On the 11th February in the midst of some of the most serious flooding the country has seen, Prime Minister David Cameron declared “money is no object”. Keen to justify ‘austerity’, Cameron had previously encouraged a household budget mentality that could count, save and spend a tangible and sensual money as a means of avoiding or erasing debt. To hear him speak of money as something intangible and beyond sensual apprehension forced pause for thought. So if money is “no object”, what is it?
Money might be understood as the babel fish of exchange – as a giant translation machine. Values from various spheres of human life are rendered equivalent. But this process of flattening is not objective, neutral or painless. Money is not, as David Graeber has argued, a necessary evolutionary stage in the development of human societies from barter to capitalism. Rather, money (coinage) has appeared, everywhere, with the advance of state power and state violence. Money is the means by which societies are stratified and access to resources is controlled.
Nevertheless, some strands of classical social theory find in money a means of generating societal stability and equilibrium, effects allegedly in short supply especially in Western societies experiencing secularization and the decline of institutional, solidarity-inducing religion. Money allegedly oils the wheels of social interaction by building into transactions senses of ‘fidelity’, ‘promise’ and ‘trust’. If two centuries ago in a country like Britain, fidelity, promise and trust were felt in terms of the social and geographical proximity of people to one another, today they have been displaced onto the money itself and the transaction as the principal nexus of interaction and its successful completion to each party’s satisfaction. In today’s modernity of virtually proximate strangers, money is supposed to be the means of generating fidelity, of discovering who can keep their promises and for obtaining trust.
Immense resources go into the development of algorithms that can make sense of the vast aggregates of simultaneous transactions because although the theory predicts that so many acts of self-interest will magically generate the happiness of the greatest number, everyone knows that the history of money is not a history of happiness but rather a history of bubbles, collapses, impoverishments and wars, and when a collapse occurs all kinds of strange things start to happen. The crash of 2007-2008 not only precipitated a massive if predictable decline in senses of fidelity, promise and trust, it also precipitated a boom in so-called Quantitative Easing, a technical phrase that masks the ex nihilo creation of money for banks by governments. For the household budget mentality this should have been the end: money, it turned out, represents nothing, refers to nothing and comes from nothing. On this basis, austerity can only be a political project. It can have no necessity. The recent floods – which have been linked to wider processes of climate change and global warming – may, however, encourage an alternative perspective on money that takes as one of its point of departure, Cameron’s unusually perceptive insight that “money is no object”.
The logic that has emerged from the crash has been that debt is bad. Indeed, the word has been loaded with a host of negative signifiers implying moral and personal failure and even degeneracy. It has become a means of discriminating between different groups of people, a means of sorting the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’. This has been done to further the project of austerity. So if debt is a personal and social bad, must one therefore aspire to debtlessness?
Money is not an object but a social relationship. In the Philippines where I have conducted fieldwork in Manila and the Southern Tagálog region, debt (utang) is not a condition from which one would want to escape. It is an existential fact of the human condition and, to be debtless would mean, in effect, to be without existence. To aspire to debtlessness would mean aspiring to a condition of having no obligations to anybody. But this would not be freedom. It would mean having no friends or family – indeed, no social relationships whatsoever. This take on debt – inflected as it is by local Filipino cultural and religious practices and idioms – suggests that debt may be a personal and public ‘good’ that may help us understand ourselves and our relationships not just with the wider society but also with the biosphere in terms of a range of reciprocal obligations in which the important thing is not ‘repayment’ – which is, in any case, impossible – but the sustenance of the cycle of debt.
References
Graeber, D. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. New York: Melville House.
Author
Paul-François Tremlett is a Lecturer in the Religious Studies department at the Open University. He can be contacted at paul-francois.tremlett@open.ac.uk