Uloga novca u metastrukturnoj promjeni tržišnog društva i globalna financijska kriza
Role of Money in the Metastructural Change of Market Society and the Global Financial Crisis

Summary/Abstract: In this article, the author relates the role of money and finances with the basic structuring of social relations. Money is the only universal form of social wealth, its measure and its meaning. Up to the present, however, the economic theory has been underestimating and overlooking money’s politico-economic role. This is revealed most radically in periods of major financial and economic crises. Consequently, the author points out that today’s economy of depression often depresses the economists themselves and their science. Bidet’s theory of modernity, along with Habermas’s, is the last large-scale attempt at theoretical explanation of the social totality, but his theoretical reconstruction of society by means of underlying “metastructures” is based on non-financial and non-monetary forms of social mediation. In contrast, the author of this article seeks to prove that precisely money and finances belong to the central metastructure of market society. What is important here is not only the subversive role of money as the monopoly-holding and political good in the exchange, but also its financial form of debt, resulting from the particular social role of debt accumulation. Society is connected with debt accumulation, and the economic sovereignty of money is its political legitimacy as debt. Therein lies its sociality, the foundation of underlying communication and of cooperation as metastructure of market society development. The present-day crisis has propelled the debt accumulation problem to absurd levels. It has brought to light that the greatest contradictions of today’s market society are based on the economic and social globalisation of finances. Contemporary capitalism is a genuine financial capitalism, which is why there can be no solution without a politico-economic and cultural reconstruction of the monetary regime and of financial economy. Accordingly, the author shows that the solution to the current economic crisis points precisely to the “metastructure” of market society.

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