2. The Economy of Infinite Valorization

The Redemption of Social Infinity

The fusion of the spiritual and the market-like discourses—a veritable “theopolitical economy,” according to David Singh—is at the root of the concept of redemption, as the Latin etymology of the verb red-imere, in English, “to buy back,” discloses.3 The covenant-making God of the Bible not only strikes down sinners but also accords protection by aiding or saving the lives of his people. In the Old Testament, redemption is notably associated with the rescuing and deliverance of the Jews from slavery and their flight from Egypt. Although in the Hebrew tradition redemption was never exclusively understood as a factual gain, the biblical model for the salvation of the soul as a canceling of material obligations had a long history in antiquity.4 Leviticus calls for the canceling of material obligations: The Jubilee was the moment in which society would begin again from a clean slate, a common institution in antiquity. Parsing the issue of indebtedness and its relation to widespread enslavement of peasantry at the dawn of large-settled societies, David Graeber observes that “Sumerian and later Babylonian kings periodically announced general amnesties . . . declar[ing] all outstanding consumer debt null and void,” thus providing relief and reestablishing social peace within their empires.5

Christianity absorbs this basic schema while transforming (or transgressing) it. Its definition of salvation is adopted from Roman law, which referred to the ransom paid by the Senate to entities who held captive Roman soldiers at the time of the Republic. This model rests on the trust that some Other (called redemptor) will intervene and on the ensuing tributary relationship between prisoner and benefactor.6 Therein a contractual or pactional system of reward and punishment emerges as a dominating institution that defines how Christianity envisions redemption in theological terms. This is not the place to show how the accounting of the soul in the afterlife is far from being mathematically sound. However, earthly Christian societies did engage in various forms of redemption by declaring amnesties or adopting systems of welfare for the community. In the Middle Ages, the general tendency to invest in the needs of the communitas was called fructuatio, while the imperative to donate quotas of capital for good works at the end of one’s life fell under the term restitutio. Although these mechanisms ensured relief for the community, they were not devoid of a degree of violence—Paul Dumouchel writes that “bonds of solidarity, obligations, and prescriptions restrain the desires of those who have, by imposing upon them a duty to give, and of those who have not, for they must be satisfied with what they get.”7 Giacomo Todeschini points out, for instance, how it was not uncommon for religious authorities like the ninth- to tenth-century century Bishop Ratherius of Verona to claim that the poor who want riches sin, while the rich, who are unencumbered by wealth, are an example of piety.8

Despite social conventions like fructuatio and restitutio, Christianity progressively liquidates the principles of mutuality that protected community members of what Dumouchel calls “traditional societies” by manipulating transcendence and thus deregulating the contractual system of redemption. Christian theology rewrites the clauses of the Jewish covenant, opening a pathway for dismantling its base of reciprocity. It is no coincidence that one of its targets was the Sabbath year of Leviticus. The spiritualization of the pactional system—one that originates in the understanding of “the infinite value of Christ’s body, or of the ecclesiastic community embodied by the Church”—leads to a remarkable repudiation of the Old Testament debt-relief practice.9 Ecclesiastic authorities like the eleventh-century Benedictine monk Peter Damian made their case against the Jubilee on the basis of a new, unlimited economy of grace. He pointed out that “the precepts of the law are truly fulfilled when they are carried out in accord with the spiritual meaning for which they were instituted. Formerly, while they were being carried out physically, they were empty, that is, a shadow or image of the thing, and not the thing itself.”10 It is the (abstract) infinite dimension of transcendence that shifts the focus from redistribution in this life to the one beyond that. Debt forgiveness in life is only an illusory copy of true forgiveness. By projecting value to the elsewhere of the divine, Peter Damian discounts earthly salvation. Therein the idealization of infinity supersedes the social infinity of human relations. This transformation of the pactional economy hints at the modulation of transcendence in modern times. As an economic virtue that will be rewarded, neoliberal austerity follows the same sacrificial formalism enacted by the elsewhere of Peter Damian’s “thing in itself.” Under advanced capitalism, the spiritualization that appreciates the value of the beyond dissolves any limit and possibility of solvency for people on earth because virtuosity is now determined by the expansion of surplus value.

