Surely, Fabio Vighi, you can offer more than a chronology of the expropriation. What prevents you from going deeper into the analysis of the core assumptions about money itself when giving your chronology of Capitalism?
For example, you speak of "capitalism’s mounting monetary contradictions. For decades, the inflationary pressures generated by financial expansion and debt accumulation were largely displaced onto the peripheries of the world economy through unequal exchange, currency hierarchies, structural adjustment and the exorbitant privilege of reserve currencies."
But what stops you from explaining 'inflation' at the core conceptual analysis of the mistaken understanding of money itself? Surely you are not suggesting that the process of 'financialization' itself was/is legitimate and that it was just managed poorly by way of displacement "onto the peripheries of the world economy through unequal exchange, currency hierarchies, structural adjustment and the exorbitant privilege of reserve currencies."
If your presentation claims to challenge the 'logic and contradictions of capitalism' then surely you are not leaving the core assumptions about money itself to stand and just critiquing its implementation....right? Let me offer this
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,...."
You will notice that the author does not challenge the legitimacy of the "imposition of the currency." And neither do you in your reference to "financial expansion and debt accumulation."
Since colonial times we have remained faithful servants to an illiterate and impossible system of imposed make believe.
What is it that prevents you from challenging the first illegitimate claim by government to “issue” (by “fiat”) acCounting units or its handing off of this process to banks?
It is the math of money (as presently conceived and structured) that should have told us that when everything is linked (monetized & commoditized) to inherent instability then everything, including community capacity and coherence, future generations, the natural world, will get sacrificed in vain attempts to respond to the illiterate imperatives of money (NOT part of the natural world) that remain unquestioned at the conceptual level.
Your presentation seems to ignore the initial imposed imperial illiteracy. So, for you the question is one of policy within the illiterate paradigm as opposed to the illiterate and unnecessary impulses toward war and the attempts to control those natural resources and using the further imposition of the same illiteracy about currency from one nation over another! Talk about compound illiteracy! Now every country is using this 'operating system' for control of the populace within its borders (as if that is not bad enough!) ...trouble is that the fighting between countries is so illiterate that countries are going to war over nonsense conceptual make believe!
We are killing each other over monetary illiteracy NOT "capitalism’s mounting [policy based] monetary contradictions."
Based on the core problem of monetary illiteracy I will submit that the question of "inflation" must be viewed from a different angle:
Abstract:
“This document is the result of a rigorous control system theory stability analysis of the current world de facto standard currency system and identifies a root instability in the form of the growth component of Debt associated with the money creation process. It first establishes the inherent instability of Common Lending Practices (application of interest). Then the analysis further charts the logical consequences of said root instability as it affects the economy as a whole and identifies how it provokes a systematic divergence between debt and value attributed to wealth in past cycles with the minimum value required in current and future cycles as those incorporate past unpaid debt i.e. systematic compounding of debt. It also identifies how the only means available within the system design for staving off inflation is through the continued contribution of collateral wealth as guaranty for the creation of new principal debt money commensurate with past debt growth. Finally it illustrates that compounding debt inevitably leads to a point where an inability to provide new wealth to guaranty new money to keep up with debt growth becomes chronic at which point either runaway inflation or a definitive collapse of the system inevitably ensues.”
While it appears that the reversion to "violent expropriation" is the 'next phase' you would like us to look at, it seems you are not addressing the means by which the initial "imperial imposition" harnesses the otherwise unwilling domestic labor in service of empire and the means by which the very 'violent militarized enforcers' are "paid" by way of all that absolute illiteracy as regards the 'imperial creation of the currency' described above. This process has been described by Graeber and many others, yet you choose to leave it out of the 'critique' you claim to be presenting. Why?
Do go away. There are better platforms for you to exercise your lunacy, and/or your contempt, and/or your lack of basic knowledge which you cover up with senseless, unrestrained, quite possibly seriously inebriated loquacity.
May I suggest the following, Fabio Vighi, if one wishes to remain focused on First Order Logic in one's analysis of capitalism.
“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
The very conceptual subjugation of the full capacity of a society to an illiterate preoccupation with the preliminary acquisition of an abstract acCouting unit (or a particular trade good, digital or real) 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?
So, can that full capacity manifest when the means by which the bookkeeping about their own economic activity holds an abstract Unit of AcCount - Money - to also BE an item of value akin to and/or equal, even superior to, their own capacity and to the very natural resources of the land?
What has been 'the solution' in the past has always been the creation - Poof! - of a newly declared unit OF Value that is just as illiterate as all that have preceded. 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.
