Abolish Money

This was originally given as a paper at the London Science Fiction Community's Activism and Resistance conference in 2021.

By money, of course, I don’t just mean coins and banknotes. I mean money itself. This paper is, like much science fiction studies, and much science fiction, about what is unthinkable, and what is thinkable. And it's about what conditions sustain the thinkability of the thinkable, and how those conditions transform over time.

I propose that until quite recently, the abolition of money has been unthinkable. 

This may come as a surprise to some of us. For instance, to Fredric Jameson, whose genealogy of Utopia begins with the fact that Thomas More could fantasize the complete elimination of money from social life: money for Jameson leading an “enclave existence” in More’s early modern moment.

I don’t think this is quite right, because I suspect Jameson exaggerates the limited and sporadic presence of money in early modern rural England, if we identify money not only with coin, but more broadly with transferable credit. 

But also, more significantly, I don't think this is quite right, because I'm not convinced that money really is completely erased from More’s Utopia. 

More represents Utopia within a world system, and he states pretty straightforwardly that the Utopians keep reserves of gold and silver to pay for mercenaries, to place bounties on the heads of belligerent princes, or to bribe those princes. Within Utopia, gold and silver are prominent in the material infrastructure that extracts forced labor from incarcerated bodies, since it is from these precious metals that the Utopians fashion the fetters for their slaves. Out-of-town Utopian merchants also enslave and import condemned criminals, and More is quite clear that they pick up a bargain or two. 

So is this money erased? Or is this money demystified? Money shown, very clearly, doing what money does?

More, I think, could not think the abolition of money, though it’s true he tried. This pattern of fudged and bungled and half-hearted abolition appears again and again in utopian literature and then in speculative fiction. 

I want to give you some examples. In Edward Bellamy’s late nineteenth century Looking Backward: 2000-1887, a time traveller visits a future United States where all forms of production and distribution are governed as one big commons. In Bellamy’s post-capitalist economy, each of us contributes equally onerous labor, and each of us receives an equal credit allowance, to claim from the national cornucopia. ‘Prices’ are algorithmically generated, as a rough estimate of the relative difficulty of producing each good. So is this a post-money future? 

The more closely you inspect Bellamy’s credit book system, the more you suspect that this is not money abolished, but money metamorphosed. For example: 

“By the way,” said I, “talking of literature, how are books published now? Is that also done by the nation?”

Any author, it turns out, if they self-publish from their allocated credit, may collect and live off royalties. But Bellamy did not anticipate buyer motives beyond aesthetic pleasure, and so he let slip into his design the seeds of an entire regime of speculation and accumulation based on the legal form of the literary work. Just to give you a glimpse, imagine the oligarch who can buy 10,000 copies of any book to welcome its author to join their elite stratum, and who plies this power to string along hundreds of thousands of readers slash budding authors slash investors. 

Or take Samuel R. Delany’s 1970s ambiguous heterotopia, Trouble on Triton, which is very consciously and explicitly post-money. Yet what Delany calls “money” turns out to be more or less “cash,” coins and banknotes. The protagonist receives digital “credit” which they seem to be able to transfer freely for goods and services. The material shift from money objects strewn throughout the hands and coats and sofas of users, to a digital infrastructure where users have far less control over the legibility of their transactions to powerful actors (including but not limited to the state), is certainly not incidental, but it does not amount to money abolition. Consider that most money, upward of 90%, is already numbers on bank spreadsheets.

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents are near future dystopian works which I think are notable for their portrayal of money’s resilience even amidst the collapse of rule of law. 

On the one hand, Butler verges on the absurdity of a video game where in the midst of hyperviolent Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes you can always stumble over to a friendly shopkeeper with a stock of context-appropriate healing potions. Putting Parable uncomfortably close not to right libertarianism per se, but to sharing right libertarianism’s rejection of money as a creature of the state.  

On the other hand, Butler’s work is still keenly aware of money as set of tools within history, whose significance is not predetermined. Money is never transcendentalized as a feature all functioning human societies above a certain complexity threshold. This awareness comes money’s mixed relationship with one of the duology’s main concerns -- slavery, both of the chattel kind, and indentured servitude whereby slaves formally receive wages which go right back to their ‘employers’ for room, board, and interest on unpayably large debt.

In Iain M. Banks’s post-scarcity Culture series I would suggest that drones and ship’s avatars allegorically enact monetary logic, and in his Look to Windward as soon as there is a scarce resource, coveted tickets to a music concert, a system of liquidity suspiciously like money is immediately invented.

These many noble failures to fully imagine the end of money find their counterparts in mainstream macroeconomics’s more ignoble failure even to fully imagine what money is. In brief, money is (a) elucidated via three or four functions, which conflate is and ought, behavior and purpose; (b) defined to exclude innumerable more-than-capitalist indigenous moneys, media, and social technologies; (c) given an incoherent origin story which smuggles capitalist subjectivities and norms into a conjectural primordial barter society.

Money abolition is becoming more thinkable in Cory Doctorow’s 2003 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which imagines a modest and limited economic hierarchy based on techno-magically mutualized knowledge of how grateful everyone is to everyone else; a sort of ideal meritocracy. But it is on the one hand, quite rightly, a very ambiguous utopia, with prescient reservations about surveillance, and about generalized incentive to cultivate a personal brand. And secondly, what fascinates me, is one moment, a key plot point, when it breaks its own rules and portrays its fantastical system temporarily behaving just like money.

