A Critical View on the Criticism of Money

precisely because such a world would be in complete contrast to our everyday experiences. In the following discussion I will subject this idea to critical scrutiny. I begin with a brief look at the role of money in earlier, noncapitalist societies. This is relevant because many radical critiques of money—and of related phenomena such as exchange and markets—appear to be based on the idea that these phenomena were either unknown outside capitalism or only played an unimportant part. In the following sections I turn to the future, discussing possible ways of organizing distribution and production without money and exchange—with a critical reflection on the difficulties and limitations that would arise from such approaches. My perspective on the possibility of a world without money has changed, partly in the discussion process accompanying the genesis of this book. While I used to see it as a desirable and essentially feasible utopia (e.g. Siefkes 2013), I now see fundamental problems, for which—as far as I can tell—there are as yet no convincing solutions. At the same time, critiques which regard the abolition of money as a necessary element of a better society now strike me as analytically false or in any case not sufficiently justified, since they wrongly consider specific functional principles of money and exchange within capitalism as universal—as necessarily linked with money and exchange.