Cooking the Books: Money problems (2026)

The Cooking The Books column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Central banks and ordinary banks are both concerned about the spread of ‘private credit’, as reflected in two headlines last month in the Times: ‘Dimon alert on private credit loans’ (7 April) and ‘Bailey warns of private credit “lemons”’ (11 April). Dimon is the chief executive of JP Morgan and Bailey is the Governor of the Bank of England.

‘Private credit refers to loans that are provided by private equity firms, asset managers or hedge funds rather than banks. The sector has grown rapidly since the financial crisis [of 2008], as tighter restrictions on traditional banks pushed riskier forms of finance into unregulated markets. Dimon estimated that lending from private credit funds to heavily indebted companies was worth about $1.8 trillion.’

These financial institutions may not be banks from a regulatory point of view but, economically, they are as they borrow money from one source and lend it to another.  As the other article, on Bailey, put it, ‘private credit funds … take money from investors and lend it to other often privately-owned companies’.

Some of those engaging in this type of ‘shadow banking’ have got into difficulty or even gone bankrupt through making bad loans. Seeing this, some of those providing the funds have been asking for their money back or to be moved elsewhere. The concern is that, if the whole sector were to be affected, this could provoke a more general financial crisis just as another form of subprime lending did in 2008.

This brings out that governments can’t control lending in the way they — and the textbooks — claim. Where there is a demand for loans and money to be made from lending, then that demand will be met, one way or another.

It also brings out that the money that is loaned doesn’t come from nowhere. Not that anybody claims that it does; everybody can see that it comes from those who confide their money to the hedge funds, asset management companies and private equity firms concerned.

A question to ponder, then, for those who think that banks can create money to lend out of thin air: if private credit firms, which are performing the same economic function as banks, can’t, how come that ordinary banks can?

The other news about money is the Bank of England’s decision to replace pictures of famous people on bank notes with pictures of animals. This of course is a trivial matter but it led Private Eye (3 April) to ask why so many bank notes are needed in the first place. It quoted figures showing that the number of payments using cash ‘has fallen roughly 70 percent from around £17bn in 2015 to fewer than £5bn, or less than 10 percent of all transactions, last year’ but that, despite this, the total value of bank notes in circulation has continued to go up not down, even taking into account inflation.

The answer Private Eye came up with is that it is ‘very likely to be tax evasion and money laundering’. This seems a reasonable assumption as, normally, if cash transactions fall, the economy will need fewer notes for its economic transactions and, if the amount in circulation is not reduced, the result would be inflation in the sense of a rise in the general price level due to a depreciation of the currency. The fact that the non-reduction in notes issued has not resulted in such inflation suggests that there is a real demand in the economy for certain cash transactions, in the event tax evasion and money laundering. There is still a certain irony in the government making more cash available for this.

The economic is impersonal (2023)

From the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Light is a monthly free newspaper aimed at winning people over to a particular point of view. It’s been going since 2020 and champions various conspiracy theories, in particular that the Covid pandemic and the climate crisis are hoaxes designed to get people to accept restrictions on their freedom imposed by a secretive, self-serving elite. It is also a place where various other eccentric theories, as against conventional medicine, 5G, ‘transgenderism’, MMR and other jabs, are aired as well as for ‘natural’ cures and currency reform. It doesn’t seem to be antisemitic, as has been alleged. According to Wikipedia it has 100,000 copies printed each month, and so will have some influence.

The front page article in March this year sets out its basic position. Headlined ‘Agenda of lies to control us. World is awash with disinformation’, it begins:

‘People often ascribe failures and disasters to incompetence, greed or corruption. And while these play a part, there is a plan in place to continue to degrade everybody’s standard of living to the point where we will be grateful for handouts — a universal basic income’.

The next page explains who it thinks is behind this plan:

‘It should now be clear that a cabal of corporations, bankers and non-governmental organisations, aided by progressive political leaders (the Davos set) is really running the world. They care not for the ordinary people, but for their own elevation to an elite-run technocracy. The contrived climate crisis is the means by which citizens are held in a tightening ratchet of supposedly ecological policies’.

Its language can be quite radical. Its aim, the editorial in June declared, is ‘to help raise awareness of the evil agenda to control the entire population, and all the world’s resources, by a tiny few.’ And from the same issue:

‘Wage/Debt Slavery. While we all need money if we want a roof over our heads and food in our bellies, spending our entire lives working for a government bureaucracy or corporate kleptocracy is as soul-destroying as it is a waste of a life. No-one was born to just drudge by and pay the bills. That’s why they give you cheap entertainment and let you get drunk and high — so you don’t explode with boredom and meaninglessness and start raging against the machine’.

And ‘The Owners do not have enough real power to control the 99% through overt force, which is why they must trick us with deception’ (March).

There is some truth in what they say. There is a privileged elite in whose interest governments act and the economy functions. And our standard of living has been under attack and has in fact been reduced over recent years. So their message could appeal to those who resent both of these. Those behind The Light are latching on to this discontent and resentment, offering an explanation and, less frequently, what they see as the way out.

But there is much more that is wrong in what they say. Indeed, the charge of ‘disinformation’ could be levelled at them. The threat from global over-warming may be exaggerated by some but it does exist. The Covid pandemic could not just have been left to run its course (it would have been irresponsible for any central administration, even a capitalist one, to let that happen). Their basic mistake is assuming that everything that happens in society and the economy has to be ‘planned’ by some group.

Unplanned

The capitalist economy is by its nature unplanned; its working gives rise to impersonal market forces that governments cannot control and which, on the contrary, exert pressure on them to give priority, over meeting people’s needs, to profit-making and capital accumulation by the minority class who own the means of production. Because governments do not have a free hand but have to act in line with the economic laws of capitalism, the impression can arise that the world is controlled by some ‘cabal’ that plans what happens and instructs governments what to do. But once it is understood that the economic laws of capitalism act as if they were a force of nature then the need to have recourse to a cabal with a plan disappears. There is no cabal. There is no plan. There is just the operation of capitalism’s impersonal economic laws.

Until the Covid pandemic and the lockdowns that were imposed those with such views were confined to theorising about the coming of a ‘new world order’ that was going to suppress the individual’s freedom to act as they chose. The lockdowns, and the demonstrations against them involving many thousands of people, gave them a chance to acquire an activist base. This still exists. The Light is distributed free by volunteers. Street stalls are held. Protests are organised to resist what they see as the cabal’s plan. Like the anarchists and Trotskyists their emphasis is on ‘resistance’; they even use the same slogans such as ‘the power of the people is stronger than the people in power’.

