Hi, Professor Wolf. Where do you stand on cashless society? Are we ready for it today, or we have to experience a dreadful economic collapse first? Would society embrace it? What would be the implications of dropping the paper?
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By “cash”, do you mean “money” in overall or only “physical cash” (such as paper, coins, …)?
If you mean “money” in overall, the you may want to ask first “what is money? How it’s generated? What is its purpose? etc…”.
If money is linked to markets, then the true question is whether markets are necessary. If money can be independent from markets and sort of float as a system of individual debts, which may imply different questions and answers. If it’s simply a may of simple exchange, independent from markets and debts, then it reaches a whole new level. And there are many other ways of looking at money.
My point is, I don’t think abolishing money would the good way to go, precisely because we don’t really know what it is/ how it works.
My intuition is that money is not necessarily the problem right now. At this point, I think it’s kinda pointless to think about it in such an abstract level. We’d first have to tackle current and real questions of domination and oppression.
I think any activist would agree that the strategy, before tackling questions about the role of money in itself, is to promote democracy at work and change the way markets and the economy operate. And eventually your answer will be answered by the mere nature of things… we can talk about it in some sort of abstract seminar, but I don’t really see the point right now.
Kind regards,
Adrien Folly