You left out perhaps the most critical means of control and the history that it most certainly has Not Been Established BY Democratic Means. But many have told this story including Graeber, Forstater, Douthwaite, and others. It makes no sense to bemoan the behavior of those of a specific class within the very system established by that class.
We already know that colonialism is imposed and includes the imposition of all kinds of injustices, including colonial money systems. So, how is it that the 'unjust' impositions of colonial governments can all be challenged except the imposition of money itself!? Many have told that history. Here are two of those tellings:
The world wide export of imperial colonial control over what shall be money and then demanding that taxes be paid in that money is the present operating system of the non-working class and is one of the critical means by which sovereignty and liberty are destroyed, along with community cooperation, and labor stolen.
From the abstract:
“In the European colonies, land expropriation and forced labor were used, but another important means of forcing indigenous populations to work as wage-laborers or produce cash crops was taxation and the requirement that taxes be paid in colonial currency. This paper provides an overview of this method, and documents its historical importance, concentrating on Africa. Taxation also played an important role in the monetization and commoditization of African economies, and in the rise of a peripheral capitalism. As the paper demonstrates, Marx was not unaware of money taxes functioning in this manner, and the phenomenon was in no way limited to Africa.” - Matthew Forstater
From the above paper by Forstater: ".... The problem was that if the subsistence base was capable of supporting the population entirely, colonial subjects would not be compelled to offer their labor-power for sale. Colonial governments thus required alternative means for compelling the population to work for wages. The historical record is clear that one very important method for accomplishing this was to impose a tax and require that the tax obligation be settled in colonial currency.
This method had the benefit of not only forcing people to work for wages, but also of creating a value for the colonial currency and monetizing the colony. In addition, this method could be used to force the population to produce cash crops for sale. What the population had to do to obtain the currency was entirely at the discretion of the colonial government, since it was the sole source of the colonial currency. This method was widespread and important enough to be called “a secret of colonial capitalist primitive accumulation” (since it was not the only method, it must be called “a” secret). This practice is extremely well documented, yet it has hardly ever been mentioned as an important method of primitive accumulation."
"......Several points concerning the role of direct taxation in colonial capitalist primitive accumulation need to be made. First, direct taxation means that the tax cannot be, e.g. an income tax. An income tax cannot assure that a population that possesses the means of production to produce their own subsistence will enter wage labor or grow cash crops. If they simply continue to engage in subsistence production, they can avoid the cash economy and thus escape the income tax and any need for colonial currency. The tax must therefore be a direct tax, such as the poll tax, hut tax, head tax, wife tax, and land tax. Second, although taxation was often imposed in the name of securing revenue for the colonial coffers, and the tax was justified in the name of Africans bearing some of the financial burden of running the colonial state, in fact the colonial government did not need the colonial currency held by Africans."
"....The requirement that taxes be paid in colonial currency rather than in-kind was
essential to producing the desired outcome,...."
Peter d'Errico writess:
“Stanley Diamond wrote that the basis of the "state" is "census, tax, conscription":
"The aims of the emerging State were directly antagonistic to the traditional self-sufficient ways of life practiced by the collectivities. For all significant economic, social, political, and ideological functions had been discharged within and among the joint family units, on a personal, communal basis, prior to the Aladaxonou-Foy conquest, which set the State-building process in motion. This process consisted in the establishment of a census-tax-conscription system designed to wrest from the kin units as much of their authority and wealth as possible."
Whether it is some historian or politician or even "scientist", most all are willing to think that humanity got the definition of money correct and structured a workable system around that, so now we just have to put the right people in charge and catch the crooks that are 'gaming the system.'
But what if the very definition of money is wrong and cannot be made to 'work'?
“Problem Statement
You have never seen a scale run out of grams. You have never been told that metres are scarce this quarter, or that the kilogram supply has been restricted to control inflation. No measuring instrument you have ever used has charged you a percentage of the value of what you were measuring, accumulated that charge across every subsequent measurement, and handed the compounding difference to a third party who contributed nothing to what was being measured.