However, unless they are simply what someone once called ‘mindless militants’ who just ‘resist’ without having any idea of an alternative (which of course is entirely possible), presumably they want the ‘plan’ to be defeated and the ‘elite-run technocracy’ to be overthrown. So, what do they envisage should take its place, where we will all be ‘free’, our standard of living won’t be degraded and we won’t be a drudge ‘working for a government bureaucracy or corporate kleptocracy’? What will be its basis?

Individualists

Here they fall back on the philosophical views of intellectuals who are in the American tradition of individualism, ‘libertarians’ as they are called over there. There is also an overlap with individualist anarchism. The April issue had an article advocating the ideas of Henry Thoreau, including not taking part in elections (contradicted by an appeal a couple of pages later for candidates to stand as independents in local elections). In the same issue there was an interview with a freelance illustrator, Lee Simpson, who echoed the anarchist Proudhon:

‘My suggestion is an old idea called mutualism, where people freely organise into worker co-operatives, using a money backed by labour (the only thing we have a monopoly on) and take part in a legitimate free market’.

But mutualist anarchists are not the only ones who laud the ‘free market’. So do out-and-out defenders of capitalism in the tradition of a reactionary like Hayek and his polemic The Road to Serfdom. An article in May against paper money was subtitled ‘Free exchange of goods and services is bedrock of freedom’ and ends

‘ … those who value liberty know that personal ownership and the unfettered exchange of goods, services and ideas remains the bedrock of those free nations that refuse to be enslaved.’

Like, presumably, the United States.

An article in the previous issue on ‘How to build a resilient economy’ answered ‘Keep using cash and resist digital currencies’, arguing that:

‘Cash provides the opportunity to build a robust, resilient, and inclusive economy. An economy in which high streets prosper and in which towns aren’t some identikit version of each other. An economy in which goods and services are mostly produced locally. And most critically: an economy which doesn’t collapse every time there is a minor contraction in the money supply. The use and re-use of cash is the key to realising this sound economic foundation’.

The article went on to give as one of the advantages of cash that ‘it tends to be spent locally’ and that ‘it is more frequently spent in small independent businesses than large multinational chains’.

Exactly the same argument that Greens use to advocate local currencies. In fact, the author evidently shares the Green Party’s ideal of going back to a smaller-scale capitalist economy with no Big Business and no Big Banks.

Against ‘communism’

There is a tension, even a contradiction, between the different supporters of the free market, between those who appear near to the anarchists and Greens and those who think that the US is a ‘free nation’. The former won’t normally be attracted either to views expressed by other contributors against ‘transgenderism’ and refugees. All that unites them is a belief that a ‘free market’ will make things better and opposition to state capitalism that they misidentify as ‘communism’ and ‘authoritarian socialism’.

But, properly understood, communism (or socialism, the same thing) is not state capitalism. It is the negation of capitalism in all forms, and means the end of the whole market economy, whether ‘free’ or regulated by the state. A return to the smaller-scale capitalism of yesteryear, even if it were possible, would not solve the problems faced by ‘wage slaves’; the whole process which has led to the corporate capitalism we know today would start all over again and we would eventually end up where we are now.

The only way to stop people being subjected to economic forces that dominate them is to end capitalism with its class ownership of resources and its production for sale with a view to profit. To replace it with a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, so allowing them to be used to directly turn out what people require to satisfy their needs. That, not an idealised free market, would put an end to the impersonal market forces that The Light mistakenly takes for the machinations of some imaginary cabal.

Adam Buick

Finance and Industry: The end of the publican (1963)

The Finance and Industry Column from the September 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

The end of the publican

Reference was made in these columns recently to the concentration of the brewing industry in a smaller number of large firms. According lo the Evening Standard (6/8/63) the process is continuing and taking new forms. One of these is that as the big firms find they can make more profit by having the public- houses run by their own paid managers, they are more and more getting rid of the houses run by tenants, as leases fall in. Some experts are forecasting a big fall in the number of publicans who run their own business, and those who remain are finding their freedom of action more restricted. Having been tied in respect of the brands of beer they could sell, they are now finding themselves limited in their choice of wines and spirits, and even cigarettes and mineral waters. The Evening Standard City Editor thinks that the big brewers, who launched their own brand of gin in opposition to the existing brands, will follow this up by producing their own brand of whisky.

He thinks the disappearance of the “free” publican a matter for regret and a positive danger, but does not explain how the all-round powerful drive concentration in industry and trade is to be halted. Governments may promise to turn back the clock by legislation, but capitalism has a habit of largely ignoring it. It was not only the Conservatives who said they were opposed to any form of monopoly, but there was a time when the Labour Party, too, wanted a large number of small capitalists in preference to a small number of large ones.

In any event it seems that the British worker to whom the Conservatives promised “full personal freedom and power of initiative” isn't going to be allowed to exercise it in his choice of pubs, beers, whisky, etc., quite apart from the limiting factor of his ability to pay.

Down with money

As a small by-product of the £2½ million train robbery the Daily Mail in its issue of August 10 had a full-length leader with the caption “Down with Money.” How bold and refreshing? Nothing of the kind: just the usual inanities of the newspaper editorial mind. The theme was that the robbers of the mail train would find it very exhausting trying to spend so much money and would soon discover that “ money is a nuisance and a bother.” So why not abolish it altogether!

After that daring promise of an idea came the flat triviality of the actual scheme: “Why do we not become a credit card nation, and free everyone from the necessity of carrying bulky pockets full of paper? ”

This, according to the leader writer, would save us all a lot of trouble. No money changing hands and being transported about or locked up in safes. Just Bank of England Computers giving everyone a statement each week of what they had spent and what they had left. All accounts would be settled by cheque. The writer conceded that we might still need a few metal discs for slot machines. “But for the rest let us just sign our names and give our numbers for everything from bus tickets to bingo games. ’ 

We may pause for a moment to contemplate the spectacle of millions of busy shoppers, and travellers signing their names and giving their numbers at shop counters, in buses, ticket offices, etc., and may well wonder whether they would consider it any less tedious than handing out notes and coin.

