In Search of Lost Time: A Note on Catherine Malabou’s Reading of Cryptocurrencies by Salman Sadeghi

“If philosophy is something useful, if it is something else than an academic exercise, if philosophy is something really useful to our life, it must propose the possibility of a real future or to examine the condition for the existence of a real future.”

– Alain Badiou

Cryptocurrencies have emerged as a new paradigm to disrupt the general understanding of money, exchange, and value. They enable the creation of decentralized and autonomous communities which do not rely on a central authority. Because of the core technology that cryptocurrencies deploy, namely blockchain technology, the potentials of these cryptographic tokens go beyond financial applications and reach all areas that involve human interactions and communications. What is unique with the cryptocurrencies from other currencies and forms of exchange throughout history, which were regulated by productive relations of economic entities that required the creation of centralized intermediaries such as banks and nation-states, is that now cryptocurrency and its underlying technology, humans have the opportunity to engage in productive activities outside the colonized realm of financial institutions.[1]

For many, cryptocurrencies are an expression of extreme technological libertarianism. At the heart of the philosophical underpinning of this school of thought is a distrust of states in favor of individuals. The advocates of this theory believe a free market economy, thanks to “the invisible hand”, can best facilitate individual will. According to them, in a real free-market economy, neither states nor corporations are acceptable intermediaries. The fact that cryptocurrencies can abolish the role of states and intermediaries has attracted the interest of market-oriented theorists.[2] Mainstream economic regimes of power are increasingly inscribing their historical knowledge and the power of money and banking within the domain of cryptocurrencies. The right-wing libertarians deploy the cognitive metaphor of “the invisible hand” in their understanding of all emerging economic phenomena. They use their historical knowledge of money as an ideological power and kill any possible futurity which may come with the emergence of cryptocurrencies.

The orthodoxy traces the theoretical roots of cryptocurrencies to the libertarian ideals that can be called ‘the Austrian School’, especially seen by Friedrich Hayek.[3] In his famous book ‘denationalization of money’ Hayek expressed a theoretical foundation for a regime of currency competition in which the state is no longer in power to produce money. In this Hayek-ian society, entities and individuals are free to establish their own money; with the market leading individuals to choose better currencies.[4] This narrative, which today dominates the orthodox literature around cryptocurrency, reduces this emerging phenomenon to a form of non-governmental currency, which, according to Hayek, can increase the level of currency competition. If this narrative is correct, cryptocurrencies are not in fact new phenomena at all and are thus stripped from creating new horizons of possibility. For the ‘orthodox domain’, the advent of cryptocurrencies is a sign of a linear evolution for money, which is a tremendous improvement in the transfer of the state's monopoly over money to the invisible hands of the market.

But what if there was a countervailing narrative that alighted from a decentralized ontology and practice? What if the privatization of money is not the truth of cryptocurrency? Calling to the text's primary question: is it possible to escape the determining force of traditions, the power regime of knowledge, and go beyond the capitalist emergence of cryptocurrencies? Can we provide a condition in which the truth of decentralized currency unfolds as it renders obsolete the dominant neoliberal narrative? The fundamental question of the present article is how to deal with the idea of cryptocurrency as an ‘anomaly’ and to imagine a real but decentralized future within it. The aim is to uproot cryptocurrencies from their libertarian origins and reinterpret them to serve not individual choice but collective intentionality, not calculations of self-interest, but collective speculations on the future which need to be shared.

With this question in mind, I will focus on the article "Cryptocurrencies: Anarchist Turn or Strengthening of Surveillance Capitalism?" which was published by Catherine Malabou in the Australian Humanities Review. I will highlight Malabou's central thesis and raise some critical questions in order to develop a further understanding of cryptocurrencies. My theoretical apparatus draws upon the work of the French philosopher, Alain Badiou, with respect to his discussions on “True and false contradictions of the crises”. I will also make reference to David Graeber and his understanding of money as found in the work, “Debt: The First 5000 Years”. As well, I deploy Brian Massumi’s proposal in his “99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto” to picture how cryptocurrencies can engineer a radically new concept of money and value.

In the final analysis, I believe a critical reading of Malabou's ideas under the philosophical tradition of Alain Badiou should move us beyond the foreclosure of a capital interpretation of cryptocurrency and help us to build true liberatory literature for decentralized currencies. I will do this from the perspective of a decentralized ontological architecture. In this way, we may thus catch a sideways glance of an emancipatory horizon of existence about which my work is focused in a different space.