Yet there is one measuring instrument you use every day for which every one of those things is not only accepted as normal — it is embedded in law, taught in universities, and defended by the most credentialed institutions on earth. That instrument is money.
But here is the deeper problem — and it is more serious than it first appears. The metre exists as a formally constituted concept. It is defined as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second — independently of any object being measured, independently of any authority, verifiable by any observer anywhere. The kilogram exists. It is defined in terms of Planck's constant. The second exists. It is defined by caesium-133 hyperfine transitions. In every case the unit has three properties: it is defined independently of what it measures, it is passive with respect to what it measures, and it is available without per-unit cost wherever the standard is applied.
Now apply the same question to money.
What independently verifiable phenomenon does the monetary symbol refer to? Not how is it used, not what do people do with it — what is it, stated in terms that are independently determinable without presupposing that money already exists and is already accepted? No such statement has ever been given. What exists in place of a definition is an operative notion: a set of behaviours associated with a symbol, accumulated across millennia of practice, treated as if it referred to a formally constituted concept with its own independent nature. What passes for money's definition — "medium of exchange, store of value, unit of account" — does not define what money is. It describes what people do when they already accept the symbol. Each term presupposes that money exists, is identifiable as money, and is accepted as money — before the definition has established any of those things. It is viciously circular from inception: not a foundation with cracks, but a missing foundation.
This is where the precise nature of the error becomes visible.
A valid measure must be independent of what it measures, passive with respect to it, and available without per-unit cost. A commodity has independent market value, is subject to scarcity, and commands a price proportional to that value for access. These two property sets share no common element. They are mutually exclusive by logical necessity: a unit that has independent market value cannot simultaneously be independent of what it measures. A unit subject to scarcity cannot simultaneously be available without per-unit cost.
The operative notion of money assigns both property sets simultaneously to the same symbol.
This is not a tension or a trade-off or a policy choice. It is a formal logical contradiction. And it is the operative assumption on which every contract, every financial model, every regulatory framework, and every policy instrument currently functioning on earth is built.
From this single contradiction everything else follows necessarily.
Because the symbol is assumed to have independent commodity value, treating access to it as scarce and subject to a percentage price is internally rational within that assumption. That percentage cost, applied across a chain of two or more transactions, generates a nominal claim that grows without bound as the chain lengthens, independently of how much real value the chain produces. This is not an economic theory. It is an arithmetic identity provable by the same mathematical induction used to prove that 1+1=2.
The two errors are not independent. The compounding extraction is not an abuse of the monetary system — it is the correct operational expression of a system whose unit is assumed to be simultaneously a measure and a commodity. Every attempt in monetary history to regulate, cap, or restructure the extraction while leaving the unit definition unchanged has either failed, been circumvented, or displaced the problem to another domain.
The consequences are observable and growing. A substantial and growing fraction of current working hours is directed at servicing financial claims rather than genuine productive activity — documented in tax burden data, household debt service ratios, and the ratio of global financial claims to real assets, which currently exceeds real productive value by a factor of three to ten and is increasing. This diversion is not a policy failure. It is a structural consequence of the contradiction operating at scale, at transaction speeds eighty-six million times faster than fifty years ago.
The correction costs nothing to implement. It penalises no agent. It requires no political consensus on values, no transfer of wealth, and no agreement on what humanity should produce or prioritise. It requires only that the unit of measure we use for everything be subjected to the same logical requirements as every other unit of measure we use correctly.” – Marc Gauvin – MSTA - Spain 2026
The very conceptual subjugation of the full capacity of a society to an illiterate preoccupation with the preliminary acquisition of an abstract acCouting unit (whether imperially declared and forced on a populace, or a particular trade good/commodity, digital or real, or "loaned" into existence by a bank) is a mistake of monumental proportions that even the best intentions cannot overcome while not correcting it. Don't we already know how to count and keep records?
