Money in an Unequal World: Keith Hart

Both John Locke and Karl Marx conceived of their times as "an age of money that left humanity suspended uneasily between a past dependency on nature and the possibility of building a just society in the future (p. 74). In terms of their viewpoints and the current relationship between markets and money, that is, current global markets and virtual money, what age are we in now? What is next? What does the author mean by the "modern era", specifically "modern"? What is a modern economy?

The communications revolution has led to the decline of state capitalism and an increase in global inequality. The distance involved in global economics, and thus the distance involved in the digitized exchange of money and services, has caused a detachment of the "money circuit" from the real economy of production and trade. Keith Hart claims that this is the source of and possible solution to growing economic inequality, as the machines offer ordinary people to be in the forefront of technological change, and allows ordinary people who are online to work against the governments and corporations who threaten to dominate the future of the Internet. Is this a realistic perspective on the future of global capitalism? Is virtual capitalism a universal informal economy?

I find the notion of "constructing a society fit for human beings" to be open to a broad range of anthropological interpretation. Money got humanity out of a state of nature, then into class separation, then into global conversations, with communication technology allowing economic distance to make us more culturally aware. Does this cultural awareness help or harm economic relations? In terms of modernization and globalization, by nature, if you are not a capitalist does that make you poor, if you own property but no money, if you can not trade for more money? Or does this only matter if the person you are trading with is trading for money and not land?

If value is worth in general, can money actually be a universal method of measurement of value without suggesting the representation of universal values and social processes? I believe that money is merely a way for inequality to be institutionalized for benefit of the small percentage of those who control the value of money. Commercial empires have developed modern industry, creating a sort of cultural colonialization by capitalism, without integrating the poor/rural populations into the profits of capitalism, but extracting and using their lands.