For the imperialists this core illiteracy has not been their focus, as they have "control of resources" in mind. But then the very instability brought on by the core illiteracy leads the entire system to a state of 'out of control' which causes even the imperialists to freak out!!
And this cycle has repeated for centuries! Isn't it time to stop this?
Dear Mark (if I may - we have been discussing this before).
Thank you again for your rigorous argument, I appreciate the effort you have put into laying it out so clearly.
However, I think we are speaking past each other at a fundamental level. Your argument is entirely rationalistic. It treats money as a measuring instrument, a unit of account, a technical system that has been “illiterately” (you repeat this several times) designed and therefore that can be logically corrected. Yes, the metre is defined independently; the kilogram is defined independently; and therefore money should be too. This is a coherent critique within the framework of rational calculus.
But money-capital is neither a metre nor a kilogram. It is not a measuring instrument in any neutral sense. Money-capital is an object of libidinal attachment, in fact the impossible object of enjoyment. We are not merely calculating with money: we are invested in it, libidinally attached to it. The capitalist system persists not because it is rational but because its logic is supplemented with a perverse form of libidinal attachment. What you call illiteracy is the very core of the system, its hard kernel, the system’s mode of enjoyment, in other words it is precisely what keeps the system running - why? Because it is where it hooks us, at the deepest level of our subjectivity. here’s the key point: humans are rational only to the extent that their “knowledge” is decided at the level of unconscious enjoyment - that’s why the overcoming of capitalism will not happen just because we rationally understand what is wrong with it; we already know it, and yet we keep validating it.
Your argument assumes that if we could just correct the logical contradiction - if we could design a unit of account that is not also a commodity - the violence would cease. But this is a rationalist fantasy! The violence is not a consequence of illiteracy; it is a consequence of how our desires and modes of enjoyment have been colonised by the capitalist value-form. People do not accumulate wealth because they are confused about the definition of money. They accumulate because they are driven to accumulate - and this drive is what makes them who they are. The object (money-capital) is structurally unattainable (there is never enough of it), and the pursuit itself is what sustains the fantasy of knowledge and rationality.
This is why all previous “corrections” have failed, as you note. They have failed not because the technical design was insufficient, but because they left the libidinal structure intact. The problem is not that we have the wrong monetary architecture; it is that our modes of enjoyment are structurally aligned with accumulation itself. Until that libidinal investment shifts - until we find a way to enjoy differently - no technical correction will deliver what it promises.
That is the level at which I am trying to think. Of course I am not ignoring the monetary foundations; I am arguing that they operate at a level beyond rationality, and that any critique that remains within the framework of rational calculus will ultimately reproduce the very logic it seeks to overcome.
I afraid that the simple response you offer is both internally contradictory and factually ignores the history presented above. So your presentation becomes circular......and that is not acceptable. I bring this challenge because your own description of your work talks about your 'focus on crisis capitalism — its logic, contradictions, and cultural expressions.'
Your assertion: "It is not a measuring instrument in any neutral sense. Money-capital is an object of libidinal attachment, in fact the impossible object of enjoyment. We are not merely calculating with money: we are invested in it, libidinally attached to it."
You cannot say that money is not a measuring instrument when it is used to assess and annotate the value of other things and keep records about that. The question of neutrality does not negate the attempted utility to do the measuring and keep the records. What you call calculating. Then you offer the assertion as to a psychological 'investment' and a 'libidinal attachment' that ignores the history of the forced imposition of the 'coin of the realm' as though this was/is some subconsciously chosen libido driven process aimed at some level of satisfaction.
Sorry, but that attachment that you describe from a vantage point of centuries later was itself the result of having been forcefully imposed. So the argument is circular and ignores the history that so many can present to you which came BEFORE Freud. Surely you are not saying that the populace ages ago had some underlying subconscious longing for accumulation to attach to something that would give libido satisfaction and that that is how they brought about the imperial impositions upon themselves.
Historical timelines matter. Yours is an 'after the fact' insertion of libido driven desire on the part of the populace for monetary accumulation that completely misses the point offered by Forstater (in his Primitive Accumulation treatise presented above) and Graeber and others that the means used by imperialists, to first declare and create the colonial currency and then demand that tax obligations be settled in colonial currency, was a somewhat less but still violently imposed way of forcing people to work for wages. That Is Not Libido. How is it that your confusion about the order of these things leaves you thinking that our present situation is one of libido driven desire for an artificially imposed fantasy? It seems that you do not even attempt to dispel the fantasy or the preoccupation with monetary accumulation if you will not call out its imposed origins within colonized peoples but simply leave your 'analysis' in the realm of psycho analytic theory. That comes across, to me, as a blame the victim process.
