On Feb 21, 2007, at 10:26 AM, Sean Andrews wrote:
> Anyway, I was hoping someone on the list could shed some light on this
> question: why can we not have a world currency?
Money, as every Marxist schoolchild knows, is the reflection of a dense network of social relations - trade, capital-labor, state, etc. "Man carries his bond with society in his pocket," as the Old Man once said. So give that the world lives under an enormous variety of social networks - which intersect of course, but are far from identical - it makes sense that there are a whole lot of moneys. Look at the trouble Europe had creating the euro - and that was 50 years in the making, on a single continent, with a long history of economic, political, and cultural ties. We do have a "world" money of sorts, the US dollar, but that reflects the enormous power of the US. But it only works for certain kinds of transactions; people are long way from having only dollars in their pockets.
Doug