The False Contradiction

Malabou begins her discussion by referring to John McAfee's ‘Declaration of Currency Independence,’ where McAfee explicitly emphasizes the need to break free from the banks and intermediaries' domination and says that ‘We humans are coins and currencies’.[5] She is keen on the war language deployed by McAfee; however she names the contention organized between cryptocurrencies and the central banks an internal war captured within the domain of capitalism, ‘A war between two brothers’:

“The enemies are brothers. In fact, what we are witnessing today is a conflict internal to capitalism. Capitalism is beginning its anarchist turn.”[6]

She continues her line of questioning:

“What else are we to describe such phenomena as decentralized currencies, the end of the state's monopoly ….and the decentralization of exchanges and transactions?”[7]

Malabou is a sharp-sighted philosopher. She truly sees the capitalist emergent of cryptocurrencies. She points out that the need to conform to the logic of profit does not allow for an actual exit from capitalism. So, she argues that capitalism is in the process of transition to what she calls later, ‘Ultra-capitalism’. And yet, she also identifies a shocking paradox in this transition:

“How can we speak of anarchy in a period marked by the growing and unprecedented concentration of power?”[8]

She interprets this paradox as the new crisis of capitalism where, on the one hand, the necessity of the transition in capitalism has led to the emergence of state-backed fascist policies. And on the other hand, this transition has a tendency toward anarchism. The upshot of this paradox, according to Malabou, is the disappearance of the idea of states and even nations. She argues that now that the state's social functionality has withered away we can thus witness the disappearance of the state apparatuses.

So far, Malabou's message for us is to see this internal contradiction in capitalism and understand the synthesis of this contradiction as “ultra-capitalism,” which again necessitates the logic of profit in a new register. But if this is the cryptocurrency narrative according to Malabou it raises a mysterious question: why did Malabou sign the Declaration of Currency Independence?

She herself provides us with the answer. Because she can see the light of resistance! Because she is informed by the work of Michel Foucault even better than we are: ‘Wherever there is power, there is resistance!’ She writes:

“I will persist in seeing in capitalism's conflict with itself the paradoxical possibility of the emergence of a new type of resistance, of an anti-capitalism that will wrench a liberatory anarchism from the grip of its counter model, libertarian anarchism”[9]

Referring to Jeremy Rifkin's ‘The Zero Marginal Cost Society’, Malabou points out that a cryptocurrency-based economy can solve the market and collaborative common dichotomies. She brilliantly sees the possibility of the emerging of new forms of communal organizations that will resist its capitalistic necessitation. 

The most exciting part of Malabou's discussion comes at the end, where she refers to the blockchain-based praxis of two anti-capitalist philosophers, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, and calls it a kind of intellectual resistance against the capitalism transition. In an attempt to revolutionize value and occupy its surplus for a postcapitalist future, these two philosophers, both under the influence of Deleuze and Guattari's interpretation of capital in “Anti-Oedipus”, are developing a blockchain-based economy that is not analogous to a capitalist economic architecture. In their “Alter Economy '', there will be a complex space of relation for individuals to create emergent collectivities through mobilizing a surplus of organizing potentials, the task that money does in the capitalist economy. A new type of decentralized organization in which “Collective emergency” or what Massumi calls “Temporary Autonomous Zone” is created by sharing all members' excessive existence beyond the capture of the capitalistic symbolic register. In fact, they want to create a space around a currency without individual ownership and other classical functions that money plays in capitalist economies, such as being a means to store value. In fact, they want to revalue value and get back its qualitative nature. And here we arrive at a novel insight: an economy without money. This is precisely where the true contradiction heightens in the precise mode of its constellation:

“This true contradiction—which must serve as the framework of our Thought and action—is one that opposes two different visions of the unavoidable break with the hierarchizing symbolic tradition. That is, the opposition between Western capitalism’s a-symbolic vision, which creates monstrous inequalities and pathogenic upheavals, and the vision that is generally called communism.”-- Alain Badiou “True and False Contradictions of the Crisis”

Toward a full-blown war!

