lodradek: 2017

Como ele tem um sotaque um pouco forte, acho que algumas pessoas que se interessariam muito por isso podem ficar a ver navios. Fiz então uma transcrição provisória, que tem seus furos, os quais aliás esperam por contribuições.

provisional transcript: "What can I say? Thank you Scott, thank you Jordan, thank you everyone for the invitation for your presence, now this invitation and this lecture is more important to me than you think, because living amongst the econ - is a very peculiar tribe - one needs such escape hatchets (?), all my life I felt like a slipping spy behind enemy lines, leading a double life, or like an atheistic monk in some middle ages monastery. Now my partners and I (???), sometime ago, offered me a escape route

but nevertheless I still operate as an academic economist, which means that, during the day at least, I have to keep up the pretence of being an economist, and participating in narratives or talks pretending to be respectful towards them, so I don't need to do that today, and therefore I thank you for the opportunity.

Now you ask me to address you on modern money and its post-gold standard aesthetics, I thought I should begin by sharing with you my first memory on means of exchange and stores of value, this is the official definition of money in economics, means of exchange and stores of value.

ok, here's the first one, I was around six when I was given a chocolate bar which contained this card, and unbeknownst to me this was a very very rare card and there were other kids in school that collected them, suddenly I found myself with social power I had never experienced before, I was showered with love, compliments, party invitations, dozens of others cards with which to start my own collection. In the end I kept it, thinking the power it bestowed upon me would last forever, of course it didn't

years later I would come across karl marx's most poetic writings, which resonated with that experience, it was a little bit like understanding that money is like the number minus one, when you multiply it by other numbers you get the opposite:

money makes the ugly attractive, the lame mobile, the bad, honored, the dishonest, trustworthy, the stupid talented, the desirous, fullfiled; money turns incapacities into their contraries, it obliterates natural qualities and replaces them with social aspects, in his wonderful words, money is the alienated ability of mankind

gold gilded or made out of paper, plastic, or digital, (…) or backed by real assests, money operates like values ethereal alter ego, reflecting part of our energies which has turned posthuman, alien, beyond the pale (?)

for schopenhauer money confronts not just our needs, but need itself, and to the extent that schopenhauer was right about music, that it's a voice of the deepest reality possible, money in this sense is a little like history, it rhymes musically, it represents the best and the worst about our humanity, a little bit like wagner's operas

wallace stevens thought along schopenhauer lines that the sole truth about the human condition is its irredimable poverty, which can only be confronted by poetry, so perhaps then andy warhol is right, that money is poetry, since it can do something about alieviating poverty

my second memory of money has the stillness about it, a hard, hard edge. Soon after

the episode of inheriting the magic spell card, on the 21^st of april 1967, this happened, a coup d'etat turned greece into a quite sizeble concentration camp, members of parliament were tortured, this particular one was murdered soon after that, close family were in jail, but perhaps worst of all, we had this kind of aesthetic, to destroy our visual life, this is the dictators chosen symbol, a dessecration of a great myth, of the phoenix rising from its ashes, we had to endure that in our school textbooks, and also on our money.

I was struck as I kid that the army could change the face of our coins, the coins with which I bought chocolate bars, looking for another magic spell

(ops, will come to him in a minute)

during the seven years of this interminable dictatorship, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, and I was partly responsible for orchestrating the family's great operation of lying to her about her son, trying to convince her that he was on a very extended business tour, while he was languishing of death row as part of his the opposition to the dictatorship

during those long days and nights with grandmother, I remember we were watching some sitcom on a black and white click (?) telly, depicting these great rich families, and the feuds, and so on, and she turned around and said to me, I have a vivid recollection of that, she said, all the world's problems would have gone away, if money had an expiry date, if you were forced to spend any money you got within a week of getting it, then we could all start again on Monday