What if we are simply holding on to a notion that is false? Not a very in depth investigation into anthropology can tell us that not every society has made this mistake, held this belief, carried it to this extreme.
We all must know that the illiterate 'pre-creation' of units is different from unit creation that comes after the work is done as recognition/a record of it. We must articulate this difference to keep people aware that it is their own freely initiated enterprise that calls the use of money into existence. When we lose sight of this we lose our sovereignty.
How does one expect to stop rogue nations from their imperial colonial activities while remaining loyal to the imperial notion that ‘the state creates the currency’?? Most all are going along with this.
No one is really challenging 'the system' if they do not challenge the assumptions upon which it is based. If the system is wrong then challenging behavior within the system does nothing to challenge the system. Anyone saying 'follow the money' is already, by default, going along with ages old and impossible assumptions about money that remain in place today. So, they have no ability to fully challenge those they claim to challenge if they are only moralizing about the 'behavior of the bad guys' but never say one word about the impossible system that ‘those guys’ are operating in or the universal participation by the entire populace in a system that cannot be made to produce different results.
The 'coin of the realm' is itself a means of enslavement.
When we stopped using fungible physical commodities as 'trade goods' and moved to bookkeeping about the value contained in the goods and services of our interchange, we mistakenly and foolishly and illiterately assigned "value" to the number units themselves using symbols ($, etc.) as though those units were still commodities that had just lost their physical form.
The very conceptual subjugation of the full capacity of a society to an illiterate preoccupation with the preliminary acquisition of an abstract acCouting unit (whether imperially declared or a particular trade good/commodity, digital or real) is a mistake of monumental proportions that even the best intentions cannot overcome while not correcting it. The 'inherited or imposed illiteracy' that surrounds money itself cannot be cured by holding the actors in this melodrama accountable for their actions within the illiterate paradigm. You see, one first has to think of, or be forced at gunpoint to accept, that money is an item of value that can also perform the function of 'unit measure of value.' But those two are mutually exclusive. The function called 'measure' is not sensible or reliable if the unit is constantly in flux and self-referential. That is the core illiteracy about money in the 'educated' class of the present day.
The 'reality transformation' that first occurs is the assumption that abstract units of representation possess the same characteristics of their predecessor trade goods and that some magical entity has the power to 'create' the abstract units of representation representing nothing but themselves!
But 'Money creation', from nothing and yet turned into a thing of 'value' - Poof! - is NOT a power that anyone actually has, not anyone, not any government, not any bank. You see, the unit to measure and keep records about the variability of the value in the things being interchanged between people cannot logically BE an item Of value with its own variability.
The first premise most people willingly go along with is the absolute illiteracy and illegitimacy of there being these so called "financial powers." WE ALL are the ones accepting the nonsense that the origination of the monetary unit is a magical process of 'creation' by some magical monetary power within government or banking. And we accept that this whole process must precede and subjugates economic activity of genuine value. And we accept this nonsense because we think that the monetary unit is an actual item of 'value'. It is NOT.
So, when the leadership of a society truly is motivated to establish "inclusive and sovereign endogenous development” it must realize that the present system and conceptual basis of money itself cannot assist but only interfere with this effort.
But won't it be amazing for a society's leadership to abandon this age old problem and correct the conceptual error by calling the world to genuine liberation through the establishment of a genuinely Logical and Mathematically Literate System of The Abstract Representation Of Value !?
Capitalism and the free market create freedom for as long as the free market remains free. But the inherent tendency is always towards those with more being able to change the rules in their favour and thus become even stronger. You don’t have to be an economist to foresee that inevitable outcome.
So, like many human tendencies we have a trajectory not a stasis. And so what was true before - about what constitutes capitalism and how much freedom it creates - is necessarily not true now at least to some degree.
I might have - reasonably (?) - been a capitalist in the, say, 50s but not so today.
Using labels from the past really should be banned unless they’ve been appropriately updated.