This compulsion to valorize value is clearly demonstrated by modern charity. When the ultrarich class engages in acts of magnanimity or in grandiose plans to save the world, it does so in ostensible and profitable ways—at a minimum, the investment in charity must grow the brand of the virtuous billionaire, while serving his self-interests.11 In effect, for the elite, direct access to grace on earth generates two behaviors that are dominated by surplus value: conspicuous opulence—think of the new space craze among oligarchs—and avarice, another of those theological categories that relate to the capitalist unconscious. The miser is the perfect example of somebody driven by the desire of accumulation for accumulation’s sake. As Mladen Dolar points out, the miser’s wealth becomes the object of all objects, a metaphysic entity or “surplus object” that augments totality not because of some specific goal but because it mirrors infinity. The surplus object is what “in money is more than money, the general equivalent without equivalent.”12 This surplus object is the neoliberal God of Christianity: the creed that demands infinite valorization through extractive practices and debt economy. The miser and their ostentatious opposite display a mimetic behavior. They follow an imaginary Other that is leading us to extinction.

By structuring itself around a transcendent Other that demands the endless expansion of surplus value, neoliberalism not only degrades societies and the ecosystem but also blocks the necessary injection of liquidity to address climate change by invoking the sanctity of the law of payability. Debt is the other side of valorization. Payability is presented as a universal law that, however, does not apply to the economic elite, who always have a path to redemption—we may call a soteriology for the 1 percent. Bailouts are for those who run the financial machine, Dolar points out, as these elites are always granted assistance because they are “in the mercy,” eternally saved by virtue of “their very position which entitled them to speculation.”13 As this cast socializes its losses, neoliberal governments staunchly promote the virtuousness of strict austerity measures. The founding principle of this narrative, which Stephanie Kelton has dubbed the “deficit myth,” assimilates the household’s budget to that of an independent nation.14 Projected onto the state, this misguided logic demands the slashing of spending to avoid insolvency of future generations. The dark irony is that these fiscal and monetary policies draw their force from a moral argument, the future of our children, precisely when facing the threat of a mass-extinction event. A brief genealogical incursion into the symbolism of money and its meanings will provide insights into how transcendence operates this reversal.

Origin and Meaning of Money

Under capitalism, money, writes Marx, is “the alienated ability of mankind.”15 This process of alienation culminates in the definition of what is essential to this ideology: surplus value, a transcendent infinity that effectively captures excess. In this respect, transcendence forces on society a logic of endless payability as the duty of the individual morphs into a restitution that mirrors infinite growth. Societal needs, in turn, are secondary and must be kept to a bare minimum, just enough to fuel growth. Scott Ferguson has pointed out that capitalism fights against the economic potential of a society—he calls it the “social ontology of money”—to undermine the real goal of the monetary function: the expansion and support of life-forms.16 The task for a viable economy of infinity is to rescind the symbolic obligations established by the pecuniary version of the Other to fully activate the social ontology of money. To do so, I propose a symbolic genealogy of money inspired by the modern monetary theory school.

Two assumptions ground an intuitive understanding of money. The first is that its value is based on the fact that money is precious—according to this view, all money is a commodity like gold. The second regards the “who” that ultimately guarantees its usage, that is, the relationship with some form of alterity. Let us begin by interrogating the first assumption. History is full of examples of societies that do not define money through some intrinsic value, be that utility, beauty, exceptionality, or even scarcity, as in the case of gold. The palatial economy of ancient Tigris and Euphrates societies (where clay tablets functioned as real money) is a case in point.17 Closer to us in time, Middle Ages authorities periodically retrieved coins from circulation and reintroduced them by determining a new value, an act known as valor impositus.18 Ernst Wolfgang writes that “the circulation of coins was often limited to a statutory period (typically a year), at the end of which all coins had to be returned to the mint.”19 Commonly known as renovatio monete, this practice suggests that “money was a matter collectively engineered to entail value anchored by its use in a polity” and not so much in a metallic referent.20 Historically, renovatio monete signals the centrality of politics as well as the emergence of a nonreferential understanding of value. From a political perspective, the royal decision has the last word on the thing of money, while from an economic perspective, the reduction of finesse did not trigger automatic devaluation insofar as liquidity was ensured within the polity.21