I asked her why she was saying that, awfully scornful of a grandmother who had been forced by life to leave school in year 3 of primary school, and she responded, if the rich were forced to spend all that money very quickly, they couldn't accumulate wealth, and there would be more for everybody to go around, now her proposal of sorts never ceased to bother me, if only because I was not sure as to why she was wrong

more recently, when I say more recently, I'm talking 2 weeks ago, I heard this man, that some of you may know him as the prince of darkness, larry summers, give a lecture, which actually was a pretty good lecture, this is a terrible thing of the year we live in, some of the worst people make the most sense, and he was actually arguing that during this crisis of ours, with zero interest rates not managing to shift the economy out of its torpor at the moment, perhaps the solution of this crisis, secular stagnation, as larry summers calls it, perhaps we need digital money, that will allow us to impose negative interest rates, in order to force the rich to spend, and then he added, if not that, at least a form of money that if you do not spend it into a certain period of time, it vanishes into thin air.

grandma, apologies

now, these are some greek coins, just as a background, but I'll come back to them in a minute.

my grandmother had a non-existing relationship with money, she lived outside the moneyed economy as a wife; during the nazI occupation there was no money, hyperinflation ensured the economy was demonetized, and after the war was over, she was a living granny, looked after by her kids, and minding her grandchildren, this is perhaps why she could afford to take an abstract look and preempt larry summers by many decades.

Let's follow her down that abstract path for a moment, shall we?

Now money is the most metaphysical of quantifiable economic variables, it falls somewhere in between facts and (knowns) the fact that for centuries it took a metallic form may not be coincidental, as metals are, at least that's how I understand them, the most metaphysical of materials, golds glimmer, weight, its imperviousness to rust, to the passage of time, has always made it impossible to us to treat it with disinterest, but it's not only gold that captures the imagination, rendering it a candidate for the transition from material to imaterial social power.

now my father is a metalurgist, and he used to bring home coins like this; as part of his research and his great love for iron in particular, he didn't care for gold that much, he alerted me to the magic effect that the discovery of how to harden iron had on the anciet greeks, and beyond, how turning a soft, useless metal, into a hard metal, simply by heating it up and immersing it in water, that was something that captured the imagination. He pointed out that Homer, in his Odissey, when he was trying to narrate in his most dramatic and epic way the blinding of Polythemus – cyclop – by Odisseus, he used the following words:

Odisseus plunged his spear into the cyclops sole eye as a blacksmith plunges a hatchet into cold water to temper it, for this is what gives strength to iron, and it makes a great hiss as he does so, and

Cyclops screams, even thus did the cyclop's eye hiss around the beam of olive wood,

the hot iron's hiss when plunged in water produces weapons of steel that won great wars, around that time it became fashionable to adorn Mycenean princesses with jewelry made of iron, not gold

In another passage, this time from the Ilyad, Homer refers to episodes when noble Trojans, caught by the Achean leaders pleaded for mercy, and offered for their release a ransom of gold, copper, and, more valuable, glittering iron, so it seems to me that iron being the modern technology of that time, that era's version of digital or binary alternatives to antiquated glimmering gold, was promoted as a more modern form of money, the form of money more in tune with modern technology of the era, and indeed more useful in oiling the cogs and wheels of society without throwing greed and discord into them.

By this what I mean is that, for instance, Licurgos, the king of Sparta, famously banned gold and silver coins from Sparta, and his argument was, well, his policy was to impose as the sole currency of Sparta, iron spits, they could be used to monetize the economy, that was his argument, and allow for society not only to be monetized, but not to be too impressed by the color, glimmer and beauty of its money, typical spartan, right?

Now historians, and this is no … a convention, divide human epoches in ages associated with particular materials, not all of them metallic, so we had the stone age, the paleolithic, the neolithic age, and then of course History properly begins with the Bronze Age. Suddenly as we move from stone to bronze, History gets moving, then we progress to the Iron Age, when History sped up considerably, it was not counted in the eons, but it was counted in the decades, it sped up further when iron harderned, the way we described, and we have the age of steel.