Mark, let me try to clarify: I am not arguing against Forstater or Graeber. They are right, of course: capital was imposed through violence, through colonial currency, tax obligations, land expropriation, forced labour, etc. I have never disputed that, and I am not offering a psychological alternative to that history. The historical record is clear.
What I am pointing to is what was imposed. It was not just a neutral measuring instrument, as you seem to suggest. It was a symbolic order - a system of meaning and value that, once imposed, began to structure not just economic behaviour but the very texture of subjectivity itself. The colonial currency was not a tool that could be picked up and put down; it was a form of life that reorganised social relations, desires, and modes of enjoyment around accumulation.
You are right that the libidinal attachment came after the imposition. I have never claimed otherwise. But the fact that it came after does not make it any less real or any less powerful. What I am trying to understand is how the imposed system reproduces itself. Why does it persist? Why do people continue to believe in the money-God, to accumulate it, to sacrifice their lives to it, even when they know, rationally, not only that it is a fiction, but that it as a social fiction it is imploding?
This is where I think psychoanalysis offers something that historical materialism alone cannot fully explain. Freud discovered something essential about human nature: that we are split between conscious, rational knowledge and unconscious drives. The belief in money is not a conscious choice; it is a libidinal investment that operates below the level of rationality. The colonial imposition may have created the conditions for this investment, but it did not determine how it would be sustained. That sustaining is a function of desire; the same desire that once sustained belief in the transcendental God, and which now sustains belief in the money-God.
This is not at all "blame the victim." The victims of colonial violence did not choose to become libidinally attached to money. The libidinal attachment was produced by the system: it is the system's way of hooking us, even of making us complicit in our own subjugation. The colonised were not given a choice; they were subjected to a structure. And that structure, once in place, operates autonomously, producing desire for what it requires.
So: I am not offering an "after the fact" insertion of libido. I am offering an analysis of how the system reproduces itself. The question you are asking at the end - "Is there something I am missing?" - is one I have asked myself many times. Perhaps what I am missing is a way to make this clearer in my writing. But I do believe that if we stop at the historical imposition argument, without understanding how it lives on in our individual and collective modes of enjoyment and rational choices, we will never understand why the system persists even when we know it is unjust and increasingly self-destructive.
The citings of Forstater and Graeber Do Not Present A Break In The History Of The Violent Enforcement Of The Ancient Or Colonial Impositions. The continuity of enforcement hardly speaks to libido attachment in the way you think this all went down and continues to go down. Read again the enforcement of the imposition of the currency....Taxes had to be paid with 'the coin of the realm'. When did this 'enforcement' stop or take a break so that the populace could find some libido driven attachment to "a symbolic order - a system of meaning and value". You misinterpret and misrepresent what I and Forstater and Graeber and others have presented.
Your words: "capital was imposed through violence, through colonial currency, tax obligations, land expropriation, forced labour, etc. I have never disputed that, and I am not offering a psychological alternative to that history. The historical record is clear."
Then, further down, your words: "psychoanalysis offers something that historical materialism alone cannot fully explain."
WHAT!? "Historical materialism" ? that is how you interpret and describe what was/is being imposed by the imperialist!? What the heck! Man!!
Perhaps you have been in places where the 'enforced structure' of the place is imposed and enforced by Mafia-like powers at the top. Does this structure then magically bring about some 'libido driven system of order, meaning, value?' 'a form of life that organises social relations, desires, and modes of enjoyment around accumulation'? I think you are confused as to what Stockholm Syndrome on a large scale looks like.
The impediments to getting a majority of the populace to clear understanding of the system are real. But they are way more external than your Freudian libido driven internal process of individual and/or collective investment for the purpose of enjoyment such that this changes the very texture of subjectivity itself.
Much to the chagrin to some in the field of psychoanalysis there are other schools of psychology that are not so enamored with this whole internal subjectivity thing as a means to interpret behavior. Particular to the "Protection Racket" features of the systems we have seen installed and enforced around the world and throughout history, I am more inclined to attribute the behavior of the oppressed populace to reaction to the enforced oppression along the lines of resignation and fear of retaliation as one can easily see in the reactions of oppressed peoples everywhere. Multiply the reactions of entire populaces over generations of inheritances of more or less severe oppression and, perhaps, one can see confusion about how extrication happens. But one thing is certain, the oppression and its enforcement is Never Abandoned by the imperialist.