But there is a catch that the writer overlooked. His brain child all began with the £2½ million train haul and he closed on the note that “there would never again be another train robbery.” But if he thinks that as credit cards come in the opportunity for theft goes out he has overlooked not only the possibility of signing someone else's name and number but also of stealing or forging credit cards.

But let us invite the writer in the Mail to give his mind to a really bold and constructive idea. Let him ask himself why bullion, coins, notes, cheques and credit cards are in use at all; whose interest they serve; and whether they are really necessary?

The theoretical justification for the continuance of a monetary system is that it enables those who lawfully possess goods to sell them, and use the money to buy whatever they choose, when and where they choose. Seemingly a very admirable and convenient arrangement (even if it does get upset much and often by robberies). But it serves to mask the realities of production and distribution which from the point of view of the majority of the population are far from admirable. How do the lawful possessors of (the products of the factories, workshops, farms, and so on, come to be in that position? Because they have laboured to produce what they own and sell? Not at all. Just the opposite in fact. The one undeniable feature of the world we live in is that wage and salary earners who are employed to produce the goods are never the owners of them after production. The owners and the non-producers, simply by virtue of the fact that they are already the owners of the factories, either directly or as shareholders.

So the money arrangements are merely the cover for the legalised exploitation of the mass of the. population, serving primarily the interests of the owning class.

Of course, it needs boldness of thought to consider the fruitful possibility of all the people of the world simply producing what all need, and distributing it directly, without any monetary arrangements (and newspaper leader writers are notoriously timid, and fearful of thought) but having made a small start could not the leader writer of the Mail be induced persevere?

Wage restraint

Mr. Harold Wilson has shown candour in saying again, as he has said before, that any future Labour Government will count on the trade unions accepting wage restraint as part of a policy of restraint of profits, rents, etc. Amid some mild expressions of approval or disapproval, Mr. Hill, general secretary of the Boilermakers Society, got into the headlines by declaring his emphatic opposition to any form of wage restraint. So the battle commences: Hill versus Wilson. And how will the issue be settled? Shall we end with wage restraint or without wage restraint? The answer is that, so long as we have wages, the efforts by workers to push them up and by employers (backed by governments) to push them down will continue: nothing will be settled.

The trouble is that those who argue for and those who argue against wage restraint are not really arguing about whether it should exist or not, but only whether its existence should be admitted in words.

Take Mr. Hill, for example. If, correctly reported, he does not want any form of wage restraint and presumably thinks that if a declaration of “ no restraint” is made, the situation will be different. But, of course, it will be altered hardly at all. For years, indeed for generations, and long before a Labour Government invented the term “wage restraint” to describe its policy, there have been workers and trade unions which have demanded higher wages, and fought bitterly by strikes to get them: and have never got the wages they demanded and thought they ought to have. They have not been restrained by the words “ wage restraint,” but by the resistance of the employers and the power of the government—in the last resort, military power.

What has Mr. Hill to say about his own Union. He has never accepted wage restraint, but he has repeatedly had to accept the fact that his Union members could not get the wages they were asking for. What has Mr. Hill done about it? He has done what he could, but that did not include getting rid of the fact of wage restraint.

As remarked earlier, this is bound to last as long as the wages system lasts, and most people, including apparently Mr. Hill, unfortunately will not get round to recognising that the wages system could and should be got rid of along with the rest of capitalism.

The role of gold

In an address to the Transvaal and Orange Free State Chamber of Mines in Johannesburg recently, the President, Mr. P. H. Anderson, reviewed the prospects of gold mining in South Africa. He stated that in the last 15 years output has more than doubled. It reached a record of 25 million ounces in 1962, and the first five months of 1963 showed a further 10 per cent. increase, but with the exhaustion of mines and in spite of the development of new areas it may now have reached its peak. Employment in the mines has begun to fail from the 1961 peak of 40,000 Europeans and 400,000 Bantu.

The working profit from the gold mines in 1962 was £123 million with a further £21 million from uranium, and dividends of £55 million.

One of the factors stimulating gold production and profits was the devaluation of the pound sterling in 1949, and the South African gold interests have for years kept up incessant propaganda for a general devaluation of world currencies, including, above all, the American dollar. In spite of repeated assurances by the American government that they have no intention of doing this, Mr. Anderson states that a number of South African mines are continuing in operation, though making losses, in the hope that devaluation will sooner or later come to their aid.

As is the way with all vested interests looking for means to increase their own profits, the South African gold interests, backed by a number of economists, argue that it is in the interest of world trade in general, and in particular that it would help the “West” against “Communism,” meaning by the latter the Russian government.

One of the counter arguments from the United States has always been that revaluing the dollar from its present rate of 35 dollars to an ounce of gold to some higher figure (50 dollars is often mentioned in the propaganda) would help the Russian Government since Russian gold stocks would automatically be worth more dollars in the world market.

It has often been claimed that Russian gold production is only second to that of South Africa and rising rapidly (a figure of over 17 million ounces was claimed in 1958). But some of the gold experts outside Russia have been sceptical about Russian output and the size of its gold reserves.

“Lombard” in the Financial Times has recently mentioned various estimates of Russian output, but dismisses them all as no more than “ intelligent guesswork.” But, he claims, if total output and stocks of gold in Russia are not known, what is known is that since the early nineteen fifties Russian gold has been coming into the world market at the rate of something under 7 million ounces a year.

His conclusion is that this figure probably represents something approaching total output and that the supposed enormous gold reserves of the Russian government are mythical—unless the Russian government, like the South Africans, is also waiting for the day when the American government devalues the dollar in terms of gold.

For Socialists it has its own lessons. In spite of the nonsensical forecasts of some alleged experts that the devaluation of the Pound in 1932 would be the end of gold, it still plays its old role in capitalist international transactions, just as much for capitalist Russia as for the rest of the capitalist world.

Edgar Hardcastle

Cooking the Books: Digital pound, what’s that? (2023)

The Cooking the Books column from the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘New deputy governor will oversee project to mint digital pound’, was how the Times (2 August) reported the appointment of Sarah Breeden as a deputy governor of the Bank of England. Here’s the Bank’s description of what is envisaged:

‘The digital pound would be a new type of money issued by the Bank of England for everyone to use for day-to-day spending. You would be able to use it in-store or online to make payments. This type of money is known as a central bank digital currency (CBDC). […] The digital pound would be denominated in sterling and its value would be stable, just like banknotes. £10 in digital pounds would always have the same value as a £10 banknote. […] The digital pound would be like an electronic version of the banknotes issued by the Bank of England. […] The way that you would access digital pounds would be through a digital wallet that would be provided by a private company’ (Digital Pound ).

