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The Marking of Money
MONEY MULTIPLIES. Despite the commonsense idea that âa dollar is a dollar is a dollar,â everywhere we look people are constantly creating different kinds of money. This book explains the remarkably various ways in which people identify, classify, organize, use, segregate, manufacture, design, store, and even decorate monies as they cope with their multiple social relations. It is a powerful ideology of our time that money is a single, interchangeable, absolutely impersonal instrumentâthe very essence of our rationalizing modern civilization. Moneyâs âcolorlessness,â as Georg Simmel saw it at the turn of the twentieth century, repainted the modern world into an âevenly flat and gray tone.â All meaningful nuances were stamped out by the new quantitative logic that asked only âhow much,â but not âwhat and how.â Or as Gertrude Stein put it more succinctly a few decades later, âWhether you like it or whether you do not money is money and that is all there is about it.â1
Money, according to this conception, also destroys, necessarily replacing personal bonds with calculative instrumental ties, corrupting cultural meanings with materialist concerns. Indeed, from Karl Marx to JĂŒrgen Habermas, from Georg Simmel to Robert Bellah, observers of commercialization in Western countries have thought they saw devastating consequences of moneyâs irresistible spread: the inexorable homogenization and flattening of social ties. Conservatives have deplored the moral decay brought by prosperity while radicals have condemned capitalismâs dehumanization, but both have seen the swelling cash nexus as the source of evil.
This book examines changes in the public and private uses of money in the United States between 1870 and 1930. Measured by the range of commodities and services available for cash, the commercialization of American life has unquestionably advanced during the twentieth century. The question, however, is whether or not the expansion of monetary exchange works the way it is supposed to, whether or not it has the consequences ordinarily attributed to it. As monetary transactions multiply, do they render social life cold, distant, and calculating? The standard answer has been an emphatic yes. This book contests such strongly held assumptions. It shows how at each step in moneyâs advance, people have reshaped their commercial transactions, introduced new distinctions, invented their own special forms of currency, earmarked money in ways that baffle market theorists, incorporated money into personalized webs of friendship, family relations, interactions with authorities, and forays through shops and businesses.
Consider, for instance, how we distinguish a lottery winning from an ordinary paycheck, or from an inheritance. A thousand dollars won in the stock market do not âadd upâ in the same way as $1,000 stolen from a bank, or $1,000 borrowed from a friend. A wage earnerâs first paycheck is not the exact equivalent of the fiftieth or even the second. The money we obtain as compensation for an accident is quite different from our royalties for a book. And royalties gained from a murdererâs memoirs fall into a separate moral category from royalties earned by a scientific text.
Unlike an âhonest dollar,â âdirtyâ money is stained by its ethically dubious origins. Thus the ubiquitous metaphor: to launder money. One striking example of dirty money comes from the practices of prostitutes. A study of the Oslo prostitution market in the 1980s found a âdivided economyâ among many of the women: welfare money, health benefits, or other legal income were carefully budgeted, spent for the âstraight life,â to pay rent and bills. Prostitution money, on the other hand, was quickly squandered on âgoing out,â on drugs, alcohol, and clothes. Paradoxically, the study notes, the women âsweat over, add up, and budget the legal money though the ends will never meet, while simultaneously thousands of crowns can be spent on âgoing out.ââ Dirty money, it seems, âburns a hole in your pocket and has to be used quickly.â2
Marty, a new Philadelphia gang recruit during the 1950s, provides a different version of moral earmarking. When asked by his family-services social worker why he would donate to his church the twenty-five cents his mother gave him but not the money he got from the gangâs robberies, Marty was clear, âOh no, that is bad money; that is not honest money.â While stolen monies were sullied, his motherâs hard-earned money was âhonestâ and âhe could offer it to God.â3 Sometimes, however, âdirty moneyâ is laundered morally by donating a portion to some worthy cause. Consider, however, how that donation differs from an office subscription, a church collection, synagogue dues, or university bequests. Still other monies circulate as different sorts of giftsâa check for a nephewâs wedding, a Christmas bonus to an employee, Hanukkah gelt for a child, a waiterâs tip. Within our households, a wifeâs income is often distinguished from her husbandâs, and surely from her childâs. Childrenâs monies, too, have multiple meanings: an allowance does not count the same way as the money earned by baby sitting.