Along with the direct enforcement that has Never Let Up there is additional effort on the part of the imperialist to indoctrinate the populace such that they are not even aware of their oppression. Do you know of the work of John Taylor Gatto? He speaks of this in great detail with all assertions documented.
It also seems, to me, that the psychoanalytical presentation you have made and then painted yourself into a corner with has a flavor of 'it must be us causing all this shit.'
It is precisely this child like thinking of self-blame when shit goes wrong, because the populace has not come to terms with the nefarious nature and or simple incompetency of the adult populace, which psychologists document as the helplessness carried from childhood into the next chronological stage but not acquiring the ability to criticize 'authority.' This process is well documented in the psychological literature of dysfunctional families and human psychological development. Have you studied this? It is very powerful.
It is well known in the fields of human psychology that there are many and varied information processing capacities distributed amongst the populace around the world and in different cultures. The basic abstract representation of and record keeping about human interaction is Not Practiced Across All Cultures. And certainly not all cultures have used or do use unit based mathematical systems for this kind of abstract representation. And many within cultures that do this kind of representation are not themselves ones with those abstract mathematical information processing capacities. So, there are many within certain cultures and also entire cultures (many aboriginal) that simply Will Not 'Get It' when they encounter systems imposed using these kinds of social and economic systems.
So, thank you for the conversation. These are my present thoughts about 'what we may be missing.' This is not an inclusive treatise, and hopefully is not the end of the conversation. Looking forward to your response.
“El mal de hoy, es sistémico, no está impulsado por agentes. Pare saber cuál es ese mal, hay que responder a algunas preguntas honestamente y sin prejuicios instintivos:
¿Cómo es que todo mal sistémico que continuamente tiene lugar bajo nuestra vigilancia requiere e inevitablemente obtiene cantidades masivas de nuestros propios recursos humanos y materiales colectivos, tanto para iniciarse como para mantenerse, a pesar del hecho de que pocos de nosotros apoyaríamos tales males por elección individual?
Empecemos con el llamado mal "lícito", también conocido como "mal necesario", por ejemplo, la guerra. Nadie vota para ir a la guerra, nadie vota para tener que trabajar en una fábrica de armas nucleares en lugar de una plétora de otras actividades productivas pero inocuas. Sin embargo, lo que determina que la guerra tendrá lugar, se las arregla para usurpar para ese fin cantidades extraordinarias de nuestra producción colectiva con una certeza asombrosa. Lo hace precisamente porque nosotros, como individuos, de alguna manera nos volvemos esencialmente irrelevantes, salvo para poner todos esos recursos a su disposición. ¿Cómo sucede eso exactamente y de que manera sistémica? ¿Cómo es que nosotros, como individuos, no podemos optar por ser productivos de maneras que nunca podrían ser usurpadas para la guerra y en cambio optamos por aceptar estos dichos "males necesarios"? ¿Cómo es que los trabajadores que contribuyen a tal mal no sienten casi ningún remordimiento por lo que hacen y no experimentan ninguna presión condenatoria por parte de la sociedad?
Desde un punto de vista de sistemas, una usurpación tan segura no puede ocurrir a menos que la mayoría sea consciente o inconscientemente obediente.
Esta sistematica de mal del cual la guerra es solo un ejemplo se puede describir de la siguiente manera:
1) Algo de lo que la mayoría tiene una "comprensión" superficial y ambigua.
2) Algo que la mayoría de las personas falsamente asumen como una necesidad inmutable de la vida, como el agua, la comida y el refugio, por lo que la mayoría de las personas se ven obligadas a cumplir sus imperativos de manera incuestionable.
3) Es ultra ubicua, es decir, afecta a todos los aspectos y niveles de la sociedad de una manera lógica y consistente.
4) Produce una dinámica meta sistémica que prevalece sobre todos los efectos y decisiones tomadas por cualquier agente, individual o colectivo.
5) Corrompe la percepción de la realidad de las personas y, por lo tanto, su capacidad para evaluar productos y servicios y tomar decisiones razonables posteriores.
6) Es esencialmente falsa, una especie de propuesta cruda pero no por ello menos convincente, apoyada por un falso estatus quo pseudo científico y tecno.
Para aclarar su naturaleza con mayor precisión mirad:
"The Return of Primitive Accumulation"
Fabio, this section of your article is a brilliant contribution to Marxist theory. Bravo!
Surely, Fabio Vighi, you can offer more than a chronology of the expropriation. What prevents you from going deeper into the analysis of the core assumptions about money itself when giving your chronology of Capitalism?