If the content of money does not depend simply on a precious metal, or, differently put, if such dependence does not rely on something concrete, it perhaps involves some form of symbolic reference. Consider the case of the gold ingot. One of the safest assets during a crisis, it still necessitates trust in some Other who will accept the lump of metal as payment. Gold objectifies the belief that some Other will redeem that piece of metal by offering something of equal value in exchange. This unspoken agreement points to the way in which money is conditioned by a transcendent dimension that determines its operability. Georg Simmel gestured to this form of abstract obligation in his famous work The Philosophy of Money. Published in 1900, this text lays out one of the first important sociological-philosophical studies of money as a noncommodity. One of the key assumptions is the centrality of the notion of trust—Simmel calls it the “supratheoretical belief” in the idea “that the community will assure the validity of the tokens for which we have exchanged the products of our labor in an exchange against material goods.”22 This supratheoretical belief embodies the ontogenesis of money because it lays out the twofold foundation of money. “To believe in someone” means that a community trusts that money will both be accepted as a unit of exchange and retain its worth in time, that is, that it will function as a storage of value. Both elements point to the role of transcendence, a role that is amplified when considering money’s capacity to reflect reality in its past, present, and future states. In sum, Simmel observes, money is “the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being.”23 Such capacity to translate any material object into a unit of value sets the stage for an understanding of economy as a theological enterprise. Transcendence is first affirmed as the trust in some Other, who will redeem the currency, and successively in an infinite substance: God. While Simmel’s insistence on the importance of the trust in the Other demystifies the definition of a currency as commodity money (gold, silver, etc.), it also spiritualizes alterity through a parallel between money and God—insofar as God is an omnipotent totality, money is a universal measure for life.

The problem is not the similitude between money and God—Marx, too, described money as the “object of eminent possession,” endowed with the “omnipotence of its being.”24 Rather, Simmel embraces the spiritualized substance of money by positing the market as the matrix of society. “The exchange of the products of labor, or of any other possessions,” he writes, “is one of the functions that creates an inner bond between men—a society, in place of a mere collection of individuals.”25 “It is,” he concludes, “almost a tautology to say that exchange brings about socialization: for exchange is a form of socialization.”26 From this perspective—one that echoes the classical approach to money by his contemporary Carl Menger—trade, exchange, and barter constitute the nexus of practices that form society. It bears noting that for Simmel, humans have always been businesslike creatures. In paleolithic times, like today, people naturally traded using innate concepts like equivalences, the law of supply and demand, price fluctuation, and so on. Therein the idea of value as exchange price is assumed to be an anthropological fact. In this, Simmel falls in line with an economistic ideology that projects backward and forward a totalizing view of “individuals who have unlimited desires,” which, as Graeber notes, will always create “at least tacit competition.”27 Rather than discovering the origin of sociality, Simmel encounters the point where the economy of infinite valorization meets the economy of rank. Accordingly, the impulse to acquire more (power, wealth, prestige, etc.) is a trait of human evolution just like mimetic rivalry in Girard’s economy of rank, where the desire of the Other as the endless expansion of surplus value pushes individuals to compete for status. Infinite valorization is the end point of Simmel’s spiritualization of money. Ultimately, he sidesteps the social content of money, what we called the social ontology of money, turning its human origin into an abstract, transcendent force.

In 1905, only five years after the publication of The Philosophy of Money, German economist Georg Knapp produced a work that skirts the spiritualization detected in Simmel. In The State Theory of Money, Knapp calls autometallism the traditional view that misinterprets the legal and political status of money. “Even in autometallism,” he observes, “it is first the possibility of employing [money] in exchange that gives [money] the property of becoming a means of payment.” Hence the use of money is, before anything else, “a legal phenomenon.”28 In Knapp’s view, moneys are actually nominal debts, that is to say, “debts repayable in the means of payment current at the time.”29 Hence, Knapp concludes, “such nominal debts are not really indefinite. All that is indefinite is the material in which they are discharged.”30 Be it a precious metal or a useful commodity like grain, shells, or even cigarettes, what defines these forms of debt (or IOUs) is their serviceability, the fact that they can transfer to other people.