Think, finally, of the remarkable range of invented monies we exchange: food stamps for the poor, supermarket coupons for the ordinary consumer, prison scrip for inmates, therapeutic tokens for the mentally ill, military currency for soldiers, chips for gamblers, lunch tickets for institutional canteens, gift certificates for celebrations. Both within the range set by governmental currencies and among the other forms of money created for special purposes, distinction and multiplication appear on every hand.
Yet we know remarkably little about the social life of money. Social scientists treat money paradoxically: although money is considered a basic element of modern society, as a sociological category it remains unanalyzed. Money is ignored, Randall Collins has suggested, âas if it were not sociological enough.â The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences devotes over thirty pages to money, but not one to its social characteristics. There are essays on the economic effect of money, on quantity theory, on velocity of circulation, and on monetary reform, but nothing on money as rĂ©alitĂ© sociale, in Simiandâs apt term. Oddly, while sociologists have long recognized social time and social space, social money has eluded them. Sorokinâs Sociocultural Causality, Space, Time, for instance, devotes separate chapters to the qualitative heterogeneity of time and space, but only a few speculative lines to the possible multiple symbolism of money.4
As a result, money as an intellectual construct remains confined primarily to the economistsâ domainâa world in which unfettered individuals behave as rational participants in market transactions, making distinctions only of price and quantity, a dispassionate sphere where all monies are alike. To be sure, Thorstein Veblen alerted us to the social meaning of what money buys; and, more recently, a new literature on the culture of consumption boldly reverses our understanding of modern commodities.5 The new revisionist approach uncovers the symbolic meanings of commercial goods, but, curiously, leaves the cultural independence and power of money unquestioned.
Ironically, popular conceptions of money seem to be wiser than academic sociology. In their everyday existence, people understand that money is not really fungible, that despite the anonymity of dollar bills, not all dollars are equal or interchangeable. We routinely assign different meanings and separate uses to particular monies. Sometimes the earmarking is quite concrete; for instance, Rainwater, Coleman, and Handelâs study of American working-class housewives describes the womenâs careful âtin-can accountingâ: monies for separate expenses were kept apart, in tin cans or labeled envelopesâone for the mortgage, another for utilities, for entertainment money, and the like. The wives in Bakkeâs landmark study of unemployed workers in the 1930s used china pitchers to segregate different types of income earmarked for particular expenses: the rent of an extra room, for example, might serve to pay off the mortgage, whereas a childâs earnings were designated to purchase school clothes. And Jean Lave tells us that in Orange County, California, today, residents segregate their monies for special uses by keeping a variety of domestic âcash stashesâââgenerally one in the billfold of each adult, childrenâs allowances and piggy banks, a âpetty cashâ fund in a teapot-equivalent, a dish of change for parking meters or laundryââor âbanked stashes of money,â including Christmas club savings and accounts designated for special expenditures such as property or other taxes, vacations, or home and car insurance payments.6
As these concrete variations suggest, we face a serious question: how does money really work? How do people make these sorts of distinctions among monies, when, and for what? But first, why have theorists held so stubbornly to such mistaken views of money?