For example, you speak of "capitalism’s mounting monetary contradictions. For decades, the inflationary pressures generated by financial expansion and debt accumulation were largely displaced onto the peripheries of the world economy through unequal exchange, currency hierarchies, structural adjustment and the exorbitant privilege of reserve currencies."
But what stops you from explaining 'inflation' at the core conceptual analysis of the mistaken understanding of money itself? Surely you are not suggesting that the process of 'financialization' itself was/is legitimate and that it was just managed poorly by way of displacement "onto the peripheries of the world economy through unequal exchange, currency hierarchies, structural adjustment and the exorbitant privilege of reserve currencies."
If your presentation claims to challenge the 'logic and contradictions of capitalism' then surely you are not leaving the core assumptions about money itself to stand and just critiquing its implementation....right? Let me offer this
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,...."
You will notice that the author does not challenge the legitimacy of the "imposition of the currency." And neither do you in your reference to "financial expansion and debt accumulation."
Since colonial times we have remained faithful servants to an illiterate and impossible system of imposed make believe.
What is it that prevents you from challenging the first illegitimate claim by government to “issue” (by “fiat”) acCounting units or its handing off of this process to banks?
It is the math of money (as presently conceived and structured) that should have told us that when everything is linked (monetized & commoditized) to inherent instability then everything, including community capacity and coherence, future generations, the natural world, will get sacrificed in vain attempts to respond to the illiterate imperatives of money (NOT part of the natural world) that remain unquestioned at the conceptual level.
Your presentation seems to ignore the initial imposed imperial illiteracy. So, for you the question is one of policy within the illiterate paradigm as opposed to the illiterate and unnecessary impulses toward war and the attempts to control those natural resources and using the further imposition of the same illiteracy about currency from one nation over another! Talk about compound illiteracy! Now every country is using this 'operating system' for control of the populace within its borders (as if that is not bad enough!) ...trouble is that the fighting between countries is so illiterate that countries are going to war over nonsense conceptual make believe!
We are killing each other over monetary illiteracy NOT "capitalism’s mounting [policy based] monetary contradictions."
Based on the core problem of monetary illiteracy I will submit that the question of "inflation" must be viewed from a different angle:
Abstract:
“This document is the result of a rigorous control system theory stability analysis of the current world de facto standard currency system and identifies a root instability in the form of the growth component of Debt associated with the money creation process. It first establishes the inherent instability of Common Lending Practices (application of interest). Then the analysis further charts the logical consequences of said root instability as it affects the economy as a whole and identifies how it provokes a systematic divergence between debt and value attributed to wealth in past cycles with the minimum value required in current and future cycles as those incorporate past unpaid debt i.e. systematic compounding of debt. It also identifies how the only means available within the system design for staving off inflation is through the continued contribution of collateral wealth as guaranty for the creation of new principal debt money commensurate with past debt growth. Finally it illustrates that compounding debt inevitably leads to a point where an inability to provide new wealth to guaranty new money to keep up with debt growth becomes chronic at which point either runaway inflation or a definitive collapse of the system inevitably ensues.”
http://bibocurrency.com/images/pdfdownloads/Formal%20Stability%20Analysis%20and%20experiment%20%28final%29%20rev%203.4.pdf
While it appears that the reversion to "violent expropriation" is the 'next phase' you would like us to look at, it seems you are not addressing the means by which the initial "imperial imposition" harnesses the otherwise unwilling domestic labor in service of empire and the means by which the very 'violent militarized enforcers' are "paid" by way of all that absolute illiteracy as regards the 'imperial creation of the currency' described above. This process has been described by Graeber and many others, yet you choose to leave it out of the 'critique' you claim to be presenting. Why?
Mark Heffernan,
Do go away. There are better platforms for you to exercise your lunacy, and/or your contempt, and/or your lack of basic knowledge which you cover up with senseless, unrestrained, quite possibly seriously inebriated loquacity.
May I suggest the following, Fabio Vighi, if one wishes to remain focused on First Order Logic in one's analysis of capitalism.
“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
The very conceptual subjugation of the full capacity of a society to an illiterate preoccupation with the preliminary acquisition of an abstract acCouting unit (or a particular trade good, digital or real) 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?
So, can that full capacity manifest when the means by which the bookkeeping about their own economic activity holds an abstract Unit of AcCount - Money - to also BE an item of value akin to and/or equal, even superior to, their own capacity and to the very natural resources of the land?
What has been 'the solution' in the past has always been the creation - Poof! - of a newly declared unit OF Value that is just as illiterate as all that have preceded. 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.