You left out perhaps the most critical means of control and the history that it most certainly has Not Been Established BY Democratic Means. But many have told this story including Graeber, Forstater, Douthwaite, and others. It makes no sense to bemoan the behavior of those of a specific class within the very system established by that class.
We already know that colonialism is imposed and includes the imposition of all kinds of injustices, including colonial money systems. So, how is it that the 'unjust' impositions of colonial governments can all be challenged except the imposition of money itself!? Many have told that history. Here are two of those tellings:
https://modernmoneynetwork.org/sites/default/files/biblio/RiPE%20Forstater.pdf
The world wide export of imperial colonial control over what shall be money and then demanding that taxes be paid in that money is the present operating system of the non-working class and is one of the critical means by which sovereignty and liberty are destroyed, along with community cooperation, and labor stolen.
From the abstract:
“In the European colonies, land expropriation and forced labor were used, but another important means of forcing indigenous populations to work as wage-laborers or produce cash crops was taxation and the requirement that taxes be paid in colonial currency. This paper provides an overview of this method, and documents its historical importance, concentrating on Africa. Taxation also played an important role in the monetization and commoditization of African economies, and in the rise of a peripheral capitalism. As the paper demonstrates, Marx was not unaware of money taxes functioning in this manner, and the phenomenon was in no way limited to Africa.” - Matthew Forstater
From the above paper by Forstater: ".... The problem was that if the subsistence base was capable of supporting the population entirely, colonial subjects would not be compelled to offer their labor-power for sale. Colonial governments thus required alternative means for compelling the population to work for wages. The historical record is clear that one very important method for accomplishing this was to impose a tax and require that the tax obligation be settled in colonial currency.
This method had the benefit of not only forcing people to work for wages, but also of creating a value for the colonial currency and monetizing the colony. In addition, this method could be used to force the population to produce cash crops for sale. What the population had to do to obtain the currency was entirely at the discretion of the colonial government, since it was the sole source of the colonial currency. This method was widespread and important enough to be called “a secret of colonial capitalist primitive accumulation” (since it was not the only method, it must be called “a” secret). This practice is extremely well documented, yet it has hardly ever been mentioned as an important method of primitive accumulation."
"......Several points concerning the role of direct taxation in colonial capitalist primitive accumulation need to be made. First, direct taxation means that the tax cannot be, e.g. an income tax. An income tax cannot assure that a population that possesses the means of production to produce their own subsistence will enter wage labor or grow cash crops. If they simply continue to engage in subsistence production, they can avoid the cash economy and thus escape the income tax and any need for colonial currency. The tax must therefore be a direct tax, such as the poll tax, hut tax, head tax, wife tax, and land tax. Second, although taxation was often imposed in the name of securing revenue for the colonial coffers, and the tax was justified in the name of Africans bearing some of the financial burden of running the colonial state, in fact the colonial government did not need the colonial currency held by Africans."
"....The requirement that taxes be paid in colonial currency rather than in-kind was
essential to producing the desired outcome,...."
Peter d'Errico writess:
“Stanley Diamond wrote that the basis of the "state" is "census, tax, conscription":
"The aims of the emerging State were directly antagonistic to the traditional self-sufficient ways of life practiced by the collectivities. For all significant economic, social, political, and ideological functions had been discharged within and among the joint family units, on a personal, communal basis, prior to the Aladaxonou-Foy conquest, which set the State-building process in motion. This process consisted in the establishment of a census-tax-conscription system designed to wrest from the kin units as much of their authority and wealth as possible."
Dahomey: The development of a proto-State https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00244520 “
The thing is that bemoaning the actions of some that are actually products of the system will not change the system.
Whether it is some historian or politician or even "scientist", most all are willing to think that humanity got the definition of money correct and structured a workable system around that, so now we just have to put the right people in charge and catch the crooks that are 'gaming the system.'
But what if the very definition of money is wrong and cannot be made to 'work'?
