[Money Abolition] The End of Money

Spring is around the corner

Throughout history money has been subject to intense moral criticism. The love of money, wrote Timothy, is the root of all of evil. Aristotle feared money’s capacity to act as a living thing, since money begets money. For Marx, exchange value is what enables our topsy-turvy social existence, whereby humans become enslaved to things.

Sometimes money as such is condemned, and sometimes just specific uses of money: usury, gambling, speculative bubbles, runaway accumulation, the enclosure and commodification of the essential elements of life and happiness, profit from war and genocide.

Yet for much of this history, the abolition of money has never been spoken about with much seriousness. Even within utopian speculative fiction, money is seldom erased completely. Many seemingly post-money societies, from Thomas More to Star Trek, cherish secret stores of currency for trading with foreigners. Or when they talk about getting rid of money, they really just mean coins and notes, in favour of a sci-fi credit. Examine closely the “labour certificates” of August Bebel’s Die Frau und der Sozialismus, or the “credit books” of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887, and you may grow convinced that money has not undergone elimination, but evolution.

In these aporia and lacunae, money still lurks like a worm in an apple, stealthily swimming till utopia topples and rots.

Moreover, while post-capitalism and post-money are closely linked, they are not identical. True, some post-capitalist futures are also post-money. But there are certainly post-capitalist futures where money is still used. And I want to argue, more tendentiously, that not every kind of capitalism really needs money.

I want to take money abolition seriously. We are not just talking about notes and coins. We are talking about money itself. Writing this in early 2024, money abolition still feels quite lonely. Yet I have a presentiment that long before it’s finished, parallel projects will be becoming visible. We are in an era of bold financial experimentation. This time, the vast, volatile and fragile financial bubbles involve things like Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). When such bubbles burst, they are not exactly a reminder of the inevitability of boom and bust, so much as a reminder that money is a human construct, one that can be reconstructed and deconstructed. At the same time, we’re witnessing a new wave of interest in the use of Artificial Intelligence to plan and manage socio-economic activity. Money, we are perhaps realising, has been a kind of AI all along. This points to the possibility of profoundly reprogramming that AI.

Then again, cryptocurrency and AI are only part of this story. Because money is so deeply rooted in our collective imaginary, it won’t be enough to generate new knowledge about money, or new ‘advanced’ forms of money. We also must unsettle and unlearn. We must cultivate new kinds of uncertainty, both in practice and in theory. So money abolition must simultaneously draw from existing diverse economic practices, and also look to speculative fiction. Money abolition must go under many names and have many fellow travellers, including many who prefer to think in terms of radical reform and redesign. 

By taking this approach, I don’t mean to claim the term money abolition on behalf of half-hearted reformism or fantastical escapism. Rather, I hope to take money abolition as seriously as is currently possible. The gamble is that by pulling the concept of money abolition opposite directions, toward both the concrete and the speculative, it can be encouraged to grow, and to grow more real. All this also means that money abolition may take us into unexpected company. Money abolition asks us to think not only about a plenitude of moneys and money-like phenomenon, but also further afield. To think about viruses, forests, foetuses, funerals, about witches and their cats, about laughter and magic and music. 

It asks us to think about jacket pockets. Imagine on the first real day of spring, reaching into the pocket of a light thing you have shrugged on for the first time in month, and pulling out … not a ten pound note but the opposite of a ten pound note. Its negation. Imagine your delight! But what would you be holding?

I’m going to try to find out.