Still, I think something profound is shifting here. More recently Karen Lord’s The Galaxy Game, Adam Roberts’s By The Pricking of Her Thumb, and Tochi Onyebuchi’s ‘How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary’  work at similar points of tension; Lord envisioning a dual sphere gift economy which fails to feel at all liberating, Roberts picturing incumbent elites scheming to find a new source of scarcity and therefore money and power, as Virtual Reality threatens us with peace and paradise; Onyebuchi imagining not a failed attempt to abolish money but something nearby: an attempt to recode money’s circulation to complete the abolition of slavery via algorithmic reparations.

So why might money abolition be becoming more thinkable? In a moment I will propose why. But first, I wonder if you are wondering: Why should money be abolished? How can money be abolished?

Why should money be abolished? 

Money should be abolished because it unfairly favors the wealthy over the poor.

But that sounds a little flippant. Let's try again. Why should money be abolished? 

Maybe I don’t want to answer this question right now. But I do want to resist answering it in two quite distinct ways.

First I want to reject thinking of money abolition as any kind of panacea. There are certainly post-money futures which are straightforwardly dystopian. 

But second, I'd argue that motives for abolishing money are incredibly pervasive.  Money has been subject to fierce moral criticism for centuries. But because money abolition has been for so long unthinkable, we steer these criticisms, expressively and interpretatively, in a different direction. 

Why not fund global access to Covid vaccines? Why do the cleaners get paid less than I do? Why fund fossil fuels exploration, instead of renewables, negative emissions technologies, and mitigation and resilience initiatives? I’d encourage us, for the moment, to think of money as a technological tool. It is a tool whose specific uses are frequently criticized. Did you actually buy that sweater? Did you actually commission those nuclear warheads? The point is that any of these criticisms can be reimagined: not, “Is the tool being used incorrectly?” but “Is this even the right tool?” Dissatisfaction with the tool is so widespread, across the political spectrum, I suspect that it is usually not. 

How should money be abolished? I can try to do it by myself, but I’m very busy. But three points. 

One, let’s acknowledge the more-than-capitalist world. Gift economies, kinship economies, mutual aid, more or less democratic and/or deliberative bureaucracies, material balances accounting, decision support tools, alternative and complementary moneys, time banks and LETS schemes, Indigenous moneys, the accounting practices of Net Zero transitions and the biometric practices of wellbeing interventions, the speculative currencies of science fiction, the avant-garde financial experiments of artists and activists. 

In connection with this first point I can offer, in a bewitching concoction of euphoria and grumpiness, two challenges. I would like speculative fiction writers to weave their futures with a greater variety of mechanisms for organising desires and resources. Would like to see more post-money and more alternative money futures. And I would like to see more utopian and SF studies scholars take advantage of the extraordinary leeway our discipline gives us, to surface and strengthen the radical post-money potentials in books and media and in everyday experience. For example, every game is a miniature economic system, and harbors potential that can be subjected to design and scaling. Too often, in practice, SF studies simply observes how a science fiction text exemplifies some theory, supposedly estranging or questioning some hierarchy or norm or binary. 

Two, let us acknowledge reversibility. Things can be done in more-or-less monetised ways, with complex implications; captured in the difference between driving yourself or cadging a lift with a friend or hitchhiking vs. calling a taxi or an uber. So when areas of social life have been financialised, they can be de-financialised, perhaps not back to what they were, but to new forms. 

Sticking with money as a technology, there is already a rich body of literature exploring how we might step back from harmful technologies; for example, Langdon Winner’s epistemological Luddism and Ivan Illich’s tools for conviviality are starting points for practical analyses of the use of money in a given context. Maybe money has, all along, been a kind of AI. That opens the possibility of reprogramming it.

Three, let us acknowledge the possibility of incremental progress. Police abolition theorists and activists encounter plenty of hostility and disbelief from folk who have simply never considered that the safeguarding functions that police are supposed to do and sometimes do do can be distributed in different ways across society. Post-work gets scoffed at by those who have not yet discovered, altering the culture of shame around non-monetised. Money abolition, like police abolition and like work abolition, is not so much about subtracting something from the world, as multiplying and cultivating what already exists in the more-than-capitalist world around us. Indeed I suspect these are all aspects of the same project.

So finally, why do I think that money abolition has become more thinkable? Well, because perhaps it is happening. I’m not sure whether it’s useful to contest whether techno-capital’s recent changes represent a radical break, a new regime of accumulation, or merely an inflection or intensification of post-Fordist or post-industrial or neoliberal dynamics. The specific labels aren’t that important. But there are certainly features of contemporary capitalism, with its myriad digital value forms including cryptocurrency and commodified big data, with its ongoing data-driven wave of AI and automation, that are not well-captured by, say, earlier critical theory’s emphasis on reification and alienation. The archetypal subject of capitalism is not homo economicus the isolated, atomic, utility-maximising agent whose inner life can only be vaguely inferred from its economic behavior, but rather a richly connected and reflective social being whose inner life and sociability are at least ostensibly legible in the vast amounts of available data. We cannot straightforwardly call the decisive steering media of contemporary capitalism ‘de-linguistified,’ as Jurgen Habermas did almost half a century ago. In short, perhaps capitalism no longer needs money. 

We might say, then, we need to abolish money, before it abolishes itself.