Money's penetration into social life

A historical sketch of financialization

Summary

The two centuries since the industrial revolution are a blink of the eye in world history, yet we rely on a perspective shaped by the daily news in one of its national fragments. Our ‘experts’ don’t try to grasp this period as we lurch into another global crisis that threatens life on this planet as the last century’s crisis did.

I focus here on the escalating dominance money has exercised over society in this process. I do not demonize money: we are trapped in limbo between the failure of the last century’s dominant social form, ‘national capitalism’, and a world society that does not yet exist. Economic transactions from the world market to the local shops are already running on money. Reforming monetary institutions will be indispensable to rebuilding society on a more inclusive scale before time runs out on us.

I locate money’s growing dominance within a framework of political history since the industrial revolution around 1800. The first stage was when peasants moved to work for urban wages on an unprecedented scale. The second was launched by the birth of ‘national capitalism’ in the mid-nineteenth century, leading to colonial empires and a bureaucratic revolution at home generating mass production and consumption by its close.

Two world wars and the anti-colonial revolution in the last century made the nation-state seem so inevitable that most people cannot imagine society in another form. Yet this is failing now due to neoliberal globalization and its discontents. A counter-revolution against postwar social democracy and socialism around 1980 has subjugated society to market fundamentalism, just as it was in the Gilded Age before 1914.

After the Cold War ended, today’s system of government by and for the rich was freed from its remaining shackles. The relationship between money and power has moved in two centuries from conflict through compromise to their despotic merger now, with capitalism and autocracy variably dominant. The history of economic thought has addressed the questions I raise here with variable success. In the current world crisis, we need to do better.

I offer links to some relevant writings posted online if readers want to follow up the argument of this sketch. To read further, click on ‘A better world somewhere’ at the top, select Archive, then scroll down.

Introduction

Society operates through money today at all levels from the world market to the local shops. In 1800 less than three percent of humanity lived in cities and animals, plants, and human beings themselves supplied most of the energy. Humanity is stumbling into another planetary crisis, following the last century’s similar experience in its middle decades. In 1870, international trade in most countries counted for only one percent of what we would now call GNP; even in Britain the weather at harvest time was still the most reliable indicator of its level that year (W.A. Lewis 1978); and 85% of British civil servants in the world, including in the United Kingdom itself, worked in India.

In this historical sketch, I seek to identify the key stages since the industrial revolution until the leading capitalist societies reached the situation today. Financial imperatives have taken over all spheres of social life that were less dependent on money before, both public and personal. This development is now so blatant that a neologism had to be found, and a seven-syllable world was coined—‘financialization’ (Epstein 2005).

If we want to understand the mess the world is in, we should develop a historical framework long enough to help us figure out how we got here and perhaps what to do next before the roof falls in. In broad terms, the leading countries of the last century were launched by political revolutions in the 1860s and early 70s that reversed the capitalists’ victory over the old regime of traditional enforcers around 1800. In all of them—Britain, the United States, Russia, France, Germany, Japan, and Italy—a new disposition was arrived at based on an uneasy alliance of the two classes, with the aristocratic military landowners taking responsibility for crowd control in government and fighting abroad.

I call this national capitalism (Hart 2024) which became the conventional form of society in the last century thank*s mainly to two world wars and the anti-colonial revolution. It forged a strong synthesis of nation-states and industrial capitalism (increasingly organized by large business corporations) that underwrote expansion of colonial empires, until the good times failed in 1914 and remained critical until 1945.

A counter-revolution against post-war developmental states—taking in the industrial West, the Soviet bloc and the former colonies—was led by Reagan and Thatcher in 1979-80, when neoliberal globalization was launched. After the Cold War, plutocracy in the form of a lawless global money circuit was liberated from its remaining shackles. Today’s system of global political economy by and for the rich was established then. The relationship between money and power moved in more than two centuries from initial conflict through class compromise to their despotic merger now, with capitalism and autocracy variably dominant.

