The other examples provided by Jean-Christophe and Tayssir are also good grist for the mill--though I will say that, as much as I like the Grieder quote, he seems to be coming to the discussion a bit late in the game. Money has certainly become a political question for the state, but even in the US it was really hard to get people to use paper money instead of gold. Isn't this really the political struggle allegorized in the original /Wizard of Oz/? The struggle over whether we should use "Greenbacks"or gold (with a senator from Kansas involved) somehow being represented by the emerald city and the yellow brick road (not sure of the validity of the source, but one interpretation of the interpretations is here: http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?issueID=40&articleID=504 )
Thanks to everyone for the replies. I started the below after Doug's reply and I think it would be redundant to reply directly to all the others since there seems to be some consensus that there isn't some grand, macroeconomic problem with a world currency (or at least not any more so than the problems Polanyi, for instance, ascribes to the Gold Standard, which seems to be the basic point Wojtek makes about monetary sovereignty.)
On 2/21/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> 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.
This is what I was thinking and what I said more or less. I guess I was wondering if there was some other kind of imperative in economic theory that the currency be linked w/ the state.
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.
It is also, arguably, one of the key reasons that the US constitution had to be written--since individual states were printing their own money in order to pay their debts. Having a unified currency was supposed to tamp down on some of that "liberty." But the EU is also evidence that it *could" be done, it would just take a lot of work. (which isn't to dismiss that work, but to say that it is more from a political, social and cultural perspective that the problems emerge, less than one that is hardwired into economic orthodoxy. Right?) IIRC, the use of money on a large geographic scale is also one of the things that Anthony Giddens identifies with the transition to modernity. I'm a bit skeptical as I know there were plenty of societies that used something like money (like cowry shells) for exchange equivalents for centuries before what Giddens would call "modernity." Then again, this was one of his last books before he went completely batty and became a Blair lackey.
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.
Perhaps a very simple example of how difficult any of this is on a cultural level is the very question of the new Dollar coins recently introduced again by the US mint. I think they've been trying to do this for nearly half a century--when a dollar used to actually buy something more than half a cup of coffee. Yet USers refuse.
Then again, as with the metric system, since people's habits prefer the old way, instead of ceasing to produce the paper dollar, the mint just keeps producing both so as to keep from upsetting the people. If there simply wasn't a paper dollar it would be harder for them to resist.
On a related note, I watched a PBS special a few weeks ago on a local currency project in Ithaca, NY (I think) called Ithaca hours. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours
Does anyone know about the success of projects like this? the difficulty, for me, is the same as Wojtek mentions about the Polish currency: even if the unit is an hour, it seems strange to think of it in those terms and I keep wanting to translate it into its dollar equivalent. This turns the whole system on its head for me because it makes sense that fruit or vegetables cost a fraction of the $10 equivalent of an hour, but when I hear that massage therapists also accept them I can't help but wonder if they only charge and "hour" for the hour, since that would only be equivalent to a $10 massage. That seems like too good to be true--and probably not enough to keep that masseuse in business.
On the other hand, it makes me think a little more about valuing things according to labor time, which seems to be more useful in the abstract terms of Marx rather than in a monetary system itself. But using it in the latter certainly leads to a critical consideration of how we value different kinds of labor differently.
Ok. Now I'm really off topic. Thanks again.
s