I will talk today about people, machines, and money (YouTube in five parts). This, in a reduced form, is the project that I take from Marx. He found that under Victorian capitalism, working people were tied to machines in the new factories and subordinated to the power of big money. He and Engels thought that this order of social organization—giving priority to money which bought the machines and thereby controlled the workers—ought to be reversed. In a broad sense, this is my political project and my writing project too. My lecture has three sections: first on machines, then on money and finally on the emergent world society that humanity is now making.
Part 1. Machines
Ten years ago, I left Cambridge University to live in Paris where I hoped to be a writer. That led to a second question, What would I write about? I had the opportunity to reinvent myself, so I then asked, What would people in future be interested in us for? I decided that we would be considered distinctive for the rapid and radical steps that humanity was taking now to form a single interactive social network whose active symbol is the internet. To answer this question, we need to ask, What is our moment in history? I would claim that in the last two decades we have been making a world society for the first time.
This is based on three developments. The first was the collapse of the Soviet Union opening the world economy to neoliberal capitalism. The second was China’s and India’s entry into globalization as major players with their two billion people. The third, of course, was the internet going public—all three in the early 1990s. Taken together, these have transformed what was an incipient process over a longer period into something that future generations will be interested in us for. I believe that our responses to this situation, ignorant and incompetent as we may be, will have far-reaching consequences for the future. It is worthwhile trying to consider that issue.
More generally, I would argue that the whole period since the Second World War has seen an accelerating unification of human social life on this planet. This was dramatically symbolized in the 1960s when we saw the world from the outside for the first time because of the space race. Our historical specificity is closely tied to our place in the machine revolution. This revolution is only two centuries old, no more than eight generations. Before then almost all the energy at our disposal came from living sources—human beings themselves, animals, and plants. Since then, we have come to rely on machines as converters of inanimate energy, mainly fossil fuels.
In that time, the world’s population has gone from one billion people to seven billion. The proportion of people living in cities went from under three percent to roughly a half now. Energy production and consumption since the 1850s has increased on average at three percent a year. Accelerated technological development can be understood in terms of three complexes. I want to examine these in some detail because it helps us to think about where we currently stand in the machine revolution.
The first, of course, was steam power. We need to identify the dates that mark how it evolved. Newcomen’s engine extracting water from mines was invented in 1712. In 1776 Boulton and Watt posted the patent that made steam engines suitable for factory use. The industrial revolution took off after the Napoleonic wars ended in the 1820s. But it took until the 1860s for Marx in Capital to be the first political economist to notice that machines played an important part in capitalist development. This took about 150 years.
If we trace the origins and development of the machine revolution’s second stage, electricity, Faraday made it experimentally in the 1830s; Edison managed to convert electricity for widespread social use in the 1880s; but it was only in the 1930s that most factories used electricity and 80 percent of American homes subsisted on it. Intellectual recognition of the potential for society of this development had to wait until after the Second World War, through cybernetics and systems theory in the 1950s—again more than a century in all.
Our stage in the machine revolution is digital—the conversion of telephones, television, and computers into a single system of communications. The phone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876; for a long time, it was thought that it would only have limited elite application. By now personal smartphones have saturated society; and even in Africa, which largely missed out on the first two stages, there are developments in East Africa that are unique in the world—the first multi-national telephone network, and popular use of phones to transfer money has been pioneered there too. Now, in the advanced capitalist countries, if you want to get as close as possible to a representative survey sample, you must make it by phone.
Television was invented in the 1920s; it only became a significant part of national society in the 1950s; video was invented in the 1970s and streaming TV from 2000. ENIAC, the first digital computer, was built in 1946 and it filled a room. Several of the basic technological breakthroughs on which our stage of the machine revolution depends were discovered in the Second World War—radar, the transistor and operations research. The internet went public in 1991 and Tim Berners-Lee’s 1989 invention, the World Wide Web, went online in 1993. When we compare the digital revolution with those of the steam engine and electricity—which became a social force with wide application in the 1820s and 1880s respectively—we could be looking at a half-century or more when fuller application of digital technologies will become more obvious. Only then may theories accounting for their evolution emerge.
I like to compare the internet with the evolution of iron in the Eastern Mediterranean (1600-500 BCE). The internet started out as an elite military, bureaucratic and academic exercise for several decades before it became the global marketplace that it is today. Iron was at first used by palace elites as personal ornaments, then a few hundred years later as weapons used for military expansion by groups such as the Assyrians. Several centuries after that iron—the most commonplace, robust, and malleable metal on earth—found its true social use as tools for farming and manufacturing by ordinary people. By looking at these analogous technological developments, I try to place what seems to me to be a momentous period in human history.
