About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


98 B.U. L. Rev. Online 1 (2018)

handle is hein.journals/bulron98 and id is 1 raw text is: HOPE AND FEAR FOR DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA DANIEL MARKOVITS The familiar saying money is power carries two meanings: one is common in the United States today; the other less so. The common meaning asserts that money buys power and therefore that economic inequality tends towards, or causes, political inequality. According to this idea, the rich can use their income and wealth to pay lobbyists and influence legislation, to subsidize political campaigns and influence elections, and even to buy publicity and influence public opinion. In the limit case, the rich deploy these and other related methods to monopolize political power. Political scientists increasingly document that the limit case is not just possible, but becoming actual. The uncommon meaning asserts, directly, that money is power, and therefore that no contingent causes are required to connect economic and political inequality. This idea begins by reflecting on the nature of money.' Imagine, the idea proposes, that a society distributes goods and services using an array of vouchers that name specific items (as when wartime rationing boards issued coupons for one pound of butter, for example, or one pint of milk) and requires anyone who wishes to have one of these items to give over an appropriate coupon, sending government agents to deploy force against those who attempt to get an item without one. The vouchers, in this system, are not properly understood as things at all. Rather, they administer an accounting system that keeps track of and controls people, specifically regarding what things people may have or use. The vouchers, that is, constitute relations of constraint. Moreover, money is simply an abstract and generalized version of this voucher system: A $20 bill is just a voucher that permits its bearer to consume any disjunction of conjunctions of goods and services that cost less than $20. Money, therefore, is no more a thing that the vouchers would be. Rather-again, just like the vouchers-money is an accounting system that constitutes relations of constraint. Money, in other words, is power. To deny this is to fall into commodity fetishism, in the classic sense of misconstruing relations of constraint as things. The common and uncommon understandings of the connection between economic and political inequality carry very different ideological valences. In this sense, also, the first view falls inside, and the second outside, the normal range of contemporary U.S.-American political discourse. 1 The discussion below follows G.A. Cohen, Back to Socialist Basics, NEW LEFT REVIEW 1/207, at 3-16 (September-October 1994). 1