Knapp’s claims regarding serviceability dispel another universal belief about the state. Although common for modern nations, coinage is not essential to the state. The true prerogative of a sovereign state is the power to change the means of payment. This happens not by minting money—historically private institutions oversaw coinage—nor thanks to the market capacity to determine the prices of goods (as in Simmel) but through a political decision on what constitutes an acceptable means of payment. Scholars calls the authorities who make these political decisions “stakeholders.” Stakeholders are people, historically councils, vested with symbolic authority. Consider how Christine Desan illustrates the creation of a new unit of account after the disappearance of the monetarized economy in post-Roman England: “The innovation occurred when a stakeholder identified a unit and began to use it as a kind of receipt to represent resources given to the group. . . . One such stakeholder could instead take an amount of goods or services early, giving in return a token that the recipient could provide later at a time of reckoning as proof that the service had been rendered.”31 Stakeholders’ role is to mobilize, circulate, and thus guarantee resources for the community. A community thus determines the value of the credits and debts of its transactions. Money is not a private property. The origin and essence of money are always political, as economist Yanis Varoufakis claims.32

To recapitulate my argument so far, transcendence rules by way of symbolic obligations driven by a logic of payability. Money plays a role that, although fundamental, is largely symbolic. Rather than being based on something tangible, money needs a ritualistic act to exist. Simmel focused on the principle of trust in the Other, but this entity quickly loses its social character, turning into the abstraction of the market. Knapp restores the centrality of the political and social dimensions through the role of sovereign authority—that is, stakeholders who validate payment units essential to the circulation of resources; this may lead to coinage, or not, as in post-Roman England. This ambivalence means that money is simply a form of representation of potentialities (resources, work, skills, ideas) that circulate in a community. Money represents the myriad of debts and credits that each member of said group has with one another. What people carry in their pockets are other people’s promises of payment. Debts and credits form the incandescent nexus that defines money.

The Currency of the Anthropocene

The Bretton Woods agreement to end gold redeemability did not prevent capitalist ideologues from depoliticizing money. On the contrary, once desubstantialized, autometallism reemerged, imposing a more pernicious tributary bond on the economic discourse. Austerity is the name for that “virtuous” principle that demands that spending be backed by a proportionate revenue stream. In the United States, for instance, the hysteria against the costs of moving toward universal health care or transitioning to a green economy is based on the fear of a deficit that would bankrupt the country. However, recall Knapp’s discussion of serviceability. Because a sovereign state is the issuer of the national currency—that is, not just the entity that mints money but also the authority that decides on the means of payment—it does not actually use taxes to fund its operations.33 Taxes do not create money. The state creates money, which it then redeems via taxes, fines, and other instruments. In this sense, L. Randall Wray argues, “the word redemption is used in two ways: accepting your own IOUs [money] in payment and promising to convert your IOUs to something else,” usually “the State’s IOUs.”34 The state decides on the resources to service society’s needs. But this mobilization must be continually ensured through fiscal operations. As Ferguson writes, “money is not an alienable entity government amasses or hemorrhages. It is a limitless writing instrument for mobilizing social production and provisioning the public purpose.”35 To follow this metaphor, the revenue system is a curator; it guarantees the legibility of this writing by ritualistically taking currency out and back into circulation. This is why there is, Ferguson concludes, “perpetual redemption at the center of money’s spiraling temporality.”36 Salvation does not expect us in the afterlife, nor is it something a transcendent entity will grant us. Salvation is the immanent process that nourishes social reproduction.

Transcendence impresses a teleological mark on the progression of time by setting salvation as an end point in one’s life and now, under neoliberalism, by substituting redemption with the endless work of restitution. The problem is not the Other but the relation we imagine having with this alterity. The Jubilee complied with this sacred function by alleviating a structural problem in the ancient world. Facing a planetary collapse, the neoliberal response instead ranges from outright denial to inadequate promises, which are always geared toward surplus value. Consider how at the onset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 it was predicted that the West would transition faster toward renewables to avoid Russian energy imports. Naturally, the opposite happened. Security concerns and record profits for fossil fuel companies prompted massive investments into new oil and gas projects that will doom any hope of meeting the Paris agreement to limit global warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Governments committed to fighting climate change enacted these policies because, as Timothy Morton writes, neoliberalism can always explain away the costs of externalities and ecological destruction; after all, both capital and nature “exist in an ethereal beyond” capable of absorbing anything.37 This repression of the ecological boundaries also fuels the discourse of austerity. The logic of payability dominates the political discourse over the ecological and social needs of our societies by setting up an imaginary future of fiscal deliverance, while the true biosocial damages of our present model of production are displaced. Neoliberalism sets up a convenient inverted image: Nature is endlessly manipulable, while the public circulation of money is constrained by transcendence, the great debt collector, which invariably vanishes when military spending knocks on the door.