What is our moment in history? A lot depends on how far advanced or backward we think we are. I think of us as something like primitive digging-stick operators scratching the ground on their way to inventing agriculture 10,000 years ago. They had no notion of what they were doing, and even less that it would end up as Chinese and west European agrarian civilizations. That I believe is our position now. It would pay us to be humble about what we can do. Nevertheless, what we do will have far-reaching consequences for humanity. I believe, therefore, that the formation of a new socially interactive digital communications network at the global level is comparable in human history to the invention of agriculture and will have ramifying consequences.
We can see all around us the explosion of new forms of markets and money, virtual reality, and what is usually described as “globalization”, all taking place together and feeding into each other at a remarkable pace. I do not claim that this is the first time globalization has occurred. The experience of the world coming closer together was palpable around 1800 and 1900 too. But our time is distinctive in having discovered universal means of communication for the dissemination of universal ideas. The world has not been short of universal ideas before, but it has lacked universal means of expressing and sharing them.
In the late 1990s, when I came up with this rationale for what is now my main project, many people—my academic colleagues in particular—told me, “How can you focus on the internet? It is for a small elite; the mass of humanity is excluded from it. The world is a terribly unequal place; 85 percent of its people never come close to using the internet. Isn’t it your responsibility as a concerned academic to study them or at least consider them?” My preference to study its initial application was based on assuming that this new development had wide implications for human evolution, and I could not or would not make studying the digital divide my main preoccupation. Even so, I felt guilty enough about this complaint from colleagues to make my book The Memory Bank’s subtitle “Money in an unequal world”.
My real interest is in, How can the social use of these new technologies be made more democratic? The engine driving them is usually called “capitalism.” Whatever its origins, the world including the founders of Marxism, could manage without this term until Werner Sombart invented it in 1902. The word may now be past its sell-by date, since it refers to so many social phenomena, while different camps are still fixed on their own versions of what it refers to. But it will probably be for some time important for us to ask, Where in the history of capitalism do we think we are now?
Marxists and others talk of “late capitalism”, as if it were about to self-destruct. This is wishful thinking; it may even be racist, since capital accumulation is becoming global for the first time now. Countries like Brazil, Russia, India, and China are now threatening western dominance of capitalism. I suspect that capitalism is not yet on its last legs, and this should affect how we imagine the political possibilities of our moment in history. In any case, its historical mission to bring cheap commodities to the masses and break down the insularity of traditional rural communities still has a way to go. The issue of what I would write about became, How are the forms of money and markets changing in the context of the digital revolution in communications?
Part 2. Money
This part will probably be even more speculative than the first. I have written half a dozen articles on money in the last two years, and it is hard for me to figure out what the big picture is, scattered between all these little essays.
Ours is an “age of money”. This idea of a period transitional between two other stages of human history was shared by John Locke and Karl Marx, who took it from him without acknowledgment. As the prophet of a nineteenth-century proletarian revolution, he could hardly trace his own intellectual genealogy to the father of the eighteenth century’s middle-class revolution. Both postulated an earlier phase of human history based on the land or a “state of nature” which then gave rise to the age of money, our own. This is temporary because contradictory, but in some ways progressive. They both laid out a vision of future society that would make good the injustices of the previous inequality. They called it a “commonwealth”, “civil government” or “communism”; G.W.F. Hegel called it the “modern state”, successor to “civil society” (bürgerliche Gesellschaft, urban capitalism).
This is a reasonable way of initially framing human history. But money in capitalist societies is still a mystery—not taught in schools and avoided as a general social phenomenon in public discourse. We are assailed by millions of trivial facts; but if you ask where in formal education or the media we will find an explanation of what money is, where it comes from, and why it is so important in our societies, you will be disappointed. Most people suppose that it is issued by the government, and that the banks have something to do with how we get it. What they do not grasp is that money is also made by each of us whenever we sign a loan contract, which then, especially though issuing credit, becomes a basis for onward lending and diverse forms of financial transaction.
I would argue—drawing on Émile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in a way that he did not articulate—that money is the religion of capitalist society. Durkheim argued that the main function of religion is to connect aspects of everyday life that we know quite well with larger forces we don’t understand that shape our experience of society. This is my approach to money too.
Capitalist societies have created two interdependent spheres of economy. One is based on money and takes the form of the “market”, where adult family members work to acquire it. The other is “home”, where most people live in small-scale unpaid intimacy. The two sides are connected as impersonal and personal spheres of social life. It is hard for most of us, including schoolchildren, to move daily between the two; but this oscillation is made easier by money playing a role in domestic life as well as in the market outside. Money therefore is the bridge between impersonal and personal aspects of society, but it also generates profound social divisions. Money is therefore both the source of our feeling vulnerable to implacable unknown forces and the means of making society more personally meaningful.