For the imperialists this core illiteracy has not been their focus, as they have "control of resources" in mind. But then the very instability brought on by the core illiteracy leads the entire system to a state of 'out of control' which causes even the imperialists to freak out!!
And this cycle has repeated for centuries! Isn't it time to stop this?
Dear Mark (if I may - we have been discussing this before).
Thank you again for your rigorous argument, I appreciate the effort you have put into laying it out so clearly.
However, I think we are speaking past each other at a fundamental level. Your argument is entirely rationalistic. It treats money as a measuring instrument, a unit of account, a technical system that has been “illiterately” (you repeat this several times) designed and therefore that can be logically corrected. Yes, the metre is defined independently; the kilogram is defined independently; and therefore money should be too. This is a coherent critique within the framework of rational calculus.
But money-capital is neither a metre nor a kilogram. It is not a measuring instrument in any neutral sense. Money-capital is an object of libidinal attachment, in fact the impossible object of enjoyment. We are not merely calculating with money: we are invested in it, libidinally attached to it. The capitalist system persists not because it is rational but because its logic is supplemented with a perverse form of libidinal attachment. What you call illiteracy is the very core of the system, its hard kernel, the system’s mode of enjoyment, in other words it is precisely what keeps the system running - why? Because it is where it hooks us, at the deepest level of our subjectivity. here’s the key point: humans are rational only to the extent that their “knowledge” is decided at the level of unconscious enjoyment - that’s why the overcoming of capitalism will not happen just because we rationally understand what is wrong with it; we already know it, and yet we keep validating it.
Your argument assumes that if we could just correct the logical contradiction - if we could design a unit of account that is not also a commodity - the violence would cease. But this is a rationalist fantasy! The violence is not a consequence of illiteracy; it is a consequence of how our desires and modes of enjoyment have been colonised by the capitalist value-form. People do not accumulate wealth because they are confused about the definition of money. They accumulate because they are driven to accumulate - and this drive is what makes them who they are. The object (money-capital) is structurally unattainable (there is never enough of it), and the pursuit itself is what sustains the fantasy of knowledge and rationality.
This is why all previous “corrections” have failed, as you note. They have failed not because the technical design was insufficient, but because they left the libidinal structure intact. The problem is not that we have the wrong monetary architecture; it is that our modes of enjoyment are structurally aligned with accumulation itself. Until that libidinal investment shifts - until we find a way to enjoy differently - no technical correction will deliver what it promises.
That is the level at which I am trying to think. Of course I am not ignoring the monetary foundations; I am arguing that they operate at a level beyond rationality, and that any critique that remains within the framework of rational calculus will ultimately reproduce the very logic it seeks to overcome.
With thanks,
Fabio
Hello Fabio.
I afraid that the simple response you offer is both internally contradictory and factually ignores the history presented above. So your presentation becomes circular......and that is not acceptable. I bring this challenge because your own description of your work talks about your 'focus on crisis capitalism — its logic, contradictions, and cultural expressions.'
Your assertion: "It is not a measuring instrument in any neutral sense. Money-capital is an object of libidinal attachment, in fact the impossible object of enjoyment. We are not merely calculating with money: we are invested in it, libidinally attached to it."
You cannot say that money is not a measuring instrument when it is used to assess and annotate the value of other things and keep records about that. The question of neutrality does not negate the attempted utility to do the measuring and keep the records. What you call calculating. Then you offer the assertion as to a psychological 'investment' and a 'libidinal attachment' that ignores the history of the forced imposition of the 'coin of the realm' as though this was/is some subconsciously chosen libido driven process aimed at some level of satisfaction.
Sorry, but that attachment that you describe from a vantage point of centuries later was itself the result of having been forcefully imposed. So the argument is circular and ignores the history that so many can present to you which came BEFORE Freud. Surely you are not saying that the populace ages ago had some underlying subconscious longing for accumulation to attach to something that would give libido satisfaction and that that is how they brought about the imperial impositions upon themselves.
Historical timelines matter. Yours is an 'after the fact' insertion of libido driven desire on the part of the populace for monetary accumulation that completely misses the point offered by Forstater (in his Primitive Accumulation treatise presented above) and Graeber and others that the means used by imperialists, to first declare and create the colonial currency and then demand that tax obligations be settled in colonial currency, was a somewhat less but still violently imposed way of forcing people to work for wages. That Is Not Libido. How is it that your confusion about the order of these things leaves you thinking that our present situation is one of libido driven desire for an artificially imposed fantasy? It seems that you do not even attempt to dispel the fantasy or the preoccupation with monetary accumulation if you will not call out its imposed origins within colonized peoples but simply leave your 'analysis' in the realm of psycho analytic theory. That comes across, to me, as a blame the victim process.