We need to move away from a symbolic model that represses the alterity we inhabit by projecting it onto the sphere of an Other who desires always more. The task is to sketch an economy of infinity that reflects Virno’s economy of noncoincidence at a monetary level, where the otherness of life takes up a political role. To do so, I analyze the new political economy imagined by Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future, which draws on Delton Chen’s idea of the Global Carbon Reward. The utopian dimension of this proposal is evident. But the novel’s attempt to bring alterity and its infinities into the fold of the social dimension of our present allows us to peer into the possibilities of what I call a social immanentization of infinity, that is, a world-forming and life-sustaining infinity detached from surplus value.

Beginning in the mid-2020s, The Ministry for the Future maps how a global movement, aided by an unconventional team of bureaucrats, embraces a revolution that includes the rights and voices of the future in today’s politics. The center of this transformation is a political institution—the ministry that gives the title to the novel—that is charged with the mission of advocating “for the world’s future generations of citizens, whose rights . . . are as valid as our own,” including “all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves.”38 The Ministry complies with this function not only via legal means but also by promoting and financing initiatives that fight climate change. The office is held by a combative politician, “Mary Murphy, an Irish woman of about forty-five years of age, ex-minister of foreign affairs in the Government of the Irish Republic, and before that a union lawyer.”39 Mary and her international cabinet members are the coprotagonists of the polyphonic and multiform movement that culminates in the revolution of 2048. I will say more about this event later on. For now, it is important to take stock of the theoretical principle behind the novel. Through the Ministry, future generations become a stakeholder in today’s politics. This alterity finds a form of political representation different from the cultic belief heralded by neoliberalism—the veneration not of the transcendent Other but of the infinities of human generations. This different other is already here and needs care and tending.

The Ministry for the Future stages an epistemological shift in the role and actions of the Ministry that deviates from standard thinking about time. The Ministry functions like a time device that embodies the new temporality of the Anthropocene. Our Newtonian understanding of time states that the future does not exist. However, Robinson attempts to capture a political structure that roots itself in the idea of the immanence of time. Folding the social infinities into the present means bending time, drawing it into the closeness of immanence. The novel illustrates this form of temporal immanence in at least two ways. The first is a paradigmatic shift. Robinson understands environmental change not so much as a near-future possibility but as something that has already happened. Climate change reveals how reality is, in fact, an ensemble of hyperobjects. A hyperobject is a category of things, Morton argues, endowed with a dimensionality that liquidates terms like Nature or the World, which is imagined as a transcendent entity, an empty container that is self-standing. Morton argues that “there is no top object that gives all objects value and meaning, and no bottom object to which they can be reduced.”40 Because of their limitlessness, hyperobjects demand a different understanding of time. It is well known that our actions (or inactions) will have a lasting impact on the life-forms that will populate this planet.41 The fact that the future is embedded in our present forces upon us what Morton calls an “intimacy” with the other.42 Notice how this contiguity with alterity reflects the economy of noncoincidence of part 1. Recall Virno’s remark regarding the deep grammar of the verb to have. One could say that we “have” a future because we are in an extrinsic relation of proximity and nonidentity with it, not in one of smooth control. Contrary to that, neoliberalism “is” the future because it identifies with it; it is simply growth.

The second form of temporal immanence emerges within the mottled temporality of the novel itself, which is based on events that disrupt the sameness of neoliberal time. Naturally, the ecological catastrophe structures the timeline of these events as the Ministry becomes a kind of shadow directorate for the green revolution. But the rugged road that leads to this transformation emerges in bursts of historical energy. Sometimes there are bloody spikes, as in large-scale attacks by ecoterrorists against the aviation and fossil fuel industries; at other times, there are more targeted actions, such as sabotages, strikes, and the hilarious contrapasso-like punishment whereby a number of CEOs are forced to attend reeducation camps, watching endless PowerPoint presentations on human-induced effects on climate. Geopolitical change takes place as well, mostly from the South of the world—India, Africa, and so on. This turmoil and the catastrophic crescendo culminate in a new Springtime of the Peoples of 1848. Significantly, what inaugurates this momentous year is a fiscal strike by the National Student’s Union in the United States.