“Problem Statement
You have never seen a scale run out of grams. You have never been told that metres are scarce this quarter, or that the kilogram supply has been restricted to control inflation. No measuring instrument you have ever used has charged you a percentage of the value of what you were measuring, accumulated that charge across every subsequent measurement, and handed the compounding difference to a third party who contributed nothing to what was being measured.
Yet there is one measuring instrument you use every day for which every one of those things is not only accepted as normal — it is embedded in law, taught in universities, and defended by the most credentialed institutions on earth. That instrument is money.
But here is the deeper problem — and it is more serious than it first appears. The metre exists as a formally constituted concept. It is defined as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second — independently of any object being measured, independently of any authority, verifiable by any observer anywhere. The kilogram exists. It is defined in terms of Planck's constant. The second exists. It is defined by caesium-133 hyperfine transitions. In every case the unit has three properties: it is defined independently of what it measures, it is passive with respect to what it measures, and it is available without per-unit cost wherever the standard is applied.
Now apply the same question to money.
What independently verifiable phenomenon does the monetary symbol refer to? Not how is it used, not what do people do with it — what is it, stated in terms that are independently determinable without presupposing that money already exists and is already accepted? No such statement has ever been given. What exists in place of a definition is an operative notion: a set of behaviours associated with a symbol, accumulated across millennia of practice, treated as if it referred to a formally constituted concept with its own independent nature. What passes for money's definition — "medium of exchange, store of value, unit of account" — does not define what money is. It describes what people do when they already accept the symbol. Each term presupposes that money exists, is identifiable as money, and is accepted as money — before the definition has established any of those things. It is viciously circular from inception: not a foundation with cracks, but a missing foundation.
This is where the precise nature of the error becomes visible.
A valid measure must be independent of what it measures, passive with respect to it, and available without per-unit cost. A commodity has independent market value, is subject to scarcity, and commands a price proportional to that value for access. These two property sets share no common element. They are mutually exclusive by logical necessity: a unit that has independent market value cannot simultaneously be independent of what it measures. A unit subject to scarcity cannot simultaneously be available without per-unit cost.
The operative notion of money assigns both property sets simultaneously to the same symbol.
This is not a tension or a trade-off or a policy choice. It is a formal logical contradiction. And it is the operative assumption on which every contract, every financial model, every regulatory framework, and every policy instrument currently functioning on earth is built.
From this single contradiction everything else follows necessarily.
Because the symbol is assumed to have independent commodity value, treating access to it as scarce and subject to a percentage price is internally rational within that assumption. That percentage cost, applied across a chain of two or more transactions, generates a nominal claim that grows without bound as the chain lengthens, independently of how much real value the chain produces. This is not an economic theory. It is an arithmetic identity provable by the same mathematical induction used to prove that 1+1=2.
The two errors are not independent. The compounding extraction is not an abuse of the monetary system — it is the correct operational expression of a system whose unit is assumed to be simultaneously a measure and a commodity. Every attempt in monetary history to regulate, cap, or restructure the extraction while leaving the unit definition unchanged has either failed, been circumvented, or displaced the problem to another domain.
The consequences are observable and growing. A substantial and growing fraction of current working hours is directed at servicing financial claims rather than genuine productive activity — documented in tax burden data, household debt service ratios, and the ratio of global financial claims to real assets, which currently exceeds real productive value by a factor of three to ten and is increasing. This diversion is not a policy failure. It is a structural consequence of the contradiction operating at scale, at transaction speeds eighty-six million times faster than fifty years ago.
The correction costs nothing to implement. It penalises no agent. It requires no political consensus on values, no transfer of wealth, and no agreement on what humanity should produce or prioritise. It requires only that the unit of measure we use for everything be subjected to the same logical requirements as every other unit of measure we use correctly.” – Marc Gauvin – MSTA - Spain 2026
The very conceptual subjugation of the full capacity of a society to an illiterate preoccupation with the preliminary acquisition of an abstract acCouting unit (whether imperially declared and forced on a populace, or a particular trade good/commodity, digital or real, or "loaned" into existence by a bank) is a mistake of monumental proportions that even the best intentions cannot overcome while not correcting it. Don't we already know how to count and keep records?