the middle ages was a lacuna, evidenced by the fact that it was not known in terms of some material

but in terms of middle

then we move to the age of steam with the first industrial revolution, and the age of the electron and electromagnetism that powered the second industrial revolution, a revolution that brought us the network corporation, the big banks and the first phase of financialization of course

but you have noticed all the absence of a golden age, there's an iron age, a bronze age, there's no golden age. Indeed the only golden age we ever had, at least in our collective imagination is the one that started after the death of the gold standard, after the second world war, the bretton woods era. Now we shouldn't of course miss the golden age, because as gore vidal once said, the problem with golden ages is that if you live in them, everything looks a little bit yellow. Setting this aside, seriously now, capitalism's golden age, the postwar period in which we had strong growth of incomes and massive reduction in inequality, this is a unique moment in human history, it happened under the dollar standard, now the dolar was linked to gold, but only theoretically, it was as if there was a spectre of gold hovering above our heads, hanging in mid air offering a false sense of security

then, on the 15^th of august, 1971, something major happened, John Connely, the Texan who had been in JFK's car on that fateful day in Dallas, and actually injured by the same bullet, that magic bullet that had a trajectory that only a magician could conjure up, by 1971 was the Treasury secretary of president nixon, and he convinced the president to put the gold spectre to rest, and to sever all links between money, dollars, and gold. What I love recounting, because this is an expression that I only found 2 or 3 weeks, as part of my research into a book I writing now, I heard from a real eye witness, or hear witness, or ear witness, that this is the expression that he used to convince nixon that he should sever the link between the dollar and gold: mister president he said, the connexion of the dollar with gold is killing us, it is allowing the French, the Germans and the

Japanese to deplete our gold and drive us into recession, we must screw these foreigners before they screw us. It was thus that the spectre of gold was put out to pasture once and for all, capitalism was to be fully and willfully desintegrated in the words of another conspirator during that time, somebody who was working with John Connely, this gentleman, Paul Volcker, who was later to become the chairman of the FED in 1978. Two weeks after this gentleman became chairman of the Fed, he explained what it was that the Americans were doing in the early 1970s, he said, this was in a speech he gave at the University of Warwick, 1978, verbatim

balancing the requirements of a stable internation system against the desirability of retaining freedom of action for national policy, the United States opted for the latter, a controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the United States for the 1990s (?)

It was around that time that europe became unhinged, this is my way of promoting my next book, which is called “Europe unhinged”, the European Union that was just like the German constitution and the Bundesbank, the Central Bank of Germany, the German FED, American inventions, I don't know if you know that, but the German Central bank was designed and put together by the United States, the European Union, which was also an American product, this is very un-European to say, that myth that it was not a European it doesn't make me particularly popular in Europe to say that, but I'm not very good at caring, erm, this EU which was being stabilized throughtout its existence by the US, as a result of this controled desintegration of the world economy went into a tailspin, and how did it try to react? By creating its own gold standard, in the middle of year (?), it's what you know as euro. Today and for the past few years Europe has been torn apart by this common currency, whose inspiration was gold, a fixed supply of money, hard money, Euro resembling, the Deutschmark resembling gold coins, now of course I promised myself I'm not going to give an economics lecture here, and so allow me to stick to the aesthetic presentation of the overlaying economic crisis.

so the symbolism has a great contribution to do to the understanding of the catharsis, free tragedy that is the eurozone at the moment. Now look at any euro note, see these bridges, and arches, and bridges and buildings? They don't exist, there's nothing real about them. A continent that is one of Humanity's civilization cradles, that has produced stupendous cathedrals, breathtaking bridges, splendid modernist buildings, has hesitated to depict any of them on our notes. It has instructed designers to come up with fictitious bridges, arches, and buildings. Why? Out of fear of discontent! And (…) and soft money. If the Italian barroque is depicted, the Germans might worry that the euro'd be devalued, considered to be associated somehow with Italian sloth and Mediterranean softness. If the Parthenon is featured, might this preclude or not preclude the EU from booting Greece out of the Eurozone? Imagine, Greece being thrown out of the eurozone, but the Parthenon being on these things (shows an eurobill). And then of course, if you preclude all Italian, Spanish and Greek architecture, as well as artifacts, then how can you have the Colonne cathedral on it? So the Union instructed designers to come up with stupid designs like this. I can think of no better metaphor for the remarkable turnaround that marks todays Europe. A continent that was for many years uniting under very different languages and cultures, today is being divided by a common currency. There is a delicious irony here. Now, those of you who are in art criticism understand everything about irony in this post-modern world of ours. Only this is much more costly in terms of human lives. I won't dwell on the euro now and its toxic impart to europeans, so let me go back to another kind of paradox.

