In a democracy we have one single vote each. This is a prerequisite for the Greek concept of isegoria: giving different views equal weight. In markets, however, the number of votes one has is determined by one’s wealth.

Since it belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one.

Commodification will never work. Markets do a great job when it comes to managing the supply of coffee shops in a city and, more generally, the distribution of goods among buyers with different tastes, just as we saw in Radford’s POW camp. But as I have attempted to show over the course of this book, they are terrible at managing money, labour and

In Ecuador for example the constitution has been amended in order to recognize the rainforest’s right to protection as if this were an invaluable end in itself, regardless of its exchange value – a first in constitutional history.

If you were to work collectively as a community of, say, a hundred fishermen, you could agree that you’d each only fish one hour per day, catching a total of two hundred trout between you and sharing them – two each, daily. Yet in market societies, each entrepreneurial fisherman is competing against the rest and such agreements go against the

First of all, those burning pine trees had no exchange value just growing on the mountainside. Whatever their experiential value to someone taking a walk in their shade, enjoying the smell of their resin, listening to the music of the breeze in their branches – a value that is incalculable – their exchange value is zero because they are not

Having accepted that money is inescapably political, there is only one thing we can do to civilize it: democratize it! Give the power to control it to the people on the basis of one person, one vote. It is the only defensible way we know.

In economic parlance this practice of buying for a lower price in one market and selling for a higher price in another is called arbitrage.

Here is one idea for how to align humanity’s interests with the rise of the machines. Very briefly, this simple, practical measure would be for a portion of the machines of every company to become the property of everyone – with the percentage of profits corresponding to that portion flowing into a common fund to be shared equally by all. Consider