I believe that money’s main function is to link intimate and local circumstances to more inclusive, even universal social forms. If you have some money, however little, there is no limit to what you can do with it. But when you use it to buy something in particular, you close off that possibility. Money’s chief property is thus its ability to move fluently between an infinite range of social action and meeting our finite desires and obligations in everyday life.
I have written in The Memory Bank and elsewhere about how one of money’s main functions is remembering. It is a significant method for keeping track of realtionships that we wish to calculate when participating in networks and society at large. Money is a store of social memory. The word comes from Juno Moneta, the Roman goddess of memory and mother of the Muses—custodians of the arts of civilization—whose temple was the mint. Its geese once warned the Latins against an invading army of Gauls. The word monere means both to remind and to warn. Money is not just an impersonal and social instrument, but also a source of personal and shared meaning. James Buchan wrote a very nice book, Frozen Desire, where he claims that money allows us to freeze some of our many desires for a moment by entering transactions capable of realising them.
Sociologists and anthropologists have long observed that money—supposedly an impersonal phenomenon—is in fact used by people as a means of social reproduction in their everyday lives. Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, in their fine collection of anthropological essays, Money and the Morality of Exchange, make this very clear for a range of non-capitalist societies. The sociologist Viviana Zelizer’s The Social Meaning of Money is the locus classicus for showing that people take something impersonal like the dollar and “earmark” it in separate compartments of their family budget for food provisioning, presents, holidays, religious festivals, and other uses.
If we care care about what people really do, think and want, we should show how they concretely behave, especially since the discipline of economics represents money just as an abstract and impersonal medium of exchange. We need to know that people have their own ways of making money count for their own purposes in society. But we also should face up to the challenge of investigating the more inclusive scales of economic activity that economists have made their own.
My aim is for economic anthropology to be first pragmatic. This means helping ordinary people to feel more at home in what they do with money and what money does to them. It should address not only those levels of intimacy and local association with which ethnographers are more familiar, but also the remote social forces that impinge on people’s lives, sometimes disastrously.
I therefore look at how money is created and used in several different settings. Once we break with the idea of national currency as having a monopoly of our monetary relations with society, we might envisage a world with as many kinds of money as levels of community from the local to the global.
I have studied community currencies with is in mind—alternative ways of making money by yourself for use in independent trading circuits. The are limited in scope and usually fail, mainly because they restrict exchange to a closed local circuit. This denies money’s main social function to bridge the gap between local and global dimensions of human experience. As Michael Linton, the inventor of Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) taught me, these could in future be organized in wider online networks through an interactive multi-domain platform. The banks could perform this service easily, but they see these new instruments as a threat to their monopoly of money. Perhaps they are. Participants are exposed to learning that “normal” economic life is not inevitable [just as we all were during Covid-19 lockdowns].
I look at how the internet has affected personal credit. Another phase of world trade has focused on a single commodity—now information transfers—that has been radically cheapened. This has positive and negative consequences for information services to much faster and more reliable. The content of financial transactions that were previously impersonal—because it was impossible to communicate personal information at a distance—is becoming much more personal. This is a huge topic that stands at the center of my work, summarized only briefly here. See The Hitman’s Dilemma: Or Business Personal and Impersonal.
I also study global financial markets as a participant observer, building on experience of betting on horses during my youth. I now invest my savings in stock markets and commodities (mostly precious metals and energy), since cash has long erned almost no interest at all. I learn more from risking my own money in world markets than from anything I read.
In the mid-1970s, almost all international money payments were for goods and services; but today most international money transfers buy money in some other form. Foreign exchange, the largest sector, has a daily turnover of $6 trillion; try regulating that. This lawless circulation of money instruments vastly exceeds not only national budgets, but also production for the home market and international trade. Detachment of money from politics, law and production is the core problem that I want to investigate and help to remedy.
An explosion of money derivatives was launched by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 1972, after Nixon took the dollar off gold in the previous year. The postwar Bretton-Woods fixed exchange-rate system collapsed, leading to a free-for-all in foreign currency markets. The CME responded immediately to the uncertain profits of Midwestern farmers selling pork bellies to German supermarkets for payment months later. Dollar-deutschmark exchange-rate futures were the pioneering result for an exploding derivatives market. I later conducted a fieldwork course for University of Chicago anthropology graduate students there.
I would like my research and writing to help people understand how a mortgage taken out in Newcastle, England links them to bad debts in California. Paul Jorion, a Belgian social anthropologist, is an executive vice-president of Countrywide, the largest American mortgage bank based in California. He is about to go down with his bank, I expect; but he published a book in January 2007, The Coming Crisis of American Capitalism, that is in for a prize awarded by the French Senate. Anthropologists and other social disciplines must help people to understand the world in ways that are more practically useful to them. It is undemocratic for the rest of us to leave the public to be mystified by economic experts whose gobbledygook substitutes for real knowledge.