Is there something I am missing?
Mark, let me try to clarify: I am not arguing against Forstater or Graeber. They are right, of course: capital was imposed through violence, through colonial currency, tax obligations, land expropriation, forced labour, etc. I have never disputed that, and I am not offering a psychological alternative to that history. The historical record is clear.
What I am pointing to is what was imposed. It was not just a neutral measuring instrument, as you seem to suggest. It was a symbolic order - a system of meaning and value that, once imposed, began to structure not just economic behaviour but the very texture of subjectivity itself. The colonial currency was not a tool that could be picked up and put down; it was a form of life that reorganised social relations, desires, and modes of enjoyment around accumulation.
You are right that the libidinal attachment came after the imposition. I have never claimed otherwise. But the fact that it came after does not make it any less real or any less powerful. What I am trying to understand is how the imposed system reproduces itself. Why does it persist? Why do people continue to believe in the money-God, to accumulate it, to sacrifice their lives to it, even when they know, rationally, not only that it is a fiction, but that it as a social fiction it is imploding?
This is where I think psychoanalysis offers something that historical materialism alone cannot fully explain. Freud discovered something essential about human nature: that we are split between conscious, rational knowledge and unconscious drives. The belief in money is not a conscious choice; it is a libidinal investment that operates below the level of rationality. The colonial imposition may have created the conditions for this investment, but it did not determine how it would be sustained. That sustaining is a function of desire; the same desire that once sustained belief in the transcendental God, and which now sustains belief in the money-God.
This is not at all "blame the victim." The victims of colonial violence did not choose to become libidinally attached to money. The libidinal attachment was produced by the system: it is the system's way of hooking us, even of making us complicit in our own subjugation. The colonised were not given a choice; they were subjected to a structure. And that structure, once in place, operates autonomously, producing desire for what it requires.
So: I am not offering an "after the fact" insertion of libido. I am offering an analysis of how the system reproduces itself. The question you are asking at the end - "Is there something I am missing?" - is one I have asked myself many times. Perhaps what I am missing is a way to make this clearer in my writing. But I do believe that if we stop at the historical imposition argument, without understanding how it lives on in our individual and collective modes of enjoyment and rational choices, we will never understand why the system persists even when we know it is unjust and increasingly self-destructive.
Hello Fabio.
The citings of Forstater and Graeber Do Not Present A Break In The History Of The Violent Enforcement Of The Ancient Or Colonial Impositions. The continuity of enforcement hardly speaks to libido attachment in the way you think this all went down and continues to go down. Read again the enforcement of the imposition of the currency....Taxes had to be paid with 'the coin of the realm'. When did this 'enforcement' stop or take a break so that the populace could find some libido driven attachment to "a symbolic order - a system of meaning and value". You misinterpret and misrepresent what I and Forstater and Graeber and others have presented.
Your words: "capital was imposed through violence, through colonial currency, tax obligations, land expropriation, forced labour, etc. I have never disputed that, and I am not offering a psychological alternative to that history. The historical record is clear."
Then, further down, your words: "psychoanalysis offers something that historical materialism alone cannot fully explain."
WHAT!? "Historical materialism" ? that is how you interpret and describe what was/is being imposed by the imperialist!? What the heck! Man!!
Perhaps you have been in places where the 'enforced structure' of the place is imposed and enforced by Mafia-like powers at the top. Does this structure then magically bring about some 'libido driven system of order, meaning, value?' 'a form of life that organises social relations, desires, and modes of enjoyment around accumulation'? I think you are confused as to what Stockholm Syndrome on a large scale looks like.
The impediments to getting a majority of the populace to clear understanding of the system are real. But they are way more external than your Freudian libido driven internal process of individual and/or collective investment for the purpose of enjoyment such that this changes the very texture of subjectivity itself.
Much to the chagrin to some in the field of psychoanalysis there are other schools of psychology that are not so enamored with this whole internal subjectivity thing as a means to interpret behavior. Particular to the "Protection Racket" features of the systems we have seen installed and enforced around the world and throughout history, I am more inclined to attribute the behavior of the oppressed populace to reaction to the enforced oppression along the lines of resignation and fear of retaliation as one can easily see in the reactions of oppressed peoples everywhere. Multiply the reactions of entire populaces over generations of inheritances of more or less severe oppression and, perhaps, one can see confusion about how extrication happens. But one thing is certain, the oppression and its enforcement is Never Abandoned by the imperialist.
