Hypercapitalism

1. Hypercapitalism COMU2020 Phil Graham Week 6

2. Political economy • As a branch of moral philosophy • As the study of how values are produced, ditributed, exchanged, and consumed (political); study of how power is distributed and exercised. • Political economy of comunication studies how communication figures in political economy (capitalism, feudalism, etc) • Field is often concerned with ownership • Monopoloy

3. “Value” and “values” • It is uncontentious to note that dollar values dominate many influential value systems. • What is a dollar worth? • What does it represent? • Who says? • How come they get to say so? • What does it mean to be able to say so?

4. The relationship between money and morality • The Church and Interest • Usury and usurers • State Interests • “Arms race” • Debt and obligation • The character of money • as Object • Symbol • Tool

5. Mercantilism • Technologies=navigation, cannon, guns, mining, and metallurgy • All require muscle • Hence slaves • Contains a principle that riches and power are linked as follows: if a nation is rich it is powerful • Conquest and protection of travel and trade routes • Hence empires • Very costly • Hence Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations)

6. Money • Available forms of money tell us a lot • What we can do with them says a lot • Who can access which forms says a lot • Who gets to make it and say it is “real” tells us a lot • It is not a stable or constant thing • Cows, salt, wheat, gold, paper, beads, leather, digital bits, • What next?

7. Money (cntd) • Money is an idea that takes a variety of physical forms. In one sense, money is a repository of labour, a specific amount of human activity that takes place within a given amount of time. That’s why time is money and money is time. Money functions as the social measure of various forms of human activity, or, human life. (Hart, 2000) • Money is a medium. In McLuhan’s words, it is ‘the poor man’s credit card’. But credit is also money: it is a form of future money, unrealised future time, future activity, and therefore – quite literally – the future of particular people, institutions, and whole populations. Debt is effectively a claim on future human life. • The idea of money is that of full exchangeability (commensurability) –the idea of money is universal value, exchangeable for all others. It is the means by which we render our various activities, and the products thereof, qualitatively homogenous. It is how we make the work of a baker translatable into the work of a stonemason or a university professor or a mercenary or a politician.

8. Money, media, values • What sort of labour (activity) “counts” as being of value? • More valuable? • Most valuable? • Civil war, telegraph, money • What are the implications of sending money as gold, or as paper (a promissory note), or as electric pulses, or as digital “bits”?

9. New Media and Value • For, since the introduction of the new artillery of powder guns, &c., and the discovery of wealth in the Indies, &c. war is become rather an expense of money than men, and success attends those that can most and longest spend money: whence it is that prince’s [sic] armies in Europe are become more proportionable to their purses than to the number of their people; so that it uncontrollably follows that a foreign trade managed to best advantage, will make our country so strong and rich, that we may command the trade of the world, the riches of it, and consequently the world itself. (Bolingbroke 1752 as cited in Viner 1948).

10. Money and value in a digital world • Money reveals itself as a social object • Value … does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men’s social product as is their language. (Marx, 1976: 167) • The relation between language, media, and value in a digital world.

11. References • McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: the extensions of man. London: Routledge. • Viner, J. (1948). Power versus plenty as objectives of foreign policy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. World Politics, 1, (1): 1-29. • Marx, K. (1976). Capital: A critique of political economy (Vol. 1), (B. Fowkes, Trans.). London: Penguin. • Hart, K. (2000). The memory bank: Money in an unequal world. London: Profile • Graham, P. (2000). A Bunch of Notes and Quotes II: Money. LNC http://www.philgraham.net/notes%20and%20quotes%20II.pdf