Now, money is the great atomizer, we have read novels, watched movies where confederates, united until the moment they steal the money, then look at the color of gold, look at the greenbacks stashed together, and their conferacy breaks down, and start recriminations, and end up invariably in jail. We can go all the way back, again to Homer, because you may remember that Achyles, the great Achean hero spends most of the Ilyad striking, he was on strike, he was not participating in the Trojan war, because he was peeved (?) that his share of the initial loot was taken away by his king Agamenon. And yet money, despite its atomizing effects, despite the fact that it is a solvent of solidarity and collaboration, is like language, it's purely wittgensteinian, it is a collective achievement that is privately used and appropriated. It is like the anciet Greeks understood autonomy, not the artifact of individuals, but something that is produced collectively, never autonomously, exactly as wealth under capitalism.

In California, in the US, the world over. While the haves like to believe that their wealth is the product of their labour and ingenuity, and good fortune, like money and language, their wealth has been collectively produced but privately appropriated. Money, to sum up, is political, and any attempt to depoliticize it is even more political, indeed it is deeply conservative, and regressive, to harbour thoughts of apolitical money. But such is History's pension for irony, that it took one of the most horrificaly conservative and regressive politician to speak the truth on the political nature of money. Misses Thatcher. Here she is on the day when she was dismissed by her minions, who coalesced amongst themselves to overthrow her, feeling that she was wrong on the question of European monetary union, back to the euro, now. Her opposition to the euro back in 1990 was the main reason, not the only reason, that on this day she shed a couple of tears in the cabinet, she was forced against her will to resign, but then, thatcher being thatcher, she got into her rollsroyce, drove to the House of Commons, and delivered a speech on europe, which was already scheduled, and I think it will be fun to listen to a bit of it.

Thatcher:...

this was a warmer, because now she's going to be asked the question, will she, following her resignation, continue to oppose an independent central bank, and a single currency? And one on the opposite side interjects, as they do in the House of Commons, with a joke, “she will be the governor of the European Central Bank”, and listen to her answer:

Speaker; Representative

Thatcher: what a good idea! I hadn't thought of that. But if I were, there'd be no European Central Bank accountable to no one least of all to national parliaments, that kind of European Central Bank is no democracy (?) taking powers from every single parliament, and being able to have a single currency and a monetary policy and interest rates that takes all political power away from us, as my (…) honorable friend said (...) his first speech after the proposal of a single currency, a single currency is about the politics of Europe, it's about a federal Europe by the backdoor...

As someone who spent 11 years opposing Mrs. Thatcher, I have participated in more than 200 demonstrations against her, using her as my role model in speeches like this is another example of History's ironic twist.

Returning to the links between money and language for a moment, I hope you'll forgive me a sojourn (?) in ethymology. You ask for a Greek to give you a lecture? You'll suffer. Where do you go to look at ancient coins? You go to a numismatic museum. That word, numismatic, has the same ethymology as nous, mind, nomizo, which means, it's a verb, which means to think, to believe, noumenon, that which is thought of. The Greek word for coin is nomisma. And that resonates with Aristotle's idea, that money has value if we believe it does. Speaking of Aristotle, besides his deep appreciation of the importance of belief and imagination in supporting the value of money, he has something else to contribute to our distopian, post-2008 world: Aristotle's teleological philosophy led him to the conclusion that just like an arrow must have a target in order to be purposeful and meaningful, same with human activity, it must have a telos, an end, an objective, to be worthwhile, to be potentially virtuous. So boat building is a virtuous enterprise. Why? Because it has a telos, an end. And the end of course is when you launch the boat, and the boat eagerly slices through the waves in search of other teloses or teli. Of course, boat builders need money, in order to build the boat, so if money making remains a means to an end, to Aristotle it's fine. But the moment one begins to make money for the purpose of making money, once it becomes a means to itself, money making is no longer a virtuous activity. When is enough enough? Never, there can be no telos to money making. Then the human is condemned to resemble a guinea pig on a threadmill, forever going faster and going nowhere. The opposite of eudaimonia, of a successful life, because in that sense that there is in ancient Greek, in the Greek mindset, something dangerous about money, money is essential and at the same time, something to be guarded against. The myth of Midas tries to tell us exactly the same idea, that if everything you touch turns to gold, soon enough you'll have a very awful death. Led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven is also a very good modern version of this tale that has given me a lot of pleasure over the years.

