”
became widespread. Th e self- evident nature of monetary organization has
come to seem increasingly fragile—except to those who construct conspiracy
theories blaming the crisis on “greedy speculators.” In many respects, however,
it has been business as usual, and no broad or fundamental debate has even
begun (M irowski 2014 ). Th is is why we need to discuss, without foregone
conclusions, forms of organization and production that no longer use
money as their (central) medium (for the question of whether and how
money can be defi ned as a medium, see the trialogue between Lohoff , Pahl
and Schr ö ter; for the technological and institutional evolution of money,
which is possibly leading to a new change brought about by digital
technologies, see Aigner and Scholz-W ä ckerle). But why does money seem so
indispensable?
If we take the critical analysis by Ernst Lohoff (in this volume) as a starting
point, money mainly seems to be indispensable because the form of separate
private production appears as natural. Th at is, despite the obvious sociality
of humans, and the specifi c sociality of all production, even today (we need
raw materials from others, etc.), individual people and companies produce
on their own, and then, e x post , connect to one another on markets via
exchange. As Tobias Aufderheide-Kohl shows in this volume, the dominant
“neoclassical” school of economics (cf. Colander et al. 2004 ; cf. also Dobusch
and Kapeller 2012 ), against all historical and anthropological evidence,
regards this kind of facilitation of exchange as the reason for the emergence
of money. 2 Th e hypothesis here is that humans have always produced and
exchanged separately and privately—and money was only invented as a
practical aid. Of course, today’s highly complex market economy presupposes
the existence of money, and could probably not function without it—but
have people really always produced separately and privately (what about
guilds?), and does it have to stay this way forever, particularly at a time when
general interconnectedness is on everyone’s lips? Generally speaking, there
seem to be three ways in which money might conceivably be overcome:
1 See also the literature review in Schr öt er (forthcoming).
2 And children’s books on this topic drive the same false and ideologically motivated
notion into the heads of children, cf. Neiser and Butschkow ( 2000 ).
Introduction 3
(a) Finding ways in which exchange can function eff ectively without
money (and its unpleasant side eff ects), e.g. transmitting the relevant
information by other means, or (partially) delegating the coordination
to things, which have become smart themselves, and/or to artifi cial
intelligences. Th is seems to be the core of the concept proposed by
Stefan Heidenreich, a post- monetary economy based on algorithmic
matching (see text by Stefan Heidenreich).
(b) Replacing ex post with ex ante mediation, i.e. instead of everyone
producing for the market separately,3 the members of a society discuss
in advance what they need and want, and then produce and distribute
the corresponding products. Th is raises the whole issue of a plan-based
economy, though it does not necessarily imply central planning—a
model that now seems virtually indefensible from both theoretical and
historical standpoints (but for new approaches to central planning see
the chapter by Peter Fleissner). Today there are diverse concepts of
participatory economy, decentralized and distributed planning (for
Hayek’s theoretical critique of—mainly but not exclusively—central
planning, see the chapter by Jasmin Kath ö fer and Jens Schr ö ter in this
volume. Th is text off ers a critical discussion of whether Hayek’s
arguments are really still valid under current media conditions).
A key approach is the area of commoning and commons, which has
once again become the subject of intense discussion, especially since the
2009 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Elinor Ostrom ( 1990 ).
What is crucial here is the idea of replacing non- social production,
which is isolated and then coordinated via the movement of things
(monetary and commodity fl ows), with social production, which is
ultimately communicative (and therefore coordinated with media that
are alternatives to money), but not by means of state planning (it is no
accident that the subtitle of the German translation of Ostrom’s book
situates the commons “beyond market and state”). 4 Logically,
production of this kind would no longer require any markets or money,
because it does not involve exchange. People agree on what is to be
produced, divide up the work, make the products, and distribute them
according to the democratic decisions made at the outset. Commons
3 Of course even today eff orts are made to discover in advance, e.g. by market research,
whether the planned products are really needed. Interestingly, such advance planning is
already a step towards an ex ante mode of production.
4 Th ese discussions have been going on for many years—O’Neill ( 1996 ) recalled, for
example, the position of Otto von Neurath, who was already arguing in the 1920s that an
economy based on direct discussion of use value (without a general equivalent as a
standard of comparison) should be possible.