Student debt was a trillion-dollar annual income stream for the banks, so this coordinated default meant that the banks were suddenly in cash-flow hell. . . . This fiscal strike threw them immediately into a liquidity crisis reminiscent of the 2008 and 2020 and 2034 crashes, except this time people had defaulted on purpose, and precisely to bring the banks down. . . . But this time the Fed asked Congress to authorize their bailing out the banks in exchange for ownership shares in every bank that took the offer.43

This lucky conjuncture of history whereby the US Congress does the right thing inverts the symbolic mechanism of redemption by eliminating eternal salvation for the elite. It also disrupts the teleology of the debt economy ingrained in such structure because redemption returns to the core of the government’s authority not as a shield of an oligopoly but as instrument for the mobilization of the social ontology aimed at the benefit of present and future people. A growing interconnectedness based on this new sense of time animates the spirit of 2048. From a theoretical point of view, this also means that the logic of social reproduction displaces surplus value both as the object of objects and as the discourse of payability. I already observed that because it is infinite, the work of reproduction points to a form of eternity. This timeless dimension thus stretches out toward the future as well, asserting its presence. Whereas the high finance of capitalism claims to predict the future when it only wants to dominate it, Robinson’s efforts go in the opposite direction. To safeguard the alterity of the future, humanity devises solutions to protect the ecosystem that nourish the reproduction of relations of humanity and its many others—that is, the alterities I discussed in part 1.

Money for Social Infinity

The Ministry for the Future directly critiques the two mechanisms that sustain the discourse of transcendence: grace as a teleological direction of time and surplus value as the top object that harnesses life. If the Ministry is the institutional tool that incorporates a new sense of time, money is the second narrative innovation that ends the model of redemption as we know it.44 As rising levels of CO₂ bring forth unbearable environmental pressures, unprecedented losses and financial exposure for insurance companies provoke a massive crisis of trust in the US dollar.45 The scale of the devastation opens a fissure in the system by bringing onto the scene the problem of infinity and its economic quantification. This type of infinity is the spiritual driver not of surplus value but of human life. If money is the general equivalent that measures the value of things, these calamities defy standard risk assessment because the cost of remediation inhibits calculation: “So just call it infinity,” states Dick Bosworth, the Australian adviser to the Ministry.46 The issue of representability emerges here as a productive paradox because it inserts itself into the discourse of payability exploding the pactional cage of neoliberalism. Just like with temporality, the novel operates an immanentization of infinity by recognizing its social character.

Standard expansionary fiscal policies are not enough to match the scale of the multiple crises. To finance the mobilization needed to comply with what Bosworth called “infinity,” another form of infinity is needed. Robinson imagines the adoption of a new money, a digital currency explicitly modeled on the Global Carbon Reward Initiative—an actual policy framework developed by Delton Chen. This approach intends to create a parallel economy that would rebalance the carbon cycle as a kind of economic photosynthesis.47 Under the new reward-base system, various private and public actors who sequester carbon (and are certified by appointed public agencies) are reimbursed with digital credits. Before I turn to the role of the carbon coin, it is important to note that Chen’s framework for a carbon reward in effect mimics the infinity of transcendence—the bioremediation work needed to restore acceptable environmental conditions is monumental, although not unlimited, and this is why he sets the unit of account for one coin at one thousand kilograms of CO₂ mitigated for a hundred-year duration.48 Yet, this amount is shaped not as a limit but as a floor that allows for a proliferation of new initiatives. Robinson’s decision to include this monetary innovation in the novel is defamiliarizing in multiple ways. It is not a prophecy nor a prediction but an idea emerging from a looped temporality—one again in line with the Anthropocene—that from the future returns to the past determining it. Furthermore, it offers a counternarrative to the current anarchocapitalist discourse. Ultimately, the carbon coin is a counter bitcoin, not a financial asset but a collective monetary tool “to invest in survival, to go long on civilization.”49