The press statement issued by the Treasury and the Bank in February announcing a consultation on the subject explained that the Bank would provide the infrastructure in the form of a ‘core ledger’; the private companies would offer people digital wallets through smartphones or smart cards (tinyurl.com/4nkjxvpt).

Money, as Marx pointed out in section 4 of chapter 1 of Capital on ‘The Fetishism of Commodities’, is not a physical thing but the expression of a social relation. He wrote of ‘a definite social relation between men that assumes… the fantastic form of a relation between things’. The relation between people he had in mind was between producers of different articles for sale who could only be brought into relation with each other via the market, which required a means of exchange. Today this includes the relation between buyers and sellers of labour power.

The physical thing in which this social relation is expressed can, and has, varied. In pre-capitalist times it had been, among other things, cows and cowrie shells but historically the most important form that money has taken has been the precious metals gold and silver. However, even these haven’t expressed money for many years now, having been replaced by intrinsically valueless paper notes and cheap metal coins issued by the state. We are currently in a period where these are being increasingly replaced by a computer code. The coming of central bank digital money would complete this change in the form (though not the substance) of money.

You can see the logic, from a capitalist point of view, of doing something like this. Payments these days are increasingly made electronically anyway, by transfers to and between banks. However, the ‘libertarian’ right are up in arms about it. Soon after the government’s announcement Nigel Farage tweeted on 7 February: ‘Central Bank Digital Currencies will give the state total control over our lives. This must be resisted’. In the recent by-elections, the Reform Party, the successor to the Brexit Party, promised to ‘oppose a cashless society and central bank digital currency’ while Piers Corbyn shouted ‘KEEP CASH!’ Yet another conspiracy theory.

The government is saying that the new form of money would not replace cash but that notes and coins would continue to be issued. What it would replace is bank transfers. Which would make it even clearer that banks only circulate money. They don’t create it. Only a central bank like the Bank of England can do that.

The socialist retort to Piers Corbyn might be ‘Smash Cash’, or, rather, change the social relation of which money is an expression by making productive resources commonly owned and democratically controlled. Money would then vanish into thin air.

Cashless - but not moneyless (1995)

From the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Welcome to a World without Money” ran the headline of a full-page feature article in the Daily Mirror on 30 January. But it wasn’t an article on Socialism or anything like it. Written by Tanith Carey, it was about an experiment that starts in Swindon this month when people will pay for things by using a special smart card instead of notes and coins or cheques or even ordinary bank and credit cards.

Tanith Carey describes what the experiment will involve:

“Imagine going on a shopping spree and never having to shell out a penny for your purchases. Groceries at the supermarket. a new outfit, even a burger on the way home all yours without ever opening your wallet. There are no bills to sign, no rooting around in your back pocket and no reaching for change in the bottom of your purse. In fact not a note changes hands. Instead, everything is taken care of with a simple swipe of a card. ”

If ever this was to be adopted universally the result would be a cashless society, not a moneyless society which would be something quite different.

A cashless society would be one in which we no longer used paper notes and metal coins to pay for things; in other respects things would stay the same. A moneyless society, on the other hand, would be a society in which the whole concept of money—as a unit in which prices are expressed and as a means of payment—would have become redundant because the things we need to live would not have prices and would no longer be bought and sold. It would be a radically different society from today.

Most people tend to see money as giving access to wealth. Indeed it does, on condition that you have some. But from another angle it can be seen as a means of excluding people from wealth—from the wealth we need but can’t pay for because we haven’t got the money. Money, in other words, only gives conditional and restricted access to wealth. It is a means of rationing—it only gives people access to what they can pay for—and the workings of the capitalist system distribute these rations to people in very' unequal amounts.

Cashless society

The idea of a “cashless society” was first promoted by the banks in the 1960s as a way of encouraging people to use cheques and so open bank accounts. In those days most people still received, each week or fortnight, a pay packet in the literal sense—an envelope containing cash. This you put in your wallet or purse and spent to meet your needs over the next week or fortnight; if you wanted to save something you had to take it as cash to a bank or building society or to the Post Office.

The banks’ scheme to increase their business worked and today most people have a bank or building society account and are paid either by cheque or by a direct transfer to their account. People now pay for many more things than they used to by cheque, with the result that the need for cash—circulating notes and coins—has declined and an approach towards a cashless society made.

A cheque is basically an IOU, a promise to pay the payee (the person or business it is made out to) a sum of money at a later date, when it is presented to their bank in fact. This, too, takes place without the need for any physical transfer of cash. It does, however, involve the physical transfer of the cheque and the feeding of the details into a computer by a bank employee. This is time-consuming and so relatively expensive for small amounts, and now the banks are dissatisfied with cheques too. They prefer bank cards.

Originally these were guarantee cards presented with the cheque to guarantee the payee that the bank would honour the cheque up to a certain amount even if the payer didn't happen to have that amount in their account at the time the cheque was presented for payment. Then, with the incorporation into them of a microchip, they became "smart cards” which enabled their holders to withdraw notes from the hole-in-the-wall cash machines that sprang up in high streets throughout the country. Now they can also be used instead of a cheque to pay for things, provided, that is, the seller (a supermarket, shop, restaurant, etc) is equipped with a machine that can read the information on the card's microchip and transmit details of the transaction to a central computer. The banks envisage these cards eventually replacing cheques altogether.

So, after the cashless society the chequeless society, the society of electronic money or, as the computer bull's call it, “digital dosh”.

Digital dosh

The experiment in Swindon, financed by the Nat West and Midland banks, takes a different approach towards the same end. It aims to see if it is practicable—and of course profitable—to replace not just cheques but cash itself in everyday transactions.

Cash differs from a cheque in two important respects. First, it circulates: the same note or coin is used many times, by the different people whose hands it passes through, to pay for things. Second, payment in cash is a transaction between two persons only; no third party is involved, only the payer and the payee, the buyer and the seller To recreate electronically these conditions, while at the same time safeguarding against fraud, is technically more difficult than the bank-card-type system which uses a third party—the central system—to carry out and confirm any transaction. But it can be done, and has been done for the Swindon experiment.