“Beyond the state it is money that rules, money that communicates, and what we need these days definitely is not any critique of Marxism, but a modern theory of money as good as Marx’s that proceeds from where he left off.” --Gilles Deleuze

At the end of her article, Malabou emphasizes that the disappearance of the idea of nationalized money is politically problematic. She argues that this problem requires us to redefine our analysis of capitalism in a new key. She considers this renewal to be the most challenging problem of philosophy in our time.[10] This has been the primary purpose of the text from the beginning: to build liberatory literature for money that can contribute to the conversation on the current transformation of money through the emergence and logistical procedures of decentralized currencies. As Thomas Kuhn states in “The Structure of Scientific Method”, only anomalies or the phenomena that the established scientific paradigm cannot explain adequately can lead to the emergence of new scientific practices.[11] This is to say that cryptocurrency, as an anomaly, calls for a fundamental reconsideration of the dominant theories around the nature of money. These new and abstract forms of money necessitate a new interpretation of money altogether: rather than the Austro libertarian narrative, we are presented with a new story one that contributes to the conversation on the current transformation of money, and potentially reveal the true potentialities of decentralized ontologies materialized-digitally in the form of cryptocurrencies.

The right-wing Austro Libertarian School understands exchange as the basis of the social dilemma. This was the idea that Carl Menger, the founder of Austrian economics, theorized in his book “On the Origins of Money”, which is the foundation on which the entire Austrian school builds its economic and philosophical foundations.[12] This idea conceives money as other commodities and claims that money was originally the result of the early markets' exchange processes. This narrative sees money as a liberatory tool and a means to minimize transaction costs. Under this assumption, money was the result of the rationality of the early abstract economic subject (homo economicus) to choose a veil in the market and has since evolved in a linear historical process from oysters, rice, and slaves to coins, fiats, and bitcoin, the story that understands money as a neutral representation of exchange value and neglects money’s subjective, even destructive characteristic.[13] Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Friedrich Hayek's utopia is a world in which money management is left to the market, the world he talks about in detail in his book “The Denationalization of Money”.

This intellectual tradition and these ideas are now the key to understanding the cryptocurrencies for the right-wing libertarians. According to Ardalan, the invisible hand, as an ideology, acts as a cognitive metaphor in mainstream economics understanding of all emerging domains. The invisible hand, which was first introduced by Adam Smith, is a metaphor for unseen forces existing in the laissez faire economics.[14] This economic philosophy appreciates free market, private property rights and encourages limited government interventions. The proponents of this ideology believe that the invisible hand in a free market economy would translate self-interested behaviors of individuals into improvement for society as a whole. Now the right-wing libertarians understand cryptocurrencies reductively in relation to the cognitive metaphor of the invisible hand. They believe that cryptocurrencies resonate with the Hayekian regime of privately issued currencies. Their whole contribution would be to investigate to what extent cryptocurrencies can fulfill Hayekian's dream of currency competition.

According to Geoffrey Ingham, the misinterpretation of the nature of money is the root cause of the significant deficiencies of mainstream economics’ thoughts on new economic phenomena.[15] Using the cognitive ideological metaphor of the invisible hand by orthodox economics in the domain of cryptocurrencies would result in misunderstanding the true potentialities of cryptocurrencies for human interaction and communications. In other words, the inability of mainstream economics to contribute to the conversion of the current socio-technological transformation of monetary forms comes from their misunderstanding of the nature of money and the role it plays in capitalist economies. To understand cryptocurrencies correctly, money must first be understood correctly. Cryptocurrencies, as Malabou herself points out, necessitate a reconsideration of the general understanding of money, an alternative theory that can reveal the truth of decentralized currencies. 

The orthodox story of money, although logical, is not based on actual archaeological and anthropological findings.[16] Many thinkers have criticized this understanding of social institutions including money. Certainly the most important of those was Nietzsche, who described debt as the basis of the Social Relations in his “On the Genealogy of Morality”, an approach that is both in opposition to the whole tradition of classical political economy, which sees the paradigm of the social in exchange and to Marx, who understood it in the relation between labor and capital.[17] Later, many economists and sociologists developed an alternative account of the origin and nature of money that was consistent with Nietzsche's ideas. David Graeber, American anthropologist, in “Debt, the First 5000 Years” states that a history of money is a history of debt. By using historical, ethnographic, and archaeological studies, he provides convincing evidence that the simple and straightforward answer of orthodox economics to the myth of the origins of money is wrong. He also believes that as the history of money moves between virtual credit money and coinage, we are in fact in an eternal return to the previous forms of money.[18]

