What
is missing from the Western understanding of capitalism is its
evolution. And while Western economies - most notably that of the
United States - have surely evolved over time, these markets are based
on a fiction.
The citizens of a monetary-bound economy live within a fiction of
value, a fiction that all objects can be valued using money.
This work, by Shmulik Fishman, encompasses ethnographic events such the
Great Depression of
the 1930s, the purchase of the Caroline Islands off the coast of Spain
by Germany in 1898, economic game theory, and current trading practices
in the U.S. stock market. Through both historic events and
philosophical inquiries a central notion is marshaled: value codes our
world - all objects in a capitalist society are placed in relation to
each other because of the implied monetary value that each one has. In
the production of such a system our world is flattened into the lonely
symbol of money that is then duplicated across a countless number of
objects. Such a
fiction is both problematic and powerful. It is problematic because all
objects have distinct properties and characteristics, yet each object
is assigned a price tag that supersedes its uniqueness. It is
powerful because value is a tool of global organization and it makes
our world stable and governable.
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