We must chart money’s rise against this backdrop. The first stage was the industrial revolution, when peasants and other oppressed rural workers exchanged non-market production and consumption for urban wage labor. Markets expanded rapidly to accommodate their need to pay for food, stimulants, clothing, housing, and transport, most of which were homemade before. The birth of national capitalism launched the second stage in mid-century leading to a bureaucratic revolution and mass production and consumption at home by its close.

‘Financialization’ today, when money’s control of society is ever more blatant, is thus the culmination of a process lasting more than two centuries. What follows will deal with the last and present centuries in greater detail. We should keep in mind, however, when asking if what is happening now repeats the 1930s, that they were the culmination of revolutionary change 70 years before, itself a response to the contradictions of industrial capitalism launched half a century before that. The history of economic thought has addressed the questions I raise here with variable success. In the current world crisis, we need to do better.

Finally, a note on some of my other relevant writings posted online. An illustrated compilation of my writings on money, markets and technology can be found here. My latest general reflection on this theme is Money and markets after capitalism which launched this page. This essay in a single file with notes and many more references can be found in my Academia profile. For a review of the recent anthropological literature, see the anthropology of money and finance (Hart and Ortiz 2014). Self in the Word: Connecting Life’s Extremes (Hart 2022a) partly addresses themes discussed here. Two earlier books are also relevant: The Memory Bank: Money in an unequal world (Hart 2000) and The Hit Man’s Dilemma: Or business personal and impersonal (Hart 2005). A broader essay is Capitalism and our moment in the history of money (Hart 2017: Chapter 1). A general theoretical overview, Economics and the Human Sciences: From modern dissenters to a human economy, is still in the draft stage.

The ‘natural’ illusion of private property

This reflection is written in the shadow of an ongoing financial crisis begun in 2008 by the mania to bundle ‘subprime mortgages’ with less shaky housing loans in impersonal financial instruments traded in global markets (M. Lewis 2010; A. Mackay 2015). The early years of this decade have unleashed developments whose consequences are unknowable: the covid pandemic (which has not ended), with all the political and economic turmoil it generated, was followed by the end of a fake credit boom lasting four decades and the return of major war to Europe and the Middle East, with unfathomable economic disruptions to a world economy now in the grip of its first ever universal debt crisis.

For three decades after the Cold War ended, the West’s rulers went to sleep, buying the idea that accumulation of wealth by the ‘one percent’ (known as ‘economic growth’ or ‘the Laffer curve’) was the answer to all social problems. No longer, and the state is back in spades as a result. The money circuit has run out of control and a creditor class has taken over governance, neglecting issues of security and the threat of war. Public discussion of credit is largely monopolized by Western economists, lawyers, bankers, and high-end journalists whose perspective on our world is narrow and, as I will show, misleading. The contradictions of contemporary finance are often sold as development solutions by international organizations run by the same class of Western professionals that gave us the subprime catastrophe.

People’s homes are among the most deeply personal aspects of human experience; and they are omitted by depersonalized models of the economy. But there are much wider issues at stake, crying out for a joined-up historical analysis. I sketch here a history of financialization in the leading capitalist countries since the Industrial Revolution. My thinking on this question was formed by studying West Africa in the field half a century ago and later writing a review of the historical literature on the region’s political economy (Hart 1982). University teaching, development policy consultancies and reading widely ever since have been combined with working in 24 countries for between a few months and over two decades.

Mainstream economists would have us believe that individuals exchanging private property, first without money and later with it, is an original component of human nature. Private property law was only independently invented by the Romans, Chinese, and possibly the Aztecs in the first millennium CE (Hicks 1968). This perspective privileges ‘spot contracts’—buyer and seller exchange cash for a good or service at one time, and each then has private disposal of what they have received. But large parts of the economy rest on transactions in which giving and receiving are separated in time. Even spot contracts have a time dimension if credit is involved and in common law if the item is faulty. Have you ever wondered why in a wage contract you get paid after you have done the work, but in a rental contract you pay before you occupy the premises? These contracts reflect the social inequality of buyers and sellers in employment and housing.

