Comments by "Curious Crow" (@CuriousCrow-mp4cx) on "Then & Now"
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That's how dialectism works: Thesis>Antithesis>Synthesis and back to Thesis. It's the evolutionary and dynamic path of ideas. There are no absolute settled, universal truths, because we are limited in our capacity to perceive or interact with reality completely. This is why we we devised technologies that expanded our capacity. This is why Marx saw Capital as a dynamic and constantly evolving concept, that evolved through ideas and beliefs being constantly questioned. That's how Capitalism has survived and it's discontent too. Capitalism sees the intellect as a commodity and continuously strives to develop it and extract value from it. How? By encouraging it to be questioned and challenged. And the discontents find new ways to challenge capital's hegemony too. So all Ideas are dynamic and dialectical, and are the means by which we evolve our interactions with everything. But it's not challenging ideas for ideas sake. It's literally ensuring our survival. If we hadn't innovated over time, we would not have been as a successful species as we are. Indeed, where we are failing to innovate is where we are experiencing crises. For example, climate change is more a conflict of ideas, whilst the material impacts progress. Capital is driven by the Profit Motive, and Shareholder Primacy ensures capital has the means to impose its will, but it is still being challenged by scientists, and the increasing consciousness of the public that Climate Change is real. There will be a tipping point, but when depends on the public literally disabusing themselves of that notion that their current existence is settled and safe. Dialectics again. And the wisest of us knows that Change is the only constant. And when we submit to thar reality we increase our chances of survival individually and collectively. Why? Being challenged by change is how we evolve. And in my opinion, Marx wanted us to be far more open to such possibility.
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You need to read the review of the book "Money" by David McWilliams (2024) in the Financial Times. It explains why Monetary History ≠ the Economic History of Humanity. Quote:
"Money sits at the very core of human social and economic life. That is a boon to its historians, because it makes it of near-universal interest — but it also brings significant challenges. One is that money is so fundamental a part of our conceptual furniture that it is hard to get an objective view: misleading metaphors, conventional misunderstandings and the surreptitious special pleading of vested interests abound. Another is that any history of money must effectively also be a general economic history of humanity. In the wrong hands, the history of money can thus easily degenerate into a conceptually confused and unmanageably expansive mess.
McWilliams dodges these elephant traps. He establishes the Archimedean point of an accurate conceptual framework up front. Money, he explains in his introduction, is nothing more or less than a “wondrous technology” that “resides in our heads, representing value”, and which “humans invented to help us negotiate an increasingly complex and interrelated world.” He thus wastes no time on old canards such as the habit of confusing the tokens that have historically been used to represent money with money itself or the myth that money is a medium of exchange that emerges from barter. Instead, he identifies money clearly as a specific, but constantly evolving, collection of ideas and institutions — from numeracy and accounting through to coinage and the eurodollar market."
Money as a technology with supporting institutions, existed before Capitalism. Therefore, it doesn't belong in a history of Capitalism. It deserves a treatment all by itself especially as Finance and Banking, the Golden Calves of our age, are poorly understood by the public and that leads them to be especially vulnerable to the crises in this area. It will also better inform the understanding of evolutions like Cryptocurrency, and the opportunities and threats they represents. Keep on pursuing the knowledge though. More people need to understand money as a technology, a tool that can kill or cure.
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