Those taking part in the experiment will be issued with a plastic card but this will be different from an ordinary bank card in that holders can transfer to it from their bank account a sum of money of their choice. This can be done either from a machine at the bank or from one attached to their phone or from an “electronic wallet” This wallet is similar in shape and size to a pocket calculator and it too contains a keyboard and a display panel; money can be transferred to it in the same way as to a card but it can also be used to transfer money directly to someone else’s card.

The card works on the same principle as a BT phonecard except that it can be used to pay for anything from a supermarket, comer shop, pub, restaurant, etc participating in the scheme, even for small items like newspapers, stamps or sweets not normally purchased by cheque. When the amount transferred to the card has been spent it can no longer be used without more money being transferred to it.

When the card is used to pay for something it is inserted into a machine that transfers the money but no information about the buyer to the retail outlet's electronic till. A perfect substitute for cash and one that avoids the dangers of robberies and muggings (but not of counterfeiting).

What a waste

It’s all hi-tech stuff, but what a waste! What a waste of the ingenuity and technical skills of the computer analysts, programmers and software and hardware engineers, since electronic money is still money, i.e. still a means of rationing people's access to things.

All these smart cards, electronic wallets and scanners with their digital signatures, guardians, cryptographic algorithms and PINs are designed for one purpose: to allow those with money access to things and then only up to the limit of the amount they have, and so to deny this conditional access to wealth to those who don't meet the conditions, i.e. to those who don’t have money or who don't have enough money. They only make “sense” in a society based on private property and buying and selling and are yet another example of how' today under capitalism scientific knowledge and technology is prostituted and used to serve anti-social ends.

In a rationally-organised society, where we produced goods to satisfy the various needs of people and where people had free access according to their individually-defined needs to what had been produced, the same technology could be used to set up and operate the efficient system of stock control that would be needed to ensure that the stores were always stocked up with the products people had indicated they wanted. But this presupposes a society of common ownership and democratic control, not the banks' advertising agency’s slogan of a cashless society. Then we would truly be able to say “Welcome to a World without Money”.

Adam Buick

It may indeed! (1972)

From the March 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unhygienic, cumbersome, expensive to renew, money is rapidly going out of fashion. The credit card, that magic wand of purchasing power is taking over, bringing with it new problems. A Stanford Research Institute economist believes that thefts and other forms of misuse could drive the credit card companies into bankruptcy within 10 years unless they install equipment to stop the abuses. In New York a stolen card now sells for anything from $75 to $200 depending on its status. The typical loss on a card known to have been stolen is somewhere between $5000 and $7000. To foil the thieves will require devices that can link a document with its true owner by voice, fingerprint or some other physical characteristic. The economist sees nothing for it but to set up a nationwide computer system to check every purchase against the card-holder’s normal spending pattern—and. of course, how much he’s got in the bank. The bewildering assortment of hardware required (including new microwave or satellite networks to transmit the data over long distances) could produce a new industry to handle it. And it isn’t as if that will be the end of it. We shall have to guard against the crooks who invade the computerised hierarchy to funnel off private fortunes from so many credit sources at once that no one will know where the money has gone. How absurd the whole business has become. “To each according to his needs . . ." may yet be the only answer.

Ariadne, The New Scientist, 13 January, 1972.

Pathfinders: Avatar, avachange (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Avatar, avachange

Anti-socialists who peddle the old saw about human nature being unchangeable ought to hang out more with the kids and play online computer games, because if they did they would soon realize just how malleable human behaviour actually is. A recent study by researchers in Palo Alto, California, took two groups of virtual reality gamers and assigned them online cartoon representations, or avatars, which were deliberately given distinct physical characteristics, shorter or taller in the first group, and uglier or prettier in the second. Then they studied the behaviour of the gamers. (New Scientist, Feb 25, p.30). Those whose avatars were taller displayed consistently more assertive and aggressive behaviour while the shorter players were more acquiescent, and in the second group, the uglier players stood farther apart than the prettier ones. A quick and informal interrogation by Pathfinders of known local players reveals that this sort of behavioural change is common knowledge among gamers and in fact accounts for much of the appeal of virtual reality gaming. If our behaviour is so easily influenced by our perception of ourselves and our virtual surroundings, it is not hard to imagine a sea-change in human behaviour occurring almost overnight if our actual material surroundings were changed, say by the abolition of private ownership. The researchers plan to run the experiment next using age as the defining characteristic. We look forward to gamers, confronted by themselves with wrinkled skin and grey hair, suddenly becoming gurus of wisdom and maturity.

RFID, RDFI, DRIF, FRIED…

News that researchers have managed to infect state of the art RFID tags with a virus (BBC Online, March 15) raises a number of disturbing issues for the security of this new technology, as well as a highly interesting question for socialist revolutionaries in the wired world of the 21st century. These electronic Radio Frequency ID tags, which give every inanimate object the ability to identify itself electronically, can now be printed on cans of beans, and even sprayed on advertising posters, so that in the supermarkets of the near future the checkout till, barcode reader and human operator will disappear and your goods will be automatically identified in the trolley, and your bank account debited, as you push your wonky-wheeled chariot through the doors and into the carpark. Such ‘smart-tagging’ of products, posters, pets and even people carries huge benefits from a capitalist point of view, and not a few benefits from a future socialist society’s point of view too (see Socialist Standard, Jan 2005), but none of this takes into account what happens when a virus introduces Factor X – the RF Identity Crisis. When all forms of hard cash have disappeared, and the circulation of money in the economy is replaced by the circulation of binary digits round a computer network, the money economy will have reached its zenith of efficiency, and its nadir of vulnerability. One smart hacker could in theory do by stealth what all the revolutionaries of history have failed to do by force – abolish price tags, wipe out bank accounts, mortgages, debts, profits, rents and fees, thus effectively ‘rebooting’ society and resetting all values at zero. The question, for socialists, is whether they could ever condone, or advocate, such a draconian step, given the chaos which would quite likely ensue. Given the organized chaos of a society which at present lets most of its members suffer appalling deprivation within a sea of riches, the answer is surely not straightforward.

More on viruses

AOL, the American internet giant, have recently been hit by a double whammy. First, according to informed sources close to Pathfinders, their endorsed anti-virus partner Macafee turned out a March upgrade to their anti-virus software which, oh dear, oops, deletes certain vital Windows DLL overlay files, which is the equivalent of removing the spark plugs from your car engine. Then, within days, the Norton group produced their anti-virus upgrade which accidentally removes, yes, you guessed it, your AOL internet software. If anti-virus companies are going to carry on doing more damage to your computer than the viruses they are supposed to catch, surely the obvious question is: why don’t they test these upgrades on virtual animals first? Remember, you saw this idea here first.