To sum up this section, there are two great means of human communication: language that we have studied comparatively at length; but as money that we still fail to recognize as a distinctive form of social communication, thinking of it rather as just numbers on bills. This is because many people demonize it. Anthropologists have presented an extraordinarily simplified and homogeneous picture of money around the world. We all know what happens when capitalism comes to town: local cultures are destroyed, money goes up to the top of society and never comes back. There are no surprises in this story. Our complicity in the popular demonization of money is because we don’t have enough of it and resent the fact that people who have much more of it run our societies.
Society today has taken on new forms largely because of a revolution in digital communications. Money is part of, feeds into, and benefits from it. It does not get rid of inequality; in fact, our societies are becoming much more unequal. But Humanity must discover more egalitarian and democratic uses of money; and for that we need to understand it. We cannot afford to neglect money’s potential for universal connection, while also prioitizing its role as a source of social inequality.
Part 3. A world society for all humanity
In this final short section, I will talk about the people, and that for me means anthropology. People enter this lecture’s analysis in two senses; first, faced with the impersonal, dehumanized version of society preferred by economists, the other social disciplines must show that economy consists of real people’s actions and thinking in forms of knowledge that are accessible to them. Economic anthropology must also be concerned with all humanity at some level
The emergence of world society—I have demonstrates this hypothesis here—opens the prospect of identifying a new human universal. Universals have until now been imposed on the world by western powers at the expense of local cultural particulars—catholic religion, white racism and bourgeois economics. Particiaption in world society as human beings is first realised through cultural particulars and by extension impersonal social forms. I conceive of the new human universal not an idea, but as the fact that living together on this planet requires all humanity to be aware of our shared existence, and to think about developing new forms of association in the general human interest, since most of our current institutions do not.
My aproach draws inspiration from great literature. Its writers—and the traditional humanities, but not as currently taught—speak to us universally when they go deeply into personalities, places, relations, and events. Ethnography at its best has some affinity with this approach. Anthropologists did make the move a century ago to join the people where they live and bring that experience concretely into general discussions of society and culture. Some anthropologists could now build creatively on this precedent and contribute to a conversation about the new human universal, world society.
This means returning to the humanist philosophy of the eighteenth century, especially to its culmination in Immanuel Kant’s work. I do not see this as reforming the academic discipline called anthropology. It would be unlikely to succeed, given the narrow and local choices that most academic anthropologists still make. I envisage rather an interdisciplinary project bringing historians, heterodox economists, philosophers, literature specialists, sociologists and some anthropologists together in the study of all humanity— an intellectual strategy analogous to development studies in the last half century which offered some specialists an opportinity to pool their knowledge for pressing social purposes.
Such an interdisiplinary project’s principal aim would be to heal the rupture between the fragmented studies of society that are typical of so-called “modern” socieites. The last century’s experiment in impersonal society—by privileging states, capitalist markets and scientific experts—overwhelmed ordinary people’s ability to engage with the world they live in. We must scale the world down and the self up to connect life’s extremes meaningfully. Religion once helped many to do this and still does, but fiction meets the same purpose today. A stage, screen or paperback reduces history to a form and scale that we can enter subjectively on our own terms without supervision. M.K. Gandhi’s development of personal politics along these lines, along with the other main anti-colonial intellectuals is the best example of this approach I know .
Perhaps a branch of knowledge drawing on anthropology’s history could help students and the public to develop a moral picture of the world with themselves in it. Everyone might build their own project of lifelong self-learning to develop personal engagement with the world as it is and might become. Consider what anthropology has been so far. In the eighteenth century, it was revolutionary humanist philosophy, in the nineteenth evolutionary world history and in the twentieth, as we all know, predominantly ethnography.
Historical conditions, as they unfold in this coming century, will require anthropology to move on by developing an eclectic synthesis of these antecedents. High on our agenda should be to repair the breach that occurred when modern ethnographers repudiated evolutionary world history as racist and imperialist, which of course it was. We also need to rediscover our roots in the European Enlightenment. Perhaps then we could make emergent world society more meaningful for our students and others interested in our work.
This vision was formed by studying money. It moves at human will between the immediate and concrete conditions of our lives and the most inclusive reaches of society. Money is better thought of as being social and individual than as anti-social, for it is local and global, real and virtual, and above all a means of communicating subject-object relations like religion.
Of all our predecessors, Gorg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money, written a century ago, has been the most inspiring. He argued there that money is the embodiment of our potential to make a universal society. Anthropology’s object in future could be to study all humanity separately and together. “Humanity” is a collective noun—all the people who have lived and ever will—a moral quality of mutual kindness, and a historical project. I would like anthropologists, under whatever name, to contribute to that project.