Graeber rejected the liberal narrative which asserts that money emerged out of the primitive barter economies and argued that money came into existence as a tool to quantify the mere obligation, which existed prior to the emergence of coins and tokens. For him, the history of money is completely the reverse of the mainstream economics argument and credit/debt is the precursor to money.[19] Graeber constructed his analysis of the history of human economic activity based on Mauss’s studies and made an argument that primitive communities were built on a sense of mutual obligations; the obligation which he refers to as debt. Primitive money, as Graeber points out, came later in the form of a unit of account to keep track of primordial debts. For Graeber, money can be equated with debt and the process of money creation would be the same as debt creation. For him, Money and the market are the products of wars, slavery, and violence, rather than an organic member of human societies or a product of human rationality.

Graeber is not the only theorist who argues that money is debt. Many economists and anthropologists have seen the roots of money in creditor-debtor relationships. They trace the history of money to the old system of gift reciprocity and argue that humans in primitive societies had a different economic model based on a system of gift-giving and gift-receiving. For example, Randall Wray in his “Introduction to an Alternative History of Money” shows how the orthodox approach to money is historically flawed. He believes that not all human societies are based on exchange and that not all human interactions in pre-capitalist societies can be called exchange relations. He argues that money and market developed together and this is why production in the market is always monetary production.[20] Like Graeber, Wray sees credit relations as prior to exchange relationships. He also believes that orthodox misunderstanding of the roots and origins of the institutions of money is the reason for all economic misconceptions of neoclassical economics. Wray's arguments underscore the hypothesis that debt preceded commodity money.

Understanding money with debt helps us to become acquainted with the powerful side of money and to picture how new forms of money and cryptocurrencies can revolutionize the way in which humans interact with each other, While mainstream economics draws attention to the passive nature of money, i.e. Money as a means of exchange. Understanding money via the notion of debt reveals the powerful and even inherently oppressive side to the story of money. When money = debt, it does not contain any external references in the present but only in the future exploitation of labor, nature, and society. In his book “The Making of the Indebted Man”, Maurizio Lazzarato, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, links “Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality” to Marx's (Das Kapital) theory of money and provides an analysis of the state of neoliberalism today. He argues that debt represents an economic relationship that is inseparable from the construction of the debtor subject and her morals. For him, the debtor-creditor relationship is the product of power relations between owners and non-owners. According to Lazzarato, this relationship makes class differences, an indebted class whose all aspects of life and morals are built exclusively on debt repayment.[21]

Now, if cryptocurrencies can provide the condition in which economic debt renders incoherent and obsolete and a new form of collective indebtedness takes the role of capital, can they still be considered as an internal transition in capitalism? If they can create a new possibility for regulating human productive activities in which intermediaries are eliminated and governance is fully decentralized, and money becomes something less than itself, are they still starting an internal war with banks and states? I think no, the whole point is our understanding of money and cryptocurrencies. It is important how you call something.

The Austrian understanding of money does not allow the possibility of a future existence within a decentralized logical unfolding as expressed through cryptocurrencies outlook. The right-wing libertarians use their historical knowledge of money and banking as an ideological power and kill any possible futurity which may come with the emergence of cryptocurrencies.  They argue that cryptocurrencies are the enemy of central banks and powers, but they want to rebuild the same structural power in new forms with cryptocurrencies, the fact that Catherine Malabou explicitly points out in her article, calling the war between cryptocurrencies and central banks an internal war in capitalism and a war between two brothers. From this we see her understanding of money unconsciously presupposes the master narrative about the nature of money and limits her to see the true potentialities of cryptocurrencies and move beyond their capitalist emergence.