Lastly, on viruses

In case you missed this: the animals in the jungle are discussing who is the scariest of them all. ‘Me’, says the lion, and gives out a big roar. The animals shake their heads, unimpressed. ‘Me’, says the gorilla, and thumps his chest. The animals tap their paws, underwhelmed. Then the parrot lets out a sneeze, and everybody runs for miles…. You know it’s serious when the jokes start appearing.

Drugs trial + Pro-Test

The controversy over animal testing has always generated more heat than light, and the temperature has now been turned up several notches on the regulo dial by two unrelated but curious events. One is the unprecedented ‘coming out’ of pro-test students in Oxford under the name ‘Pro-Test’, instigated by a young student disgusted with anti-testers’ increasingly terrorist tactics against individuals as well as the alleged poor quality of the debate. The other is the catastrophic clinical trial of the drug TGN1412, developed by the German TeGenero biotechnology company, that left six UK volunteers in intensive care, with two of them in critical condition as this goes to press (FT.com, March 16). Early reports are suggesting that the paperwork for the trial was entirely in order and that the drug had already been extensively tested on rabbits and monkeys with no discernible adverse effects, so that it was deemed entirely safe to proceed with clinical trials in humans. What is especially interesting about this calamity is that both sides of the animal testing debate will immediately seize on it as proof of their position: the anti-testers will parade this disaster as evidence that animal testing is unable to prevent harmful drugs like Thalidomide and Seroxat, now TGN1412, from reaching humans, while pro-testers will be entirely justified in asking how many more potentially lethal drugs would have been tried on humans if animal testing had been banned outright. As with many things in science, both sides have a point, and there are no simple answers. Even in socialism, where there would be little likelihood of animal testing for non-medical purposes, eg. cosmetics (such research today account for around three quarters of testing), this debate would most probably run and run.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Fully automated luxury . . . capitalism (2019)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

This issue looks at some models of post-capitalist society that might sound futuristic – until you realise how fast capitalism is already moving. From extraction to manufacturing, distribution and retail, changes are taking place at a startling rate as industry, sensor technology and artificial intelligence converge in a process that’s become known as the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0.

Let’s start at the outlets, where people shop. That’s probably where you’ll have noticed a difference. If you’re still adjusting to the novelty of contactless card payments, you might not be quite ready for Asda’s new ‘Scan and Go’ hand scanners. You use these to scan barcodes yourself as you go along, automatically totting up your basket items and your spend and saving you time at the check-out queue. This is part of a huge global trend towards cashless and cashierless retail, but hand scanners are just the clunky overture to the main performance. Walmart and Microsoft are working on ‘Grab and Go’ stores similar to Amazon Go ‘Just walk out’ stores where you just pick up stuff and leave, the whole transaction worked out invisibly by a combination of tech that might include smartphone, QR codes, RFID tags, or (in China anyway) face recognition. One company is developing a ‘nanostore’, which is a container-sized walk-in 24/7 retail pod which unlocks when you flash your phone, uses shelf sensors to register what groceries you pick up, and automatically debits your account before locking up on exit, no doubt having invited you by name to have a nice evening and to call again soon.

Smart retail is still at an early stage, but the cost and time savings to business owners hardly need to be laboured. Amazon Go has plans to open 3,000 stores in the next few years, and sector investment has tripled since 2017. The convenience to consumers, however, is more nuanced. 24/7 accessibility sounds impressive, but not many people are likely to want to buy bread, socks or rawl-plugs at 4 am. Meanwhile, people who enjoy some human interaction in their day and don’t like to be railroaded won’t necessarily appreciate cashierless retail, which is essentially about the speed of throughput. Perhaps the appeal is more psychological. Smart retail emulates the socialist obliteration of the money transaction. It feels like it’s free, even though you know it isn’t. Perhaps in turn that helps you feel like you’re free, even though you know you aren’t. With a feel-good rush of dopamine and no price labels in sight, you’ll be keen to keep spending. You’ll be what capitalism wants you to be – a consumer junkie.

So what’s happening at the back-end, to supply the junkies with their junk? To begin with, the traditional capital and labour-intensive extractive industries are getting an AI makeover. Seismic surveying using delicate sensor equipment allows firms to zero in on likely deposits in a fraction of the time, cost and labour of older methods, while computerised drilling operations keep accuracy and efficiency optimal while increasing yield and reducing health and safety risks. Advances in robotics and autonomous ‘intelligent’ machines are widely expected to develop extraction methodology to planet-plundering perfection.

Meanwhile, the factory production line is being refitted for 5G as sensors are placed on every physical component to report on its condition and failure potential. The aggregation of this mass of data creates a ‘digital twin’ of the entire plant so that a human, or perhaps an AI, can oversee the entire production flow and anticipate weaknesses or failures before they even occur, maintaining throughput and cutting expensive downtime and service interventions. It can also run virtual tests and experiments on alternative process configurations without incurring real costs or risking damage. Where spare parts are needed they can often be 3D-printed on site or close by, further reducing costs. Smart manufacturing also involves engineering flexibility into the productive system to achieve ‘mass customisation’, i.e. goods personalised for the customer but at mass-production standards of cost and reliability.

At the same time, distribution is being revolutionised by autonomous road transport vehicles and also by ‘last-mile delivery’ technology which includes delivery robots, drones and even smart front doors, which open a panel to accept packages.

It goes without saying that none of this matters if you don’t have money to spend and you don’t constitute ‘effective demand’. But it does show how capitalism is using technology to engineer the inefficiencies (including the people) out of the productive process. It is fully automated luxury capitalism – driven by profit, of course, but entirely amenable to full-scale socialist adoption.

Meanwhile, what happens to the workers displaced by machines? According to the World Economic Forum, 50 per cent of workplace jobs will be done by machines by 2025, up from 29 per cent today. All the low-end, low-skilled jobs are disappearing, and future employability is likely to involve running faster and faster just to stand still. The WEF says that workers will on average need 101 days of retraining by 2022. Workers know which way the wind is blowing, and are desperate to get this training, even if it means paying for it themselves. A 2016 survey of 19,000 young workers across 25 countries showed that 95 per cent would be willing to pay for their own up-skilling. This must be music to the ears of bosses, of course.

