In an era of rising protectionism, right-wing ideology, and deglobalization, neoliberal ideologies have certainly experienced a backlash. But they have also rearticulated themselves by forging new alliances and taking on novel forms. Three dimensions of the current conjuncture are worth highlighting.
Today, as in the 1960s, there is an immense interest in the form that money takes as a central factor in politics and social life. Monetary policy is more than ever a political question of direct concern to people otherwise uninterested in its arcana. There is reason to think that the global system of money and finance is approaching a disruptive threshold of historic significance, with the potential to change how societies invest, insure, and trade.
Of course, the form of money — essentially the socially and politically constructed “promise to pay” — has always fluctuated. What is distinctive about the transformation of money in the early-twenty-first century is, first of all, the proliferation of digital currencies and tokens. Operating in the shadows of hegemonic monetary systems, these cannot simply be seen as tools for bottom-up emancipation pitted against authoritarian central banks and austerity-inducing monetary politics, as is sometimes claimed by their boosters.
Rather, non-fungible tokens, Web3, blockchain technology, crypto, and decentralized autonomous organizations are at the forefront of a financial revolution driven increasingly by transnational platforms and central banks themselves. In the name of flexibility and efficiency, they prefigure the end of physical cash, thereby jeopardizing privacy and further undermining democracy. Such developments signal the exhaustion of the quantitative easing (QE) regime since 2019.
Although they are far too complex to be analyzed in any detail here, they represent one prospectus for the so-called post-neoliberal order, whose features cannot be understood as progressive, promising in some instances to surrender still more authority to the lords of finance themselves, potentially directly by administrative means.
The terms in which this new monetary architecture is discussed recall earlier debates. In the field of digital currencies, for example, the highly restricted, limited, and market-disciplining logic of Bitcoin bears comparison to the built-in scarcity of gold — and if introduced more broadly, could reproduce the logic of the gold standard — while the seemingly endless proliferation of absurdly branded private money over the decade of QE resembles the wild speculation enabled by free-floating exchange rates.
To this familiar opposition, a third pole may be added: central bank digital currency, issued either formally by central banks themselves or — what is functionally equivalent — by the largest private banks. This novel form of money is distinct in that it introduces the prospect of directly imposing socio-political conditions on transactions or penalizing savers through very low interest rates.
It is perhaps for this reason that the more principled neoliberals themselves have joined in to sound the alarm when it comes to some of these innovations. As the historian Adam Tooze has suggested, paraphrasing Antonio Gramsci, “crypto is the morbid symptom of an interregnum, an interregnum in which the gold standard is dead but a fully political money that dares to speak its name has not yet been born.”