MARKET MONEY: A UTILITARIAN APPROACH
Monetizationâthe increase in the proportion of all goods and services bought and sold by means of moneyâhas been accelerating for several centuries. Many eighteenth-century thinkers saw the monetization of the economy as compatible with or even complementary to the maintenance of a morally coherent social life.7 But the power of money to transform modern society captured the imagination of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social theorists. Deeply worried about an ever-expanding market relentlessly invading and desiccating all social spaces, classical social thinkers assumed that money, which Max Weber called the âmost abstract and âimpersonalâ element that exists in human life,â was spearheading the process of rationalization. It was the perverse magical wand that disenchanted modern life. Money turned the world, observed Simmel, into an âarithmetic problem.â8 On purely technical grounds, monetary accounting certainly promoted impersonal rational economic markets. But traditional social thinkers argued that the effects of money transcended the market: more significantly, money became the catalyst for the pervasive instrumentalism of modern social life. In his Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel summed up this nineteenth-century view in his observation that âthe complete heartlessness of money is reflected in our social culture, which is itself determined by money.â9
The task of social theory was thus to explain this uncontested revolutionary power of money. Presumably, it stemmed from moneyâs total indifference to values. Money was perceived as the prototype of an instrumental, calculating approach, in Simmel's words, âthe purest reification of means.â It was also the symbol of what Simmel identified as a major tendency of modern lifeâthe reduction of quality to quantity, âwhich achieves its highest and uniquely perfect representation in money.â Only money, argued Simmel, âis free from any quality and exclusively determined by quantity.â With money, all qualitative distinctions between goods were equally convertible into an arithmetically calculable âsystem of numbers.â10
That âuncompromising objectivityâ allowed money to function as a âtechnically perfectâ medium of modern economic exchange. Free from subjective restrictions, indifferent to âparticular interests, origins, or relations,â moneyâs liquidity and divisibility were infinite. The very essence of money, claimed Simmel, was its âunconditional interchangeability, the internal uniformity that makes each piece exchangeable for another.â Money thus served as the fitting neutral intermediary of a rational, impersonal market, âexpressing the economic relations between objects ... in abstract quantitative terms, without itself entering into those relations.â11 Simmel unequivocally dismissed noneconomic restrictions in the use of money as residual atavisms: âThe inhibiting notion that certain amounts of money may be âstained with bloodâ or be under a curse are sentimentalities that lose their significance completely with the growing indifference of money.â As money became nothing but âmere money,â its freedom was apparently unassailable and its uses unlimited.12
This objectification of modern life had a dual effect. On the one hand, Simmel argued that a money economy broke the personal bondage of traditional arrangements by allowing every individual the freedom of selecting the terms and partners of economic exchange. But the quantifying alchemy of money had a more ominous chemistry. In an early essay, Marx had warned that the transformational powers of money subverted reality, âconfounding and compounding ... all natural and human qualities . . . [money] serves to exchange every property for every other, even contradictory, property and object: it is the fraternization of impossibilities.â As the ultimate objectifierâa âgod among commoditiesââmoney not only obliterated all subjective connections between objects and individuals, but also reduced personal relations to the âcash nexus.â13 Indeed, Marx argued in the Grundrisse and Capital, money fetishism was the most âglaringâ form of commodity fetishism. The âpervertedâ process by which social relations between people were transmuted into material relations among things peaked with money. For other commodities might retain their more ânaturalâ value or âuse valueâ and therefore some distinctive quality. But as pure exchange value, money necessarily assumed an âunmeaningâ form, which in turn neutralized all possible qualitative distinctions between commodities. In their money form, noted Marx, âall commodities look alike.â And more incongruously still, money turned even intangible objects devoid of utilityâsuch as conscience or honorâinto ordinary commodities. Thus the priceless itself surrenders to price. âNot even the bones of saints . . . are extra commercium hominum able to withstand the alchemy.â14
For Marx, money was thus an irresistible and âradical leveler,â invading all areas of social life. By homogenizing all qualitative distinctions into an abstract quantity, money allowed the âequation of the incompatible.â Half a century later, Simmel confirmed Marxâs diagnosis, dubbing money a âfrightful leveler,â which perverted the uniqueness of personal and social values: âWith its colorlessness and indifference . . . [money] hollows out the core of things . . . their specific value, and their incomparability.â Indeed, in his analysis of prostitution Simmel recognized âin the nature of money itself something of the essence of prostitution.â Of all social relationships, prostitution, noted Simmel, was âthe most striking instance of mutual degradation to a mere means,â thereby connecting prostitution to the money economyââthe economy of âmeansâ in the strictest sense.â Max Weber, too, pointed to the fundamental antago...