The Commoner

Issue 07: Spring/Summer 2003

‘The “governance” of imposed scarcity: Money, enclosures and the space of co-optation’

In this issue we present two contributions on money and three contributions on neoliberal governance. What do money and neoliberal governance have in common? The Commoner suggests at least one thing: they are both different but complementary ways of organizing our lives around the rat race of global competition.


  • Introduction by the editors: The “governance” of imposed scarcity: Money, enclosures and the space of co-optation [PDF]
  • George Caffentzis: The Power of Money: Debt and Enclosure [PDF]
  • Matthew Hampton: The Return of Scarcity and the International Organisation of Money After the Collapse of Bretton Woods [PDF]
  • Massimo De Angelis: Neoliberal Global Governance and Accumulation [PDF]
  • Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey: New Labour’s neoliberal Gleichschaltung: the case of higher education [PDF]

‘What originally appeared as a means to promote production [i.e., money] becomes a relation alien to the producers. As the producers become more dependent on exchange, exchange appears to become more independent of them, and the gap between the product as product and the product as exchange value appears to widen. Money does not create these antitheses and contradictions; it is, rather, the development of these contradictions and antitheses which creates the seemingly transcendent power of money’
[Karl Marx, Notebook 1, 1857]