The Materiality of Money
John’s post about Zimbabwe made me think other recent examples such as Venezuela that, similarly, demonstrate what Marx’ calls ‘the problem of adequation’ when the dialectic relationship between substance and sign breaks down and people only see paper.
There are also mainy historical examples of this phenomenon with people, for example, using money as fuel to keep them warm. This brings us to Polayni’s famous concept of ‘double movement‘ (the disembedding and reembedding of the economy from social life in 3 phases), which he applied to the financial crisis and the devaluation of money in Europe during the 1930s Great Depression. I am sure that many of you are familiar with Polayni’s work, but in his classic ‘The Great Transformation’ (1944) he argues that in Europe the economy went through a period of disembedding from social life that started with the Industrial Evolution. This period of expansion (phase 1) resulted in a period of disruption with the Great Depression, fascism and WW2 (phase 2 disruption). Eventually we see a reaction (phase 3) which leads to a re-embedding of the economy through the Bretton Woods system and Keynesian politics, that, for example, resulted in the establishment of the welfare state in Europe.
Polayni has of course been critiqued. He, for example, seems to suggest that capital is a mystical force outside the ‘web of life’. Another critique is that he sees the double-movement as linear while recent examples such as Zimbabwe and Venezuela show that the movement is cyclical or multi-scalar. Still, his work recently had a revival and I found the edited collection by anthropologists Hahan and Hart, listed below, particularly enlightening. I recomment, the chapter by Hahn who applies the concept of the ‘double movement’ to China. Hann.pdf
Hann, C. and K. Hart (eds.). 2009. Market and Society: the great transformation today. Cambridge University Press.