Just like a regular digital currency, in the novel, the carbon coin encompasses all three basic monetary functions of a currency: unit of account, storage of value, and medium of exchange (Robinson imagines the creation of fractions of a carbon coin for daily expenditure called carboni).50 However, because the exchange rate for the carbon coin is set at a level that meets the mitigation target established by the international community, the yield is constantly raising. In this way, the rift between finiteness of the present and infinity of the future is inhibited. Infinity is already present in the empiric world of humans; it inhabits the work of reproduction of social relations. But the nurturing of the material and immaterial needs a proper conduit for that to live. The carbon coin becomes this conduit, an economic policy that avoids relapsing into a new form of adulation of transcendence because its purpose is ensuring a livable ecosphere for the reproduction of social ontology.

The biosphere finally acquires its true value, or as Dick Bosworth summarizes, “its worth to people [becomes] a kind of existential infinity. Gauging the price of saving the biosphere’s functions against the cost of losing them would therefore always be impossible.”51 Under this arrangement, a reward, or shall I say redemption, is finally assigned to those who work for the preservation of this life, not the celestial one. This economic revolution deals the final blow to the status quo as the vast majority of people see neoliberal discourse for what it really is: “a kind of existential assumption, as if civilization were a kind of cancer and them all therefore committed to growth as their particular deadly form of life. But this time, growth might be reconfiguring itself as the growth of some kind of safety.”52 At this point, life is oriented not toward transcendence but toward its own immanent reproduction. Grafted on a series of massive events and violent struggles, the Ministry’s push for the carbon coin is the economic platform that unites people in a collective task. It is an economic device in the highest sense: It provides both a symbolic and a material structure for the reproduction of subjectivity and its ecosystem. Social ontology is what anchors Robinson’s notion of value and is also why Chen’s monetary proposal is so appealing to him. Robinson’s understanding of value is economic but not economistic. Capitalism follows an idealized market-based notion of value, the competition for scarce resources that produces profit. The new value for the Anthropocene is the preservation of the other (the many others that form the biosphere) as an immanent form of life. Robinson describes it as a new gold standard, one whereby finance provisions the social and biological basis of life and whose value is defined not by the scarcity of a valuable good that can be hoarded but by the infinite task of mending and nourishing life.

Notes

1. 1. Eric Santner, “A Critique of Mana-Theism,” posted by Brown University, June 20, 2019, YouTube video, 32:24, https://youtu.be/j4fNKG0JNcY. See also Andrea Righi, “The Pactional Model of Salvation and Its Undoing in Catherine of Siena,” Italian Culture 40, no. 2 (2022): 112–30.

2. 2. Several scholars have already demonstrated the indistinguishability between the two realms; see Giacomo Todeschini, Come l’acqua e il sangue (Carocci, 2021).

3. 3. David Singh, Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (Stanford University Press, 2018), 12.

4. 4. As Moshe Idel writes, redemption was understood not only as “a material form of retribution” but also as a spiritual and intellectual process whereby “the messianic attainments are related to the impact of the ‘divine influx’ on the messiah, described also as a divine man.” Idel, “Multiple Forms of Redemption in Kabbalah and Hasidism,” Jewish Quarterly Review 101 (2011): 29, 28.

5. 5. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2012), 65.

6. 6. See Tiziana Faitini, “Redimere e riscattare: La redemptio tra teologia e politica,” Politica e Religione: Annuario di Teologia Politica 16 (2017): 4–6.

7. 7. Paul Dumouchel, “The Ambivalence of Scarcity” and Other Essays (University of Michigan Press, 2014), 102.

8. 8. See Giacomo Todeschini, I mercanti e il tempio (Il Mulino, 2002), 191.

9. 9. Giacomo Todeschini, “The Incivility of Judas,” in Money, Morality, and Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2016), 38.

10. 10. Peter Damian, Letters 1–30 (Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 70.

11. 11. See Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All (Knopf, 2018).

12. 12. Mladen Dolar, “Avatars of Avarice,” Jnanapravaha Mumbai Conference, 2019, YouTube video, https://youtu.be/5Uqsgns8h90.

