Money for the Common Wealth of the Multitude: Toward a User-Managed Currency and Payment System Design

This thesis will begin with a critique to the orthodox paradigm in monetary economics. Secondly, I will offer a theoretical, economic, structural and biopolitical analyses of the origin, nature and effects of money on society. After a critique to conventional paradigm of money, I will then propose a semiotic genealogy of money followed by an analysis of the Common, the Multitude together with a tentative fourfold proposal for monetary reform, i.e. a monetary dispositif for the socio-economic emancipation of the Multitude from the rule of capital to build a new paradigm of money. In particular, I will discuss the literatures on basic income and the emerging notion for bottom-up welfare named Commonfare; the Neo-Chartalist approach to money; complementary, viz. subaltern currencies; and crypto-currencies and distributed ledgers technology. In turn, I will present the two qualitative methodologies that I endorsed to design and research four sites of inquiry in Iceland, Spain, Finland and Italy: Participatory Action Research and Critical Muti-Sited Ethnography. A discussion of fieldwork findings will follow. Moreover, I will offer a comparative analysis on fieldwork findings by identifying not only commonalities and differences among the four sites, but also by eliciting the limits of methodological choices. I will conclude this thesis by arguing to refine the theoretical framework introduced in the literature review; and notwithstanding personal and objective limitations to the application of the monetary dispositif in the real world, I will advocate for further inquiry on Money for the Common Wealth of the Multitude to increase the quality and effectiveness of the debate on suggestions for monetary reform.