But back to Aristotle, the idea of money breeding money is disconcerting to him, for it resembles a Frankensteinian like-sentient being, capable of self-guided reproduction. Money begetting money was not something to be celebrated for Aristotle.

On another ethymological note, beget in Greek is known as toketos, interest, as in interest rates, is tokos, and interest rate is epitokio. so this fear of money begetting money, of tokos, became a loathing for interest-bearing loans that today we associate with Islam but, as we know, up until fairly recently in the peace (?), was also part, as Shakespeare's Shylock reminds us, of the Christian tradition, until Protestantism changed all that through predestination, throught the elevation of accumulation to the Pantheon of Christian virtues. Another manifestation of that is the transition from Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, who in the end gets its comeuppance, has to forfeit his soul to Mefistofeles, to Dr. Faust by Goethe, Goethe allows Dr Faust to get away with it. What was there in between Dr. Marlowe and Goethe? The transition whereby interest, toketos, tokos, money begetting money becomes mainstream.

Returning one more time to Aristotle and the anciet Athenians, one might wonder what he might have answered to the question, ok so what do you do with the bankers? A question that is prominent in our minds, has been for a while, and should remain there. How should finance be restrained? If money making money makes for a problem. The answer could not be more concret than it was in ancient Athens. Again I owe this to my father, it's something I didn't know. Did you know that bankers in ancient Athens were all exclusively slaves? As were the official testers of quality, the quality of wine, the quality of coins, whether they had been counterfeited or not? Why were they slaves? Because the city of Athens did not have the right to flog citizens, but it did have the right to flog slaves. so bankers were slaves exclusively so that they could be flogged if they attempted to go too far. If only president Obama knew this anciet Greek story I trust that the (dod frank) and the Volcker rule bills might have looked a little bit more different, possibly have a little bit more bite.

My last sojourn into ethymology has to do with the Greek word for money, which is chrema. Now, you all know google's chrome, that chr has exactly the same ethymology, chrome comes from chroma, color, this is where google gets it from, but it has a number of varieties, chreos means two things in anciet Greek, it means debt and it means duty, chresI is use and utility, chroma is color, and chrema is money. so the words for debt and money are very highly correlated in ancient Greek ethymology and this is something that our friends from the modern money theory network, I'm not sure they know it, I'd have to inform them, but they would love it. Speaking of these ethymological, not coincidences, but connections, perhaps those of you who worry, not worry, ask the pertinent question, why is Germany so terribly despondent about the idea of debt? I remind you that the same word in German for debt, Schuld, is also the same word for sin.

Ok, going back to the nmt (??) story, and to this connection between debt and money. Archeological research has shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, I believe, that the first instance of money comes from Mesopotamia. And it took the form of a ledger of debt, in particular following the agricultural revolution and the fact that farming is a collective process, at least when it comes to warehousing wheat or corn, they had to have a ledger, where they would write down that Mr. Marmud, or Armud, I don't know what the Mesopotamian names were back then, is owed so many bails of wheat. And these were written on stone, shells, and these shells, after a while, became means of exchange. so the fact that you were owed something of value, a real asset, like wheat, creates this (…) debt obligation into a monetary unit. What is even more fascinating is the evidence that the first coins to be used were not minted, at least a 150 years after they were used, which is a very interesting intertemporal substitution (into it?). What I mean by this is this: there were (??) be receipts, or even on shells, that you were owed one metallic coin for the wheat that you had stored in the collective warehouse, and that was a kind of claim you had on a coin. It now turns out that these coins were never minted, they were minted 150 years later, so the connection between metal, the imaginary debt, time, and real production comes homes immediately when we start contemplating this.

