Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze by Braidotti Rosi; Pisters Patricia;

Author:Braidotti, Rosi; Pisters, Patricia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Marauding money: Where does it come from?

Deleuze observes that ‘[b]eyond the state it’s money that rules’ and ‘money that communicates’; he goes on to suggest that ‘what we need these days definitely isn’t any critique of Marxism, but a modern theory of money as good as Marx’s that goes on from where he left off’ (1995: 152). Deleuze here invokes his typical prescience, for money even since Deleuze’s death has become an internationally marauding beast, moving across and beyond nation-states in pursuit of new resources and new markets (at the expense of, for example, human interests and the environment).

So what then is this marauding money made of exactly and where does it come from? Geoffrey Ingham reminds us that ‘[f]undamentally different answers to the question of the ontology of money have endured for at least two millennia’ (2006: 259). More troublingly, Thomas Jefferson in 1816 noted that ‘banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies’; and that ‘the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale’ (Jefferson, 1904). He concluded in 1813, like a number of former American Presidents, that ‘[private] Bank-paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs’ (Jefferson, 1904). Similarly, Canadian Prime Minister W. L. MacKenzie King observed in 1935 that ‘[u]ntil money creation and control of credit is restored to government as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of sovereignty of the nation and democracy is idle and futile’.

The issue these money commentators raise does not so much concern who has money or how money is used, as the nature of money itself and who is granted the power to create and issue it. These days, as suggested already, the vast majority of global money creation is performed by private banks – like Goldman Sachs – who, of course, are then in position to benefit from the interest-owing and the control-through-disenfranchisement that accompanies money’s production. Of course, problems occur when money is put in the service of money itself, rather than in the service of the ‘real’ economy and the people of a country. Consider, for example, that in Canada (like in many other countries3) less than 5 per cent of the money supply is created by the national Bank of Canada (in the form of coins and dollar bills), while over 95 per cent of the money supply (not in the form of coins and bills) is created by private banks (or chartered banks) who then, of course, are owed interest on the money they’ve created as a credit.

Not only that, but Canada’s private banks are not compelled to draw on reserves or deposits to produce this money; rather, the globally dominant credit-money is created in the form of loans – as credit – whenever someone comes in for a line of credit, a mortgage, etc. Moreover, it is not only Canadian individuals who find themselves borrowing at ever-greater rates from private Canadian banks but also the Government of Canada itself.

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