Project

A Humanist Approach to Money, Markets and Technology

Keith Hart

DOI: 10.26303/dz11-pk57

What is it about?

Money is the fuel of the modern world, the one powerful force that unites all of humanity into a single world market. It generally has had a bad press, first as a threat to the landlord class of agrarian civilizations and latterly as a symbol of inequality in capitalist societies. The gap between rich and poor seems to be accelerating at an alarming pace on a world scale.

The rich cut themselves off from the poor despite their being increasingly connected through technology. This economic polarization is largely due to neoliberal globalization since 1980, four decades that have undermined a national capitalism that saw both unprecedented economic expansion and greater equality after 1945. A similar period of financial imperialism ended in the world wars and great depression of 1914-1945.

The global money circuit is lawless and out of control. No local society has ever been economically self-sufficient and each has had to make good local deficiencies through trade with foreigners. This is why markets and money, in a tremendous variety of forms, are human universals and we need to change how both work in the human interest. Anthropologist and writer Keith Hart believes that our economies are archaic and unjust. Money also has redemptive qualities and, drawing on the potential of the digital revolution, it can empower individuals, giving meaning to our attempts to participate in emergent world society.

Hart calls this a "human economy", one that puts people back in the driving seat and allows each of us to connect our everyday affairs to humanity as a whole.

Why is it important?

The two great means of communication are language and money. They are converging in the internet. National capitalism is in decline, so that inequality and autocratic rule are both increasing fast. We have not yet found the next stage for human society, one driven by the two great values of modern civilization, democracy and science. If people are to be truly self-governing, we must overcome poverty, injustice and ignorance; and for that we need to know how the world really works. Achieving a human economy requires a massive programme of political education.

Perspectives

In the last century, the experiment known as social sciences failed. Anthropology, by identifying with universities committed to bureaucratizing capitalism, lost its inclusive vision of human progress. It also lost its original mission to further democratic revolution. The next world revolution in knowledge will bring together science and the humanities. Anthropology will be a central part of that synthesis.

Keith Hart

Goldsmiths, University of London

Audience briefings1 total

  • Press briefing

    Serving the Interests of Economic Democracy Using the Internet

    18 February 2021, Paris – Classical economists identified three resources with the power of increase: land, money, and human creativity. In the 20th century, governments legitimized their control over the first of these in the name of a national citizenry. They also monopolized the management of state-made money. Furthermore, business corporations made an ambivalent alliance with governments by collapsing the difference between real and artificial individuals in economic law.

    As a result, national capitalism became the norm in the last century. A world revolution after 1945 saw western industrial democracies, the Soviet bloc and newly independent countries adopt developmental states based on public services, increased disposable incomes, capital controls and much greater equality than before. A counter-revolution led by Reagan and Thatcher sought to remove political and legal controls from markets and capital flows. The result has been escalating inequality, reduced democracy and greater precarity for the working and middle classes. Two-thirds of the world's largest economic entities are transnational corporations, some bigger than all but eight countries.

    Keith Hart is an anthropologist and self-taught economist. In his 2000 book, The Memory Bank, Professor Hart outlines a humanistic approach to markets and money that aims to democratize the global economy by using technology, especially the internet—an idea he has explored further in subsequent publications.

    He calls upon all users of the internet to work towards a new form of world society —one in which every individual is free to find meaning for their lives literally by “making money”. This does not refer to the process of earning a living, but rather to taking control of the processes that give money its value and determine how it is exchanged.

    Hart believes that money harnessed to the digital media brings to impersonal long-distance transactions a great deal of personal information. The latest machine revolution radically cheapens the cost of transferring information. This is currently abused by remote corporate agencies addicted to command-and-control methods of accumulation. The sides in this struggle are totalitarian bureaucracy and democracy. For the first time we have access to universal media capable of spreading universal ideas. We the people have, in our human creativity, the means to win this one.

    His latest book, Self in the World: Connecting Life's Extremes is due to appear as a Berghahn Books trade hardback (and other formats) in Spring 2022.

Resources9 total

Who is involved?