Gifts must not be reciprocated on the spot (Mauss 1925), but by far the most important transactions with time built into them are credit-debt relationships. There are wide national variations in how money is conceived. The French and Germans consider money to be debt, an obligation to repay rulers who issue it, while the Anglophones conceive of money as credit, something for nothing, at least for now. Moneylending with interest is the oldest form of capitalism, followed by trade—buying cheap to sell dear. Neither involves production directly.

Capitalists go it alone, but soon need help from the traditional enforcers

Buying and selling human labor on a large-scale is much more recent than usury and trade; it has been the dominant economic form for 150 years and then only in the leading countries. This was the first and crucial financialization, when peasants, serfs, and slaves who before supplied most of their needs outside markets, moved to industrial cities and worked for wages. Now they had to buy food, clothing, accommodation, transport, and stimulants, most of which were homemade before. This expansion of the market boosted modern economic growth measured as money transfers while undermining the social institutions of existing society.

Industrial wages were at first so meager that contemporary political economists like David Ricardo (1817) measured their value by the price of corn. We now know that the early industrial cities supported many informal market and non-market activities; but economists did not notice them at the time. When industrial capitalists sought to displace the military landlord aristocracy from power—as city-states based on water-borne trade did in the Mediterranean during the first millennium BCE and from the European Renaissance onwards—they assumed that workers would identify with their interests. They were out to prove that when profit replaced rent as an economy’s staple, it would grow. This is known as the ‘bourgeois revolution’ or ‘English political economy’ by its European detractors (Hart 2017).

Fast forward to the mid-nineteenth century when machine production had pulled many workers into the industrial centers and criminal gangs had taken over large swathes of the main cities. Capitalists needed to enforce their contracts so that workers would work on time under supervision, buyers pay for what they bought, and borrowers repay loans. Both workers and consumers were organizing in large collectives; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in their Communist Manifesto (1848), saw this as an opportunity for the working-class to turn the tables on their bosses, since private ownership was inherently anarchic and could not organize society.

The capitalists now recognized that they could not enforce contracts by themselves; they needed governments, police, prisons, even armies, especially when their project went global as colonial empires. They made an alliance with the landlords, whose speciality was fighting and crowd control, in a series of political revolutions of the 1860s and early 1870s aiming to subdue the workers and tame the gangs. This coincided with a technological revolution—continental railroads, steamships, and the telegraph.

These revolutions took place in the countries that dominated the last century—the United States (civil war), Italy (Risorgimento), Russia (abolition of serfdom), Britain (second Reform Act, Anglo-Indian superstate), Japan (Meiji restoration), Germany (unification and Franco-Prussian war), and France (Third Republic). The world seems in retrospect to have been already unified then. But in most countries, international trade accounted for less than 1 percent of GNP; in Britain the weather at harvest time was still the best indicator of the national economy’s level (W.A. Lewis 1978). I call the main social form of the last century ‘national capitalism’—the attempt to control money, markets, and accumulation through central bureaucracy in the interest of a fictitious citizen body. Its rise, stagnation and fall in the 2020s is the most inclusive historical framework for understanding the world crisis today (Hart 2024).

Georg W. F. Hegel envisaged national capitalism in The Philosophy of Right (2005 [1821]), although John Locke got there first and saw its limitations: see his ‘labor theory of value’, later borrowed without acknowledgment by Karl Marx (Locke 1690). Hegel understood that capitalism broke up the traditional isolation of rural communities and brought cheap goods to the masses; but it also generated poverty and mindless work, while exporting the unemployed middle and working classes to the colonies. Industrial capitalism made strong national societies possible, but the state should manage its downside. University-trained professionals would manage this process through public bureaucracies devoted to the national interest. His strategy led to four decades of financial imperialism after the mid-century political revolutions, ending in 1914.

I know of only one work of fiction concerned with capitalism’s violent origins, Martin Scorsese’s movie, The Gangs of New York (2002, from Asbury 1927). In the Manhattan of 1863, Union soldiers’ coffins line the dockside, poor Irish immigrants compete with runaway slaves for the lowest paid jobs, Tammany Hall corruption is rife, and Protestant and Catholic gangs fight for territory. A conscription order is issued requiring $300 to buy exemption. The poor invade districts occupied by the rich; the army shoots into crowds; and the United States’ first urban race riot kills about a hundred ‘negroes’. The Union navy shells South Manhattan where gangs rule from the East River. *The film ends by fading into the modern high-rise landscape of today, minus the World Trade Center which fell in the previous year.