In short, the libertarian version of reality traps us with a false contradiction. This contradiction is false because one thing is common to both sides of this contradiction: the absence of futurity. This article believes that reconsidering the ideas about money and exchange is necessary to see any possible future with cryptocurrencies and it is only through this process that one can affirm a true contradiction with the orthodox literature, and unfold the truth of cryptocurrencies. According to Badiou, it is only a true opposition that gives us the opportunity to picture a real future: 

“An opposition between Western capitalism’s a-symbolic vision, which creates monstrous inequalities and pathogenic upheavals, and the vision that is generally called communism”. -- Alain Badiou “True and False Contradictions of the Crisis”

In Search of Lost Time

In capitalism, the future is not real, but only the mechanical repetition of the past in the present.  In ‘The Communist Manifesto’ Marx wrote that in the capitalist world, the past dominates the present. According to him, in capitalism, the socially necessary force becomes the abstract force of labor. The form of value and the form of commodity take the form of capitalism. Value loses its quality and becomes alien to itself in the language of numbers. Human activity is thus violently reduced to working hours and becomes idolized in the form of goods and commodities. This destructive apparatus is exacted and colonized via the libertarian story of money when it is a means to store value. Said differently, Money is the domination of past over the present, the best domination of the past over present and thus cancelling out any future outcome not already entailed by a stabilized store-house of money.

Cryptocurrency gives us the opportunity to think against the grain by retroactively interpreting money and its nature as gift exchange. The revolutionary character of cryptocurrencies is not just in cutting off governments from producing money, but in and through itself provides us the ability to make other kinds of productive relations possible. Graeber in “On the moral grounds of economic relations: A Maussian approach” argued that there are three moral grounds for productive relations which are communism, hierarchy, and exchange. He stresses that capitalism elevates exchange above the other principles, hierarchy and communism, and develops its morals which produces a calculating subject who conceives life as a marketplace and herself as an isolated individual entering exchange relations and then introducing money as the best way to organize exchange relations.[22] However, according to him, communism is the basis of many everyday human relations and human cross-cultures around the world share the fundamentals of communism.

Cryptocurrencies enable us to extend the logic of communism, from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs, to workgroups. Because of the transparency and confidence that blockchain builds infinitely and is not perceived in the present, humans can accumulate their surplus and build communities that do not work based on capital predicated on the logic of profit. Cryptocurrencies remove the need for centralized verification and planning.  They can provide the condition in which new ways of governance and responsibility can emerge and become obsolete from the previous forms of exploitation. Debt, which takes on an economic form in the right-wing liberal understanding of money, can take on an ethical form. In this case, the economic debt can be obsolete and take its new form, which is collective. This mutual indebtedness would seek to reconstruct the field of ethics and as a result, create new subjectivities that are indifferent to the criteria of judgment and are really this-worldly.

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are a specific expression of the potentials of cryptocurrencies. In simple terms, DAOs are a new type of organization where all members’ interactions are mediated by smart contracts and cryptocurrencies. In a true liberatory DAO, cryptocurrencies would be only used to keep track of the time that each member devoted to the community to rearrange human relations with the aim to increase equity and fairness within the community. Individuals’ relations within these communities would be not based on exchange but based on communism and thus, money’s destructive role as a store of value would be eliminated. The DAO would take the responsibility of all its members and no one considered herself as an isolated subject entering exchange relations. DAOs can create an altar-economy based on a total system of giving with a complex space of relations in which tokens and coins only determine the extent to which individuals participate in human production, a human space full of the generosity of value exchanges and not liquidity of money. This can lead to a transition from the idea of money where it corrupts value, which is a qualitative concept, and stores it in the language of numbers and provides the state of exploitation of labour and time. Remember, ‘We humans are coins and currencies’. When there is no money, as a means to store value, there is no creditor/debtor relationships and debt, and there is no class struggle. In this society called de-centralized communism, debt would be rendered incoherent and thus disappear, and humanity may have the opportunity to pay her debt to herself, which is her future.

Conclusion

In this article, I have shown that Malabou’s interpretation of cryptocurrencies presupposes the master narrative of the Austrian approach to the concept of money and its functionality socially, politically, and economically. And it is for this reason that she is dubious about the emancipatory potentialities of a cryptocurrency social space and calls the war between decentralized currencies and central banks an internal war. I have argued that the mainstream economic regime of power reproduces its historical understanding of money in the domain of cryptocurrencies, and thus eliminating the possibility of any unpredictable future with cryptocurrencies. I also have shown that there are alternative explanations of money from the perspective of a decentralized ontology, a different narrative that traces the history of money to the old system of gift-giving and gift-receiving and equated money with debt. This is why we can reclaim a future not determined by a universal concept of money. This article argues that a new analysis of money and its functionality in the capitalist economy is required to see the truth of cryptocurrencies unfolding.