Now, what was it that truly characterized the transition from feudalism to capitalism? And course there are a myriad different answers to this question, but let me give you my abstract answer very briefly: it was a reversal of the chain of causality, between debt, production and distribution. In the era of Homer, or in the era of feudalism, peasants worked, or slaves worked, or freemen worked, or women, there was production, there was a harvest, so production came first, then came distribution. The sheriff would come on behalf of the lord and pick up the lord's lion share. That's distribution. And finally the lord would sell what he couldn't eat, his family couldn't eat, his servants didn't need in order to be nourished to rudimentary markets nearby, further afield, collect the surplus in monetary terms, and lend it out, act as a loan truck?, so debt came last. so you had production, distribution, debt.

With the enclosures, in Britain, which gave rise to the commercialization of land and labour, to rise of capitalism in other words, what happend then? Suddenly, the peasants that had been thrown off the land, that had been evicted from the land, were given the opportunity, well, some of them, a very small number of them, to become quasi-enterpreneurs, to come back to the land, to rent the land out from the lord, pay the lord rent, but of course they didn't have any money to the lord, so they would have to borrow from the lord, so debt comes first, then they would have to hire other workers, ex-peasants, starving like them, in order to do the actual work. That's distribution, so we have a complete reversal, whereas he had production, distribution, debt, now we have debt, distribution, and production comes last. Add to that mix the steam engine and add further the idea of a banker, a loan shark, a lord, somebody who in the ends becomes a financier, who does what? In order to support this mode of production which begins with debt, what you need to do as a financier is you need to extend loans presently, far in advance of the money that you have in your pocket or in some chest. So how do you do that? You just create it, (…) then I owe you, which then can be used by the ex-peasant to buy supplies or hire labour, and that becomes money. so in a sense, the banker, the financier, it is as if he's standing in front of the membrane that represents the timeline and puts his right arm (I say right, not left) through that membrane, and grabs value that has not been produced yet, from the future, just like those coins that had not been minted before, and brings it to the present, uses it in order to activate the production process, hoping that the production process will create enough value so the future can be replenished, can be repaid with interest, with tokos. That for me was the fundamental, profound transformation that brought about capitalism, with all its capacity to unleash productive power and to create mountains of wealth and mountains of poverty, side by side, in this dialectical contradiction that capitalism is made of.

Now, John Law was a figure from the 18^th century, who rose up in the French government very fast and furiously, and managed to convince the French government, I think that the (?) royal family, that he could push foward into the future the whole of French public debt, which was huge, because of the wars that the kings back then used to persecute on the base of debt, a form of this kind of temporal substitution that modern monetary theory is concentrated on writing about. For a while it worked, but the more sucessful he was, the more eager he became to do more of it. And indeed it's true, if credit is imaginary, why not imagine a great deal of it? so the point i'm making is something real must underpin this process, the intertemporal substitution that the right arm of the financier, that goes into the future and brings value into the present, why do we have crisis one after the other, because bankers overdo it, and the present cannot produce the value that the future demands, and then we have a crash. And then what happens? The power that be, the bankers and the States conspire to ensure that the little people who never borrowed are the ones to fully pay. And that was the case in the 18^th century, in the 19^th century, and in 2008, and in 2014.

but what is it really that value is all about? Because if money needs real value to be backed up, at least at some point, what is that real value? It can't be gold, because gold means nothing, there may be (?) of gold in Mars, but it's completely and utterly valueless. Now, at this point I have to bring in the Matrix, because the Matrix is the best way to make this point I'm trying to make. It is only human labour that creates value. If you watch the movie, the world looks like a mechanical clock, or actually, not so much a mechanical clock, a digital clock, or a digital watch. You have different kinds of machines, that have taken over the planet, they function like an organized political economy, they have division of labour, they produce a lot of stuff, they've populated the planet, they keep reproducing and improving themselves, so they have research departments where robots improve other robots and fix robots that are faulty, and humans remain on this planet as batteries, as sources of energy plugged into the system, this distopian view. Now there is > why it is analitically very important, the Matrix has been used .... aesthetically, in many ways, but why I think that from a political point of view it is a central movie? It is because it speaks to the question of what is it that creates value? Does it make sense to speak of value in that machine economy? I don't think so, it's like looking inside your watch and trying to find a value system. If you are an engineer you don't need a concept of value, you have the concept of function, you know which part of the machine is doing, so when they colaborate with one another, the watch produces time. But The concept of value is superfluous, it's excess to requirements. Similarly in that society where you have machines, there's absolutely no need to discuss in terms of value, you only need an engineer to tell you how this roboticized economy works, even the humans in it, because they have no will power, they have no consciousness, they have no capacity through critical judgement to make any difference to this world, they are just, they can be thought of as the battery that keeps your watch working.