As Hegel proposed, the late nineteenth century saw a bureaucratic revolution. Governments and business corporations maintained their alliance and abolished the distinction in law between real and artificial persons for the latter (but not for churches and political parties), when granting them the same legal status as human citizens, while they retained limited liability for debt (Hartmann 2002). International and rural-urban migration fueled mass production and consumption. This was the second stage of financialization. Around 1900—much later than is commonly imagined (for example in Wallerstein’s 1974 multi-volume work)—the world was divided into high-wage and low-wage zones conceived of as a racial hierarchy (W.A.Lewis 1978); and the former’s consumers bought a lot more than corn.

Friendly societies (Smelser 1959) spawned building societies, cooperatives, labor unions, mutual insurance, and working-class political parties (Stedman Jones 1973). Funeral clubs became life insurance, Pricing the Priceless Child (Zelizer 1985). Markets and money now penetrated social life as never before. I recall “the man from the Prudential” cycling to our home in the 1950s, his trousers clipped and a satchel on his shoulder, to take pennies from my mother toward a hedge against the costs of death. ‘Mortgage’ in Old French means a bet on death, so the idea is old enough. Incidentally, Old English plejian meant both ‘pledge’, a promise to pay up if you lose, and ‘play’—for the English (and the Chinese) a game is not worth playing without a bet on the outcome.

Governments learned in the Great War that they could raise and kill off huge armies, control production and market prices, and monopolize propaganda. Disruptions of world trade, transport, and communications turned economies inward to import-substituting industrialization, and national capitalism dominated the coming century. When “the second thirty years war” of 1914–1945 ended (Churchill 1948), a world revolution took place. Developmental states in the industrial West, the Soviet bloc, and countries having gained independence from colonial rule were committed to reducing economic inequality, expanding public services, and increasing families’ purchasing power. Nation-states and multilateral organizations regulated capital flows, exchange rates were fixed, and the United Nations moderated western capitalism’s racist excesses around the world.

This was national capitalism’s heyday—or Eric Hobsbawm’s (1994) ‘golden age’—and it lasted until the early 1970s. The world economy boomed as never before or since. Richard Nixon, shortly before his downfall, said “We are all Keynesians now,” meaning that governments now acknowledged their responsibility for maintaining citizens’ living standards. The neoliberal counter-revolution aimed to abolish this popular social contract, and Hegel has still not been given credit for his brainchild’s postwar success.

National capitalism started unravelling in the 1970s

In the early 1970s, the United States’ losing war in Vietnam unbalanced global money supplies, the exchange rate mechanism broke down, the dollar was detached from gold in 1971, money market derivatives were invented in Chicago the next year, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) made the first of two massive hikes in the oil price, and the world economy entered a depression from which it has never fully recovered. Growing cracks appeared in the Keynesian system and neo-conservative liberals, led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, seized political advantage while reviving the pre-war and Victorian ideology of market fundamentalism, now operating under the slogan of ‘sound money’ or ‘monetarism’ (Friedman 1962).

The counter-revolution against the postwar economic order around 1980 freed up global capital movements, deregulated markets, and privatized public institutions. The money interest was back in charge, although it took the Soviet collapse, the rise of China and India as economic powers, and the internet going public in 1989–91 for ‘one-world capitalism’ (neoliberal globalization) to liberate a lawless global money circuit from its remaining political shackles.

The 1970s were a watershed. World monetary transactions were largely limited then to payment for international trade in goods and services. Today most international transactions are money exchanged for money in another form; the largest sector is foreign exchange where daily turnover is $6 trillion! National economies predominated after the war; now they are swamped by an unruly tide of money that vastly exceeds their own resources. People are no longer valued for their labor, but rather for the money they spend as consumers and repay with interest as debtors.

