What is Money?

oikos, modern: The extremely elevated capacity of people pressured by money to produce more with less effort and to distribute products more precisely would absolutely be useful - it just ought to be organised differently than it is with money and its constraints.

Commoning: The commons movement counters money-mediated provisioning with collective participation in the activities and basic concerns of provisioning such as ownership. The movement’s core conviction is that only the community can decide on its common endeavours.

«Good» Money: Money should be crisis-free, a kind of money that ignores certain disadvantages and limits itself to its benefits. Other approaches use alternative forms of money, underneath the reign of world money, that deviate in tangible ways from its logic.

Market: A coherent market with a common pricing structure only emerges towards the end of the 16th century in Europe. This development gave the market economy its name and coincided with the transformation of money into the universal medium of exchange.

Purchasing: Buying replaces the all-encompassing social bond with one single obligation: to pay something to someone. Thus buying is both obligatory liquidation and the liquidation of the obligation.

Gifts: In communities that have no money in the modern sense, the presentation of gifts is crucially important. The gifts are not swaps; rather, along with other customs, they confirm and reaffirm a basic bond people have with one another.

Thought reflexes: Just as we can buy anything and everything with money, we also view and judge anything and everything in the form it acquires through money: as a value among values - even when we’re not involved with money-related things.

Subject / Object: Descartes was the first to formulate the then-new notion of a world split into subject and object. It implies the world is split into the determining, money, as subject and that which it determines, the commodity, as object.

Function and progress: Money requires everyone to think of goods as both the respective thing itself and its monetary value, that is, purely quantitatively. This results in a way of thinking which also induces a new way of calculating, the concept of functions in mathematics.

Money forms people’s thinking by forcing them to cope with its restraints regularly. Yet it also imposes them certain ways of unconscious thinking. In the modern age, money influences a lot in this way, no less than the natural sciences and philosophy.