To make money, capitalism panders to the needs and desires of the paying customer, ignoring as far as inhumanly possible various externalities including the needs and desires of the working employee. The paradox is at that customer and employee are frequently the same person. Thus the peculiar dualistic experience of modern workers, pampered at the weekend and punished in the week. The more stressed and desperate we become, the more we need our booze and bling and big TVs. We are locked in a cycle of abuse and excess, addicted to our luxury fixes and paying for them with poverty and slavery.

Technology is just a tool. We can let capitalism use it against us and in total disregard for the environment, or we can take it away from its elite owners and start using it democratically and sustainably across the world. We don’t have to fully automate socialism if we don’t want to, because too much leisure might become stultifying, but it’s good to know we have technological options.

Paddy Shannon

Brief Reports (2019)

From the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

What a pity

‘Large numbers of children in Britain could grow up struggling with “financial illiteracy” if the UK becomes a cashless society and does not educate children on the concept of paying for things, a maths professor has warned. Many children are failing to grasp the concept of exchanging money for goods because they have never seen their parents or carers handing over coins or notes to a cashier, warned Dr Jennie Golding, at the UCL Institute of Education.’ (i paper, 15 June)

Why would this be a problem if Adam Smith was right about humans having a ‘propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another’? But wait till we have socialism when we will all be ‘financially illiterate’ and adults, let alone children, won’t know what a cash machine was or what paying for something online means. 

They still don’t get it

‘Working-class values like hard work should be rewarded with decent pay and security. The Government should concentrate on rebuilding working-class jobs with decent pay’ (Frances O’Grady, TUC General Secretary, i paper, 10 August).

It must be nearly two hundred years since the slogan ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ was first raised and it’s over 150 years since Marx urged English trade unions to abandon that ‘conservative motto’ for the ‘the revolutionary watchword, Abolition of the wages system.’ Maybe the C in TUC stands for ‘conservative’.

Ten less years

‘For most people, health has little to do with healthcare. It is genetically and socially determined, and in a country like the U.K. with high levels of child poverty and income inequality, the consequence is a 10-year gap in life expectancy between rich and poor, and a 20-year difference in healthy years lived.’ (M.D., Private Eye, 9 August).

Cooking the Books: Towards a Cashless Society? (2014)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Cash was king, but debit cards rule now’ the Times (30 April) reported:

   Notes and coins now account for less than £1 in every £5 spent by British consumers, according to a new survey (…) Halifax found that cash is now used in 17 per cent of all transactions, while debit cards, the most popular way of paying, are used in more than half (…) Cash has also been overtaken by direct debit, which is used for just under 20 per cent of transactions.

The following week Patrick Hosking speculated (Times, 6 May) in an article on ‘contactless cards’ (cards you simply swipe without having to key in a PIN and can use for payments up to £20) that this trend might go even further:

  For future historians looking back at social trends, it may just be the moment when the slow trudge towards a cashless society took a leap forward – a turning point when people chose to use plastic for even the tiniest purchases, whether a coffee, bus fare or newspaper.

A cashless society? That’s quite possible. The paper notes and metallic coins that are ‘cash’ are not money but only tokens for it and there is no reason in principle why they could not be replaced by plastic cards to fulfil money’s role as a means of payment. In practical terms of course this assumes a highly-developed IT infrastructure. And cash does have the advantage of being anonymous so that transactions using it cannot be traced, which is why some people will always prefer to use it, though Bitcoins and the like are an attempt to reproduce this electronically.

A cashless society would not be a moneyless society as serving as a means of payment is only one of money’s functions. ‘Money’ is also a standard of price, a store of value and a unit of account. As an expression of price and a unit of account, money reflects in however a roundabout and indirect way the labour-time value of goods and services produced for sale (‘commodities’ in Marxian terminology). These days it is not a stable standard of price as it is official government policy to increase the general price level by around 2 percent a year. Money, even electronic money, is still a store of value, even though in insecure times people prefer to transform their wealth into something that it intrinsically valuable (such as gold or jewellery) or that will keep or increase its price (such as works of art).

It could be that the concept of a cashless society makes that of a moneyless society more plausible, but the replacement of cash by electronic transactions has given rise to all sorts of wild ideas of what money is and where it comes from. Despite the illusion that money is created by banks by a keyboard stroke, purchasing power arises in the first place out of production, either as the wages and salaries of the workers or as the realisable profits of the investors, together corresponding to the total value of what has been produced.

Unlike a cashless society, a moneyless society would be one in which goods and services would not be priced but would be freely available to take and use and in which the calculations involved in the production and distribution of useful goods and services would not be done in a single, general unit of account but simply in units measuring specific amounts of goods (weight, number, etc).

Cooking the Books: Abolish Money – But Not Now (2017)

The Cooking the Books column from the February 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists want to see money disappear, because of the rationing it means for most people, but only as a consequence of the establishment of the common ownership of the means of wealth production. This, in enabling production to be carried on to directly meet human needs, would render money redundant. With the end of production for the market and of buying and selling, there would be no need for money.

We do not envisage the ‘abolition of money’ with nothing else changing, i.e. its abolition while the rest of the economy remains capitalist. That would lead to chaos and hardship, as was seen when at the beginning of November the Indian government suddenly announced that all 500 and 1000 rupee notes (worth £6 and £12 respectively) still in circulation at the end of the year would be cancelled. Since these were used to carry out some 85 percent of cash transactions in India this was tantamount to abolishing 85 per cent of money. So as not to lose out, Indians had to exchange any such notes at a bank by that date.

Marx once remarked that, while no kind of bank legislation could eliminate a money crisis, ‘ignorant and mistaken bank legislation’ could intensify one (Capital, Vol. III, ch.30).  What happened in India has proved his point.  According to Ed Conway, Sky News’s economics editor writing in the Times (23 December), as less than half of Indians have bank accounts, this measure, aimed at catching tax dodgers and money launderers, hit the poorest half of Indians the most:

‘The real victims of demonetarisation are not wealthy ne’er-do-wells, who long ago shifted their money out of cash and into other currencies and assets: gold, Treasury bonds, apartments in London and New York. No, the real victims are, as so often, the poor.’

So, no, we are not envisaging the abolition of money within capitalism.