Capital’s main purpose now is to persuade people to part with their money. The power of labor unions was broken under the threat of exporting production to cheap-labor countries or importing their workers. This was the next stage of financialization—the shift from goods to services, especially finance and entertainment, the removal of political controls from the global money circuit, and the invasion of the public sector by private capital, including the corrupt purchase of politicians and bureaucrats. The priority of central banks shifted from managing the money supply to keeping up prices in asset markets, while giving away interest-free money to chosen corporations and billionaires to relieve their debts after the 2008 crash. The ensuing global plutocracy has now merged money and power.

The rise of Big Tech and the banks

The dotcom boom went bust soon after the millennium. This made available much unsold bandwidth, facilitating the rise of social media and Big Tech. All the loose money had to go somewhere and real estate, the second biggest asset market after equities, was the obvious choice. The Federal Reserve fueled a real estate boom unlike any that preceded it. Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve accelerated a version of rentier capitalism that serves only the super-rich. The pairing of George W and Halliburton was indistinguishable from that between *George III and the East India Company before the War of Independence. See Adam McKay’s movie, Vice (2018), starring Christian Bale as Dick Cheney, and my serialized essay, Notes on the long counter-revolution (note 1).

Wall Street banks discovered a new way of making money. Whereas before they lent it to people who had some—often a lot of it—now they found that they could make more from lending to people who had little or none—deploying variable interest rates, fees, penalties, and default seizures ——of property. This has revolutionized banking worldwide, replacing an ersatz moral contract with naked predation (Schraten 2020 for South Africa).

The main recipe for national capitalism in the last century was mild inflation, giving house owners the nominal illusion that their property was making money for them, as it sometimes did, but also the opposite. When I was starting out in the 1960s, my bank manager and I were on first-name terms as middle-class professionals. The digital revolution enabled financial firms to gather unlimited personal information about customers and for decision-making to follow remote algorithms.

With housing, cars, and smaller personal loans (mainly through credit cards) in the lead, whatever remained of human agency gave way to subprime mortgages, where even rents paid by students to their dormitories were assembled in derivatives traded globally. People who could not afford to buy houses were now encouraged to do so by creditors who knew that their property would end up with them at a much cheaper price than their real value.

Before the Lehman crash of September 2008, some sixty countries were growing at over 7 percent; soon there were only nine. High finance, much of it held by the shadow banking sector, now penetrated areas of public and personal life that had been relatively immune before.

According to the adage “what goes up must come down,” most lucrative investments since 1980 are all varieties of Ponzi scheme. It has ended in tears. The interminable crises that beset our world have one common denominator: national capitalism reached its apogee in the 1970s and has been in decline ever since. Governments wedded to transnational corporations, but sometimes at odds with them, have orchestrated the demise of political and legal constraints on accumulation, while escalating their own reliance on public debt. The BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—have bucked this trend, since each is trying to build a welfare state for citizens brought rapidly into urban capitalism, while their rulers pile up illicit wealth.

The nation-state vehicle for society was once extremely powerful, bringing together five kinds of community—political, territorial, imagined/virtual, monetary, and a shared interest in trade and war. Many still cling to this as their only idea of how society can be made, especially in Western countries that benefited most from the system. Already market fundamentalism (Hart 2018) has split between those who want to leave the world and others who would join it. Authoritarian xenophobic nationalists challenge neoliberal globalization; and the long-run economic impact of the covid pandemic has reinforced this trend.

The transnational corporations are quietly building a new world society to suit themselves. Money is already issued by a distributed global network of many more corporate entities than governments and banks. There is no credible national economic policy left, yet many voters still believe that switching governing parties will solve everything, and politicians incur spiraling government debt rather than raise taxes.

The main institutional reaction to the unraveling of national capitalism has been to form regional trading blocs, of which the European Union was for a time the leading example. It is now coming unstuck, but such federations or coalitions between some powerful and many weak states are the only intermediate stage toward a functioning world society at present. I argue that this is especially true for Africa, where 55 states take refuge in dependence on major foreign powers (Hart 2023b, Gabi-Williams 2022: sections 14-16). Social democracy must be restored somehow—a variety of associations, unlike today’s free-for-all, should start building a world society capable of regulating global capital, preferably before rather than after a world war.