Along with the direct enforcement that has Never Let Up there is additional effort on the part of the imperialist to indoctrinate the populace such that they are not even aware of their oppression. Do you know of the work of John Taylor Gatto? He speaks of this in great detail with all assertions documented.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZBdv2yznmI&t=282s
It also seems, to me, that the psychoanalytical presentation you have made and then painted yourself into a corner with has a flavor of 'it must be us causing all this shit.'
It is precisely this child like thinking of self-blame when shit goes wrong, because the populace has not come to terms with the nefarious nature and or simple incompetency of the adult populace, which psychologists document as the helplessness carried from childhood into the next chronological stage but not acquiring the ability to criticize 'authority.' This process is well documented in the psychological literature of dysfunctional families and human psychological development. Have you studied this? It is very powerful.
It is well known in the fields of human psychology that there are many and varied information processing capacities distributed amongst the populace around the world and in different cultures. The basic abstract representation of and record keeping about human interaction is Not Practiced Across All Cultures. And certainly not all cultures have used or do use unit based mathematical systems for this kind of abstract representation. And many within cultures that do this kind of representation are not themselves ones with those abstract mathematical information processing capacities. So, there are many within certain cultures and also entire cultures (many aboriginal) that simply Will Not 'Get It' when they encounter systems imposed using these kinds of social and economic systems.
So, thank you for the conversation. These are my present thoughts about 'what we may be missing.' This is not an inclusive treatise, and hopefully is not the end of the conversation. Looking forward to your response.
Marc Gauvin:
“El mal de hoy, es sistémico, no está impulsado por agentes. Pare saber cuál es ese mal, hay que responder a algunas preguntas honestamente y sin prejuicios instintivos:
¿Cómo es que todo mal sistémico que continuamente tiene lugar bajo nuestra vigilancia requiere e inevitablemente obtiene cantidades masivas de nuestros propios recursos humanos y materiales colectivos, tanto para iniciarse como para mantenerse, a pesar del hecho de que pocos de nosotros apoyaríamos tales males por elección individual?
Empecemos con el llamado mal "lícito", también conocido como "mal necesario", por ejemplo, la guerra. Nadie vota para ir a la guerra, nadie vota para tener que trabajar en una fábrica de armas nucleares en lugar de una plétora de otras actividades productivas pero inocuas. Sin embargo, lo que determina que la guerra tendrá lugar, se las arregla para usurpar para ese fin cantidades extraordinarias de nuestra producción colectiva con una certeza asombrosa. Lo hace precisamente porque nosotros, como individuos, de alguna manera nos volvemos esencialmente irrelevantes, salvo para poner todos esos recursos a su disposición. ¿Cómo sucede eso exactamente y de que manera sistémica? ¿Cómo es que nosotros, como individuos, no podemos optar por ser productivos de maneras que nunca podrían ser usurpadas para la guerra y en cambio optamos por aceptar estos dichos "males necesarios"? ¿Cómo es que los trabajadores que contribuyen a tal mal no sienten casi ningún remordimiento por lo que hacen y no experimentan ninguna presión condenatoria por parte de la sociedad?
Desde un punto de vista de sistemas, una usurpación tan segura no puede ocurrir a menos que la mayoría sea consciente o inconscientemente obediente.
Esta sistematica de mal del cual la guerra es solo un ejemplo se puede describir de la siguiente manera:
1) Algo de lo que la mayoría tiene una "comprensión" superficial y ambigua.
2) Algo que la mayoría de las personas falsamente asumen como una necesidad inmutable de la vida, como el agua, la comida y el refugio, por lo que la mayoría de las personas se ven obligadas a cumplir sus imperativos de manera incuestionable.
3) Es ultra ubicua, es decir, afecta a todos los aspectos y niveles de la sociedad de una manera lógica y consistente.
4) Produce una dinámica meta sistémica que prevalece sobre todos los efectos y decisiones tomadas por cualquier agente, individual o colectivo.
5) Corrompe la percepción de la realidad de las personas y, por lo tanto, su capacidad para evaluar productos y servicios y tomar decisiones razonables posteriores.
6) Es esencialmente falsa, una especie de propuesta cruda pero no por ello menos convincente, apoyada por un falso estatus quo pseudo científico y tecno.
Para aclarar su naturaleza con mayor precisión mirad:
https://bibocurrency.com/images/images/Comunicado_urgente_FINAl_rev_101123%20.pdf “
You are missing a well-functionhing logical brain