Making Capital Democratic : A Reconstruction of State, Credit, and Finance

The “software” that structures our financial systems and, through them, the broader economy, is made up of certain basic concepts that guide how we think.These concepts include money, finance, investment, credit, and - above all - capital.This conceptual software manifests itself in our current “operating system” of institutions and practices.But our concepts and the system itself are radically out of date as representations of monetary, financial, productive and distributive reality.Robert Hockett shows that this mismatch has serious consequences and argues that it’s time for a complete overhaul of our economic understanding. The underlying conceptual problem, Hockett contends, is that we miss the extent to which our financial systems are deeply and ineradicably public.Money is an inherent emanation of our basic social contract; capital in turn emerges as almost entirely publicly generated.Our systems of finance and investment must therefore be publicly and democratically determined.L