Lazzarato believes that neoliberalism is the privatization of the commons. In the neoliberal economy, Public goods such as health, education, and culture, along with other human needs, have taken the form of commodities. Community members have to pay to use these commodities, the money they earn from selling their labor, and it causes a distorted relationship, a dual mask to meet two values. If money is understood as a means of regulating the debt relationships of members of society, then one can imagine the revolution that cryptocurrencies can create in relationships that lead to production. This article believes that Cryptocurrencies are the socialization of the privatized. By cutting the hands of intermediaries and building a true transparent history of records, a new form of productive relationships can be made. Money can be passed through an infinite yet immanent domain of a decentralized ontological existence whereby the mode of production merges with the ownership of that mode as defined by all actors equally. If so, as Marx told us, one can exchange love with love and honesty with honesty. In a money-free society, morality can be redefined without the presence of the "Big Other." And the worker of Prévert's poem no longer taunts the sun that his employer has robbed her time and her ability, indeed her very dignity. But she may say to the sun this time:

“Eh, Camarade Soleil,

tu ne trouves pas

que c’est plutôt magnifique

de reprendre une journée  pareille

à un patron”

Bibliography

Fantacci, Luca. “Cryptocurrencies and the Denationalization of Money.” International Journal of Political Economy 48, no. 2 (April 3, 2019): 105–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/08911916.2019.1624319.

Ferguson, Niall. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. London: Penguin, 2008.

Graeber, David. Debt, the First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011.

———. “On the Invention of Money.” The anarchist library, 2011. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-on-the-invention-of-money.

Hayek, Friedrich. The Denationalisation of Money. Institute of Economic Affairs, 1967.

Ingham, Geoffrey. The Nature of Money. Polity Press. Cambridge: Polity Press Ltd, 2004.

Kavous Ardalan. “Invisible Ideology of Mainstream Economics: The ‘Invisible Hand.’” World Review of Political Economy 5, no. 3 (2014): 297. https://doi.org/10.13169/WORLREVIPOLIECON.5.3.0297.

Kuhn, Thomas S. Introduction to The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Edited by Joshua David Jordan. Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2012.

Malabou, Catherine. “Cryptocurrencies: Anarchist Turn or Strengthening of Surveillance Capitalism? From Bitcoin to Libra.” Australian Humanities Review, no. 66 (2020): 144–55. http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2020/05/31/cryptocurrencies-anarchist-turn-or-strengthening-of-surveillance-capitalism-from-bitcoin-to-libra/.

McAfee, John. “Declaration of Currency Independence,” 2018. https://medium.com/@currencyindependence/declaration-of-currency-independence-b404296bf03b.

Sanz Bas, David. “Hayek and the Cryptocurrency Revolution.” Iberian Journal of the History of Economic Thought 7, no. 1 (2020): 15–28. https://doi.org/10.5209/ijhe.69403.

Wray, L Randall. “Introduction to an Alternative History of Money.” New York, 2012.

Footnotes

[1] Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, introduction.

[2] Sanz Bas, “Hayek and the Cryptocurrency Revolution, 16.”

[3] Fantacci, “Cryptocurrencies and the Denationalization of Money, 105.”

[4] Hayek, The Denationalisation of Money, 34.

[5] McAfee, “Declaration of Currency Independence.”

[6] Malabou, “Cryptocurrencies: Anarchist Turn or Strengthening of Surveillance Capitalism? From Bitcoin to Libra, 146.”

[7] Malabou, 146.

[8] Malabou, 148.

[9] Malabou, 150.

[10] Malabou, 153.

[11] Kuhn, Introduction to The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 55.

[12] Ingham, The Nature of Money, 16.

[13] Ingham, 16.

[14] Kavous Ardalan, “Invisible Ideology of Mainstream Economics: The ‘Invisible Hand, 297.’”

[15] Ingham, The Nature of Money, 16.

[16] Wray, “Introduction to an Alternative History of Money, 6.”

[17] Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition., trans. Joshua David Jordan (Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2012): 39.

[18] Graeber, Debt, the First 5,000 Years, 166.

[19] Graeber, “On the Invention of Money.”

[20] Wray, “Introduction to an Alternative History of Money, 12.”

[21] Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, 11.

[22] Graeber, Debt, the First 5,000 Years, 65.

(Cover photo, Kevin Krüger)