Meanwhile, in a more advanced part of the capitalist world, in Seattle on the West Coast of the USA:

‘Amazon has unveiled its first bricks and mortar grocery store, which does away with tills and queues and lets shoppers grab what they want and stroll out’ (Times, 6 December).

That’s more like what we envisage happening in socialism, except that, under capitalism, it is not as simple as that – the shoppers still have to pay in the end:

‘Shoppers will be billed using an array of cameras and sensors tracking their every move … Customers will need to download an Amazon Go app and tap in with their phone at special barriers when they enter, then they can take what they want from the shelves and walk out. When a customer leaves the shop the app adds up their purchases and charges their Amazon account.’

No doubt, in socialism, in some stores in some parts of the world, electronic devices will help stock control by automatically noting what has been taken, but there will be no need to record what each particular individual has taken, only what has been taken in total over a given period.

Conway, whose article is headed ‘Cash belongs in the past so let’s abolish it’, favours a cashless society because this would be ‘a hammer blow to the black market and the corrupt criminals and cronies who benefit from the anonymity of paper money.’ But the price would be an increase in the surveillance state in which the authorities would be able to know how all of us spent our money. Besides, some geniuses have invented an anonymous electronic money – bitcoins -- another waste and misapplication, alongside Amazon’s app, of human ingenuity and IT brought about by capitalism.

Cooking the Books: Cashless but Not Profitless (2016)

The Cooking the Books column from the December 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Apple’s latest ambition is to rid the world of cash’ reads the headline in the Times (20 October), reporting Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, saying ‘we would like to be a catalyst for taking cash out of the system.’ The prospect of a ‘cashless society’ has been held out before. Apple’s plan is that people should use its smartphones to pay for things instead of cash or a cheque or even a debit or credit card.

A cashless society is not the same as a moneyless society, for a reason hinted at in a turn of phrase used by Christopher Burniske, described as ‘an analyst of digital currency’:

‘Apple’s is building a payment structure where you can use all kinds of digital means to transfer value.’

Actually, transferring value is not a bad way of describing one of the functions of money, that of being a means of exchanging values.

When something is bought (and therefore sold) what is happening is that the ownership of something that has ‘value’ is being transferred from one person to another. Money is the means through which this is done. In this transaction money represents a value that is transferred from the buyer to the seller in exchange for something in principle of equal value. The buyer will normally have acquired the money by themselves having exchanged something for it.

Things that are bought and sold (Marx called them ‘commodities’) have value because they have been produced by work, their value being the amount of necessary labour embodied in them through the work of the series of workers involved in their production from start to finish. At one time money had intrinsic value itself as a product of labour, that involved in mining, transporting and refining the gold or silver and then of minting these into coins. So exchange really was an exchange of real things of equal value. This time is long past. For over a hundred years now, ‘money’ has been paper (and with the new £5 note plastic) and metal tokens for value. These still represent value even though they have no, or not much, value themselves.

Now that the electronic technology exists there is no reason why cash could not be replaced by digital money. In fact it already is to an increasing extent. It is doubtful, though, that it will ever completely replace cash. In theory it could, but a cashless society would be not be a moneyless society.  It would be a society in which cash had merely been replaced by a digital currency. It would still be a buying and selling society where goods and services were produced for sale on a market with a view to profit. It would still be a society based on the ownership of the means of wealth production by a tiny minority with the non-owning majority being forced to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary. It would still be capitalism.

But what a waste of human ingenuity and IT that could be more usefully employed to help organise the production and distribution of wealth to meet human needs in the non-market, money-free society that socialism will be. Apple’s real aim of course is not so much to help a cashless society emerge as to make a profit from selling the devices it makes and the apps to use them.

Cooking the Books: Cashless is Not Moneyless (2015)

The Cooking the Books column from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'WE DON'T NEED CASH. LET'S ABOLISH IT OUTRIGHT' was the perhaps surprising headline of an article in the Times (24 March) by Ed Conway, the economics editor of Sky News. His argument was that the continuing use of cash is negating the policy of governments and central banks of trying to control the economy by varying interest rates.

The theory behind this policy is that if interest rates go up people will be encouraged to save, and 'if a recession strikes, down go interest rates, and, in theory, everyone goes out and spends.' Leaving aside the fact that this mistakenly assumes that an economic recovery can be consumer-led whereas it has to be profit-led, interest rates are now so low that this theory, even on its own assumptions, is not working.

As the rise in the general price level has virtually stopped in the Eurozone, and has even fallen, the European Central Bank has resorted to negative interest rates. The rate is now minus 0.2 percent. The aim is still to encourage spending. But it hasn't. What it has done, according to Conway, is encourage people to keep their savings in cash rather than deposit them in a bank. Even banks are not depositing their cash with the Bank of England as they normally do but 'are stacking it away on pallets in warehouses under lock and key.' If you do this you don't get any interest of course, but at least it avoids you having to pay 'negative interest'.

Conway's solution is to abolish cash altogether so as to prevent people and banks doing this with the result that their spending cannot be controlled by the central bank (not that it is anyway). It's not going to happen but, even if it did, the resulting 'cashless' society' would not be the 'moneyless' society that socialists have always envisaged.

Socialism will be a moneyless society because, both productive resources and products when they are produced being commonly owned, there will be no exchange of goods and services of equal economic value, no buying and selling, only distribution (whether through free distribution or free access). So there would be no need of money as a means of exchange, money's primary function.

A cashless society would still have an exchange economy, the difference being that the means of exchange would no longer include notes and coins, only electronic transfers. In fact this is already how most exchange transactions are done. Capitalist firms and banks have long since abandoned transferring wads of notes to make a payment or a loan. And individuals are using electronic payments more and more. As Conway notes:

'The majority of our day-to-day transactions now take place using credit cards, contactless payment and charge cards (such as Oyster cards). Internet banking means you can transfer money to someone in a few clicks.'

Notes and coins are not in themselves money, but only tokens for it. There is no reason in principle why they couldn't be replaced by something else – by, precisely, digits on a computer. These too are still tokens for money because the purchasing power they represent circulates. If, like store cards, they were cancelled on use, they wouldn't be money-tokens but this is not what happens. They are transferred from owner to owner just as cash is and are just as much 'currency'.

Socialism will involve the disappearance not just of notes and coins but also of these other, electronic tokens for money as a means of exchange and payment. It will be a 'plastic-less' society too.