My research is broadly concerned with the relationship between finance and the social. It builds upon the Marxist understanding that finance ‘socialises’ capital (within the confines of capitalism itself) and uses this to inform critical engagement with contemporary proposals for – and experiments in – the “socialisation” or “democratisation” of finance. In addition to analysing the existing literature, I conduct participatory observation within groups and networks in Europe experimenting with the socialisation of finance through cryptocurrency. My aim here is to clarify the categories of labour, production, value, and the social that inform progressive experiments in socialist finance. Drawing on Moishe Postone’s (1993) interpretation of Marx, I identify a tendency within these proposals and experiments to focus narrowly on the sphere of distribution (the market and private property) while taking for granted the continuation of industrial production and the form of labour in capitalism. My research aims to move beyond the limitations of this one-sided approach and to explore the shifts in labour and production that would be necessary in order for finance to be truly social(ised). I approach this by revisiting anthropological accounts of indigenous economies, particularly that of Māori in pre-colonial Aotearoa, in order to understand historical articulations of the relationship between finance and the social in non-capitalist societies. I explore how, rather than “socialising” finance, Māori and other indigenous peoples realised the already social characteristics of “financial” logics such as debt (i.e. as expressed in the logic of utu) in the reproduction of (non-capitalist) social life. I do not advocate for the appropriation of indigenous forms of finance but rather draw from them in order to highlight the historically specific character of the divisions between the social and private, abstract and concrete, and circulation and production.
Catherine Comyn is a PhD candidate in International Political Economy at King’s College London. Grounded in historical materialism, her work is centrally interested in intersections of finance capital and colonisation, and possibilities for their overcoming. She is the author of The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa (ESRA, 2023) and a contributor to the volume The Entangled Legacies of Empire: Race, Finance, and Inequality (Manchester University Press, 2023). She was born in Aotearoa/New Zealand, of Māori and Pākehā descent, and relocated to the UK in 2018. She is a researcher at Economic and Social Research Aotearoa (ESRA).