What if we are simply holding on to a notion that is false? Not a very in depth investigation into anthropology can tell us that not every society has made this mistake, held this belief, carried it to this extreme.
We all must know that the illiterate 'pre-creation' of units is different from unit creation that comes after the work is done as recognition/a record of it. We must articulate this difference to keep people aware that it is their own freely initiated enterprise that calls the use of money into existence. When we lose sight of this we lose our sovereignty.
How does one expect to stop rogue nations from their imperial colonial activities while remaining loyal to the imperial notion that ‘the state creates the currency’?? Most all are going along with this.
No one is really challenging 'the system' if they do not challenge the assumptions upon which it is based. If the system is wrong then challenging behavior within the system does nothing to challenge the system. Anyone saying 'follow the money' is already, by default, going along with ages old and impossible assumptions about money that remain in place today. So, they have no ability to fully challenge those they claim to challenge if they are only moralizing about the 'behavior of the bad guys' but never say one word about the impossible system that ‘those guys’ are operating in or the universal participation by the entire populace in a system that cannot be made to produce different results.
The 'coin of the realm' is itself a means of enslavement.
When we stopped using fungible physical commodities as 'trade goods' and moved to bookkeeping about the value contained in the goods and services of our interchange, we mistakenly and foolishly and illiterately assigned "value" to the number units themselves using symbols ($, etc.) as though those units were still commodities that had just lost their physical form.
The very conceptual subjugation of the full capacity of a society to an illiterate preoccupation with the preliminary acquisition of an abstract acCouting unit (whether imperially declared or a particular trade good/commodity, digital or real) is a mistake of monumental proportions that even the best intentions cannot overcome while not correcting it. The 'inherited or imposed illiteracy' that surrounds money itself cannot be cured by holding the actors in this melodrama accountable for their actions within the illiterate paradigm. You see, one first has to think of, or be forced at gunpoint to accept, that money is an item of value that can also perform the function of 'unit measure of value.' But those two are mutually exclusive. The function called 'measure' is not sensible or reliable if the unit is constantly in flux and self-referential. That is the core illiteracy about money in the 'educated' class of the present day.
The 'reality transformation' that first occurs is the assumption that abstract units of representation possess the same characteristics of their predecessor trade goods and that some magical entity has the power to 'create' the abstract units of representation representing nothing but themselves!
But 'Money creation', from nothing and yet turned into a thing of 'value' - Poof! - is NOT a power that anyone actually has, not anyone, not any government, not any bank. You see, the unit to measure and keep records about the variability of the value in the things being interchanged between people cannot logically BE an item Of value with its own variability.
The first premise most people willingly go along with is the absolute illiteracy and illegitimacy of there being these so called "financial powers." WE ALL are the ones accepting the nonsense that the origination of the monetary unit is a magical process of 'creation' by some magical monetary power within government or banking. And we accept that this whole process must precede and subjugates economic activity of genuine value. And we accept this nonsense because we think that the monetary unit is an actual item of 'value'. It is NOT.
So, when the leadership of a society truly is motivated to establish "inclusive and sovereign endogenous development” it must realize that the present system and conceptual basis of money itself cannot assist but only interfere with this effort.
But won't it be amazing for a society's leadership to abandon this age old problem and correct the conceptual error by calling the world to genuine liberation through the establishment of a genuinely Logical and Mathematically Literate System of The Abstract Representation Of Value !?
Capitalism and the free market create freedom for as long as the free market remains free. But the inherent tendency is always towards those with more being able to change the rules in their favour and thus become even stronger. You don’t have to be an economist to foresee that inevitable outcome.
So, like many human tendencies we have a trajectory not a stasis. And so what was true before - about what constitutes capitalism and how much freedom it creates - is necessarily not true now at least to some degree.
I might have - reasonably (?) - been a capitalist in the, say, 50s but not so today.
Using labels from the past really should be banned unless they’ve been appropriately updated.