I am grateful for the comments in this book forum and the opportunity to clarify my book’s theoretical ambition. In Moral Economies of Money, I argue that British colonial and U.S. history oscillates between two poles. On the one hand, periods of broad but exclusivist public engagement with money creation, which I call moral economies of money. In such periods, money users understood that currency/credit are the product of a design process: Who gets to create money, according to what rules, for whom, and for what purpose? On the other hand, periods marked by a widespread disconnect from knowledges about money creation, the outcome of a process I call monetary silencing.

Because this is an important theoretical concern, I want to focus on a worry most contributors to this forum share: How does Moral Economies of Money relate to the central categories of social analysis, especially class, race, gender, and the state? I think that removing the assumption of monetary silence defamiliarizes these categories, opens up new avenues for historical inquiry, and broadens political possibilities today.

To begin with, if we suspend the assumption of monetary silence, the capital-labor relation no longer looks the same. Under monetary silence, class formation and struggle play out as capital and labor vie for power and wealth. Because they focus on changes in the capital-labor relation, analysts highlight issues such as unions, strikes, the labor process, and distributive outcomes. In the book, I have little to say about these classical terrains of class. But I think moral economies of money and their silencing shape possibilities for understanding class formation and prospects for realizing workers’ rights.

For instance, the first March on Washington, known as Coxey’s Army, took place in a period of intense monetary controversy. Inspired by greenbacks of the Civil War, marchers demanded that Congress create money to employ them for road construction and maintenance—they saw it was immoral and illogical to prevent them from contributing to society and denying them much-needed income. They wanted to redesign money so public institutions could accomplish what private employers did not. Such moral economies of money do not make the wage relation itself unimportant. But they place it in the context of a more encompassing structure, defamiliarizing the capital-labor relation, making it more contingent. Monetary silence, in other words, shapes the conditions for class formation as well as the frame for its analysis.

When it comes to small farmers, a class that has repeatedly placed moral economies of money at the center of its politics, public monetary knowledge and its absence are important in a direct way. Eighteenth-century and postbellum farmers’ movements thought that access to credit in the form of public money creation meant the difference between their continued existence as a class of owners, or a transition to waged work. Therefore, they claimed the right to participate in the politics of money creation. Take, for example, Ten Men of Money Island. In this widely read late-nineteenth-century work of Populist fiction that also captures the spirit of other periods, the author urged readers to think of themselves as active participants in the process of designing credit/debt relations between the institutions of self-governance and money users. If money users delegate the right to create money to banking corporations—when they lose the habit of involvement in it—, widespread immiseration and increasing inequality will ensue. Once again, the presence or absence of moral economies shapes conditions for class formation, both in historical actors’ perception and at the level of social analysis.

Suspending the assumption of monetary silence also changes the common understanding of “the state” and possibilities for governance. Ten Men of Money Island helps showcase how: When they design a credit/debt relation between money issuer and money users as a governance mechanism that allows them to coordinate their labor, the book’s protagonists do not relate to “the state” as an external entity that exists above “society” but participate in public money creation—something that should not be privatized. Note that this is not a libertarian fantasy of a society in which heroic individuals engage in individual exchanges without governance. It is, instead, a project of democratizing money issue and redemption: a conceptual space in which conventional notions of “the state” as an external and coercive but necessary entity become destabilized.

I have tried to explain that I see “class” and “state” in the book in a way that seeks to defamiliarize them. There is much more work to do, and I think removing the assumption of monetary silence will open up new ways of looking at other social categories. While I could discuss race only relatively briefly in Chapter 1, Diren Valayden and I have argued that race is the project and outcome of a particularly violent form of monetary silencing, grounded in the denial of Native forms of monetary coordination. Colonizer theorists such as John Locke advanced the notion that Natives do not have any form of economic coordination, that they are moneyless societies, and their land is there for the taking of those who can make use of it. In practice, the monetary dimension of colonization involved at least two processes: Disabling Native monetary systems and imposing those of the colonizers. This process is also constitutive—it is a silencing that is more categorical and violent because it denies the aptitude of a population to be part of a monetary society (claims that echo today when we hear that certain populations lack “financial literacy” and their problems are not due to orchestrated exclusion but incompetence to be remedied by “education”).

A range of additional questions should be asked: Is the assumption of monetary silence complicit in organizing our relations with “nature”? How does it relate to denial of pay for work in households, the vast amount of unpaid labor that “does not count”? Would institutionally grounded public monetary knowledge open up distinct possibilities for thinking about reparations? How would widely shared institutional monetary knowledge change how we relate to an uncertain future? From this perspective, it is only a slight exaggeration to say, with Adam Slez, that Moral Economies of Money “is not about money at all” but about gauging possibilities for democratizing society.

Return to Jakob Feinig: Moral Economies of Money symposium prompt.