What does it mean to say the meaning of money has been all
but obliterated? I’m not much of an economist so I enter this discussion with
some hesitation, but there are a few simpler concepts that we can go over
perhaps.
One of the important characteristics of money as a medium of
exchange is that it should serve as a store of some sort of value when affixed
to the objects to be exchanged. How is this value derived? Well that question
usually leads back to the concept of supply and demand, which might be somewhat
useful for explanatory purposes, as simplistic as that concept is.
So objects take on a value in accordance with how plentiful
they are (supply) as well as how much people are willing to pay for those
objects considering availability and desire for those objects (demand).
Problems do arise when we talk about supply and demand. We
try to explain this with a model of individuals as rational participants in a
free market possessing perfect information, but that’s going to run into
problems of course. How much are people willing to pay for something? Are they
forced to pay something, as is the case when there are monopolies or state
coercion? Are they influenced to pay for certain things through social pressure
and carefully tuned marketing tactics? How much of a choice do we have in what
becomes widely produced and widely available considering the market forces
generated by large economic entities such as a multinational corporation?
We can still agree, however tenuously, that our money holds
some sort of agreed-upon value, though we will have to dispense of the notion
that each of us is a free rational actor in a free market possessing perfect
information. Insofar as our money circulates within a stable social system,
however much force and manipulation is required to maintain that system, the
money still manages to hold a universal value that is agreed upon, however
passively, by market participants.
But the funny thing is now that very value, as asymmetrically
contrived and artificially cultivated as it is, is itself under assault. And by
the very participants that benefit from a stable monetary value no doubt! Short
term gain always seems like a good idea until the long term effects begin to
make themselves felt. That will happen soon enough I imagine.
Speculators manipulate currencies and energy and commodity
prices in vast, carefully orchestrated abstractions in order to enrich
themselves with values completely divorced from any physical production.
Financial institutions generate huge unstable masses of fictional value by
creating debt upon debt, manipulating each tier of debt to extract more and
more fictional value from them, in turn destroying the productive classes that
generate the value in the first place. Monetary value itself is bent and
squeezed around the slow disintegration of the global working class and middle
class.
So in effect, money is no longer some store of value that
can be used as a medium for free exchange in a healthy economy, but a sort of
tethering agent that ties us to an increasingly self-destructive economic
system, the only purpose of which is to disproportionately enrich a parasitic oligarchic
class.