13. 13. Mladen Dolar, “The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strained,” Yearbook of Comparative Literature 60 (2014): 18.

14. 14. Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth (Public Affairs, 2020).

15. 15. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/power.htm.

16. 16. Modern monetary theory (MMT) understands money as both credit and fiat money, that is, money made by governmental decree. From this integration, MMT constructs an alternative to austerity focusing on the underutilization of public resources, the only real limit of which is inflation.

17. 17. See Michael Hudson, “The Archeology of Money: Debt Versus Barter Theories of Money’s Origins,” in Credit and State Theories of Money: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes, ed. L. Randall Wray, 99–127 (Edward Elgar, 2004).

18. 18. See Fabian Wittreck, “Money in Medieval Philosophy,” in Money in the Western Legal Tradition, ed. David Fox and Wolfgang Ernst (Oxford University Press, 2016), 58.

19. 19. Wolfgang Ernst, “The Legists’ Doctrines on Money and the Law from the Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries,” in Fox and Ernst, Money in the Western Legal Tradition, 113.

20. 20. Caterina Desan, “Money as a Legal Institution,” in Fox and Ernst, Money in the Western Legal Tradition, 28.

21. 21. See Alfred Mitchell Innes, “What Is Money?,” in Wray, Credit and State Theories of Money, 15, and Ernst, “Legists’ Doctrines on Money,” 113.

22. 22. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (Routledge, 2004), 178.

23. 23. Simmel, 127.

24. 24. Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.”

25. 25. Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 174.

26. 26. Simmel, 174.

27. 27. David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 257.

28. 28. Georg Friedrich Knapp, The State Theory of Money (1905; repr., Martino Publishing, 2013), 6.

29. 29. Knapp, 15.

30. 30. Knapp, 16.

31. 31. Desan, “Money as a Legal Institution,” 23.

32. 32. Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019).

33. 33. L. Randall Wray, introduction to Credit and State Theories of Money, 8.

34. 34. L. Randall Wray, “Modern Money Theory: How I Came to MMT and What I Include in MMT,” New Economic Perspectives (blog), October 1, 2018, https://neweconomicperspectives.org/2018/10/modern-money-theory-how-i-came-to-mmt-and-what-i-include-in-mmt.html.

35. 35. Scott Ferguson, Declarations of Dependence (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 63. For MMT, the only real internal limit is inflation.

36. 36. Ferguson, 63.

37. 37. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 115.

38. 38. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020), 16.

39. 39. Robinson, 18. Mary resembles another of Robinson’s heroes from the Mars Trilogy, Tatiana Durova, an engineer, who similarly directs revolutionary change through institutional means. On the sociopolitical framework for the trilogy, see Kenneth Knoespel, “Reading and Revolution on the Horizon of Myth and History: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy,” Configurations 20, no. 1 (2012): 109–36.

40. 40. Morton, Hyperobjects, 116.

41. 41. Morton summarizes the unusual temporality of the Anthropocene as follows: “The very large finitude of hyperobjects forces humans to coexist with a strange future, a future without us,” given that events like “plutonium and global warming have amortization rates of 24,100 and 100,000 years respectively” (94).

42. 42. Morton, 95.

43. 43. Robinson, Ministry for the Future, 375.

44. 44. Contrary to the sci-fi genre, Robinson’s treatment of money, too, follows an immanent approach, for as Maxximilian Seijo writes, “Ministry stays put, prioritizes place, and redefines the money animating our world.” Seijo, “Money’s Place: Science Fiction, Realism and Modern Monetary Theory in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future,” Money on the Left 1, no. 1 (2023): 19.

45. 45. Seijo, 54.

46. 46. Seijo, 55.

47. 47. See the Global Carbon Reward Initiative, https://globalcarbonreward.org/americas-tour-2022/pricing-nature-yale-podcast/.

48. 48. See Pricing Nature podcast, Global Carbon Reward Initiative, https://globalcarbonreward.org/carbon-currency/.

49. 49. Robinson, Ministry for the Future, 288.

50. 50. Robinson, 356–57. Chen’s proposal envisions the Global Carbon Reward as a financial asset, not as a medium of exchange.

51. 51. Robinson, 344.

52. 52. Robinson, 345.