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

• Technologiesnavigation, 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. Thats
  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 McLuhans words, it is the
  poor mans 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 princes 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 mens 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/notes20a
  nd20quotes20II.pdf