so , if human labour, and human ingenuity, and this mistery that is the human spirit is what creates value, we have a very interesting way of reunderstanding, of rethinking capitalism. Which is of course not (?), it's Karl Marx, I'm sorry , but that the way it is. Because what was Marx's point? Marx's point was that the firm, the enterprise, the corporation is the last oasis from markets, when you're inside a corporation, there's no market. You may have a complete triumph of capitalism and the markets, everything would have been commodified, including, you know, women's wombs, the stars, dna, but you cannot commodify what happens inside the corporation. What happens inside the corporation is a power network, a social relationship, and if you don't have that social relationship then you end up with Matrix, which means a lot of function, no value, no possibility of profit. so you have this epic drama, that Marx captured quite brilliantly, that on the one hand employers having inexorable pressure placed upon them to turn us into androids, but if they do, then no value is produced and they go bankrupt. And that is an explanation of both why money goes through (>>>) tribulations in term of the fluctuation of its value, of why debts lead to crisis, there is no such process in a matrix-like economy, and why we in the end both capitalists and proletarians, dispossed people sleeping on the street, and intellectuals who are at Berkeley University discussing all these matters, without worrying how they would produce surplus value for themselves or for anybody else, why we're all caught up in this epic drama, which fluctuates, which is uncertain, except in that it produces increasing degrees of misery, and increasing degrees of wealth, invents beatiful gadgets and new forms of deprivation constantly.

so the question of course is what makes us human, and this is the question that has been answered very nicely in this movie, so I don't need to say anything beyond that. so the question is are we going to end up as a Matrix, simulacrum, or something closer to Startrek? I don't know if you've ever noticed, there is nothing like money in Startrek, in Bladerunner there's money, there are corporations, the struggle for defining what constitutes a human, which is the essence of Bladerunner, goes hand in hand with money, corporate power and exploitation. Here, there-s no money, this is perfect comunism, nobody works, there's a hole in the wall that produces anything you want, right? There's no employment contract between anyone and anyone, so what do they do? They just explore the universe, and try to work out their relation with the clingons. Well, that wasnt bad for 1967, compared with todays television.

So just to bring this to a close, Frederick von Hayek is a radical voice on precisely the opposite side of this spectrum to me, and to be (…) to me and I think to some of you too. But he is a radical voice nevertheless, speaking of money in 1972, a year after Connely killed off the the gold dollar relationship, Hayek published an article in which having understood that gold is finished, he had to come up with an alternative phantasy of apolitical money, and in that article he argued against fiat (??) money, against government money, he argued in favor of private money. And what was his idea? That everybody should be able to issue currency, different currencies issued by you, me, the UCLA, the Bank of America, Apple, whoever wants to issue currency, let those currencies compete against each other and the good currency, sound money is going to win, that way you maintain the notion that you can have apolitical money, market-determined money, but you decouple it from the idea that you tie money to gold and this is how you maintain it apolitical. Unbeknownst to him, and in a way that he not appreciate it, he would not have appreciated, it was very prophetic. By the late 1990s we had private money, it was called CDOs, and CDOs (?), and ABSs all those toxic derivatives that Wall Street was producing. What were those derivatives? They were means of exchange and stores of value that Lemann Brothers and JB Morgan and GoldmannSachs were producing and procuring without any regulation and still that money reached 750bI dolars inside the West's banks, and it was the money that burned out in 2008. And of course Main Street had to bail them out.