The UN’s middle forecast is that in 2100 Asia will have 44 percent of the world’s population (60 percent in 2022), Africa 40 percent (18 percent now), all the rest 16 percent, with Europe reduced to 6 percent compared with 25 percent in 1900—36 percent including the temperate zone lands of new settlement. The median age in Africa is now under twenty years; half the world’s children (18 and under) will be African in 2100. This is due to annual population growth of 2.5 percent; everywhere else the population is aging and in decline. Humanity’s future in this century will be decided by Asians and Africans, maybe with the United States after a successful world war. Asia will have the producers; Africa will be the most buoyant sector of world market demand—population size is the main determinant of economic strength—and the US will still have most of the weapons. A Pentagon air force colonel once told me, “You Europeans have stolen our moral high ground; the Chinese have stolen our manufactures; all we have left are the weapons—I guess it’s double or quits.”

The long view: Land mortgages, Karl Marx, and a human economy

We should not focus only on the short run, but rather take an anthropological perspective on the long history of money in society. An edited collection, Land and the Mortgage (Rodima-Taylor and Shipton 2021), does an admirable job of introducing much-needed diversity into this history. The topic of mortgages opens out onto humanity’s relationship to the land, from the original conditions of hominid evolution to living in cities ruled by money.

In his Precapitalist Economic Formations of 1844, Marx (1858) lays out a vision of human history in which capitalism is the final dissolvent of those forms of society linking us to an evolutionary past that we share with the animals (Hart 2013):

“The original conditions of production cannot initially be themselves produced. What requires explanation is not the unity of living and active human beings with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolism with nature; nor is this the result of a historic process. What we must explain is the separation of these inorganic conditions of human existence from this active existence, a separation which is only fully completed in the relationship between wage labor and capital” (Marx 1858: 489).

He believed that capitalism, in making that break, was the enabling force for an emergent human society fully emancipated from primitive dependence on nature—most of us would now reject that idea. It was not that society, but its midwife. Human evolution before capitalism, according to Marx, was marked by two processes: the individuation of the original animal herd and the separation of social life from its original matrix, the earth as laboratory. From his point of view, we were witnessing the apotheosis of capital as it freed itself from human, physical, and geographical encumbrances.

Berghahn’s Human Economy series both shares and rejects Marx’s conclusions. The capitalists’ utopia—money makes money all by itself with minimal human intervention—is a dystopia and it must be replaced by economies that serve common human interests. This means putting people at the forefront, always with an eye on global humanity. Marx joined the economists in separating society from its original matrix in nature. We affirm that people, however degraded by their exploiters, are indispensable to maintaining and improving their own lives in society and nature.

A movement of heterodox economists and their fellow travelers (including me) in the World Economics Association wishes to connect the study of the economy to the real world; to make its findings more accessible to the public; and to place economic analysis within a framework that embraces humanity, the world we live in. Alfred Marshall (1890), in his synthesis of the marginalist revolution, defined economics as “both a study of wealth and a branch of the study of man.” Marshall was Maynard Keynes’s teacher at Cambridge. He was a cooperative socialist—like Marcel Mauss and his friends, Sidney and Beatrice Webb—and developed a Hegelian historical *theory of the welfare state.

The ‘human economy’ approach (Hart 2008) shares these priorities. It is not an exclusive concept or method, but an umbrella term for a conversation between those of us who draw on a wide variety of intellectual and political precedents. We encourage work pitched in dialogue with related approaches operating under different labels, united by a desire to make the economy more human than we now find it. We do not aim for an exclusive monopoly (‘our side’), but to help build a progressive, plural, and decentralized global network united by the pursuit of common human interests.

The economy is not a remote object glimpsed occasionally online or on the TV news. It is a plethora of ideas and practices concerned with how people should manage their lives with a view to getting by and perhaps improving their lot. Economic thought has addressed this question so far with variable success. In the current world crisis we need to do better.

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