The Root of All Evil: Money, Markets, and the Prospects of Rewriting the Rules of the Game

Abstract

The chapter draws on Karl Polanyi’s insights on market logic and David Graeber’s analyses of debt to apply a critical perspective on the artifact of general-purpose money. It suggests that the insidious trajectories of human ideas traced by Polanyi and Graeber—and more generally by Marx—are generated by the artifact of money itself. The structural logic following from the use of conventional money inexorably generates disastrous social and ecological consequences precisely with regard to the three commodities that Polanyi deemed fictitious: labour, land, and money. Given the apparent inability of society to remedy increasing economic inequalities, ecological degradation, and financial vulnerability, the only remaining hope hinges on our capacity to identify money itself as the source of all these evils, and consequently to critically rethink the idea of universal commensurability.