Now more recently there was another phantasy, post-modern phantasy regarding the form of money. Have you noticed that – now you all know bitcoin, you don't need me to introduce bitcoin to you – now bitcoin was celebrated for being imaterial, for being digital, for being a string of numbers. And yet every article, every depiction depicted it in the context of silver and gold. I think this should concentrate our minds, I'm not going to explain why this is a dangerous phantasy, except to say that this is a dangerous phantasy because all notions, as Thatcher so poignantly put it, of apolitical money hide a highly political, regressive, antidemocratic dictatorial agenda behind them. This one is not dictatorial, this is just a PonzI scheme. However, I spent quite a few months, almost a year, studying the spontaneously emerging currencies inside videogame communities, when I worked for (>) corporation in Seattle, back in 2012. it was absolutely fascinating. These were not PonzI schemes, these were real currencies, that allowed almost 200 thousand people to make a decent living by playing these games and producing new designs of currency-like items for these videogames communities. When you had 14 year-old boys, mostly boys, in China, in (?), in Kansas City, in Ucraine, in Russia, making 80 thousand dolars a year, of real dollars, not bitcoins, out of this activity, then you realise that what you have here is real currencies, what you have here is real economies. When I say real we have to be circumspect about it. Even though they operated exactly like one would expect of a market-based capitalist economy, if one is particularly unschooled as to what capitalism is, if you look more closely, these economies were not capitalist. They were market-based, but they were not capitalist. Why weren't they capitalist? What's the difference between a market-based economy and capitalism? I think i've already explained it. There was no labour contract involved in there, everybody was a businessman or woman or himself, or herself. There was no employment contract. In these videogame communities nobody works for anybody else, if you are producing a digital item of value, then what happens is that it gets sold and you make money, but you are never depedent of the willingness of another to give you the capacity to ick out (?) a modest existence through operating with capital goods that your employer owns, while your employer extracts surplus value from you.

so in a sense these videogame communities, even though they are extremetly sofisticated, I'm talking about hundreds of millions of people playing and creating billions worth of real dollars of value, in the form of digital currencies that evolve spontaneously as highly (>>>) to evolve, and yet, this is a parallel universe. To the extent that it did not create the dialectics of the labour relationship, it was never a real capitalist economy, and it can never be one. It will always be in a state of atrophy, attached to the real capitalist economy. Now, this is not new either! During the 2^nd WW, in prisioner camps, very interesting market economies operated, in which usually cigarettes played the role of currencies, of money. And what did they have in common with these videogame economies? The lack of labour markets. so prisioners of war would receive from the Red Cross a box, every 2^nd week or so, containing a bit of chocolate, a bit of tea, a can of tuna, some cigarettes, of course, and they would trade with one another, and they would trade very vigorously, a very complex economy, like the videogame economies, but you wouldn't have a prisioner of war working for another, and this is what prevented these post-modern, or pre-modern, or wartime economies, market economies, from emulating capitalism. so in a sense all this talk about bitcoin and videogame communities having surpassed the limit of imagination of all these like me, boils down to this (collective vintage card), because this, which is where I started from was a similar economy, little cards that kids wanted, exchanged with one another, and some of these cards like magical dispell turning out to be the currency. To round off, drawing to a close, the elephant in the room, that was my talk here today for the most part of its part, is perhaps the greates factor in determining the role of modern money. The extractive power exercised by elite on non-elite groups while at the same time shrouding social power in a veil of obfuscation. Money in its many various forms plays a gigantic role in this process, and none more so that the phantasy that it can be apolitical. For as long as this continues, money will remain a rather blunt instrument, a primitive tool in the service of maintaining a primitive social order, that constantly spells (?) crises, deepens discontent, and champions inequality. In juxtaposition, a more sophisticated tool, as humans is the capacity critically to reflect on the norms that supposedly ought to govern our behaviour. And this entails the capacity to question the value of money and the values of those who are besotted with it. Thank you."

lodradek

Monday, December 18, 2017

18/12/2017

Friday, November 24, 2017

Diário de leitura: Iain Levison, Tribulations d'un précaire

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Coup de coeur: Paul Jacoulet

Privação, falta, abstinência de sono

Sunday, July 9, 2017

Diário de leitura: How the rich get richer

Monday, June 26, 2017

Primavera

Sunday, June 25, 2017

Um momento da primavera

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

The Lumineers live at Columbia City Theatre

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Vídeo teaser: O fim de um ciclo

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

"The nature of money", Yanis Varoufakis + transcript

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Deglutição