Like most people, I usually mute and ignore advertisements; however, one caught my attention. It was the new Barclays advert—have you seen it? Well, whether you have or you haven’t I’ll describe it for you:
Adults are portrayed as children going about daily activities. A boy in a suit walks down the street, children dressed as adults work in an office, and others sit around a dinner table, engaging in typical adult conversations. The scene shifts to a child entering a Barclays branch. A voice announces: “Studies show our relationship with money is formed from the age of seven.” The advert ends with the Barclays logo and the slogan “Make money work for you.”
Generally, I thought the advert was quite good. We can feel like children operating in an adult world, doing and learning as we pave out our career paths, manage our friendships, seek a healthy work-life balance etc. However, given the banking sector’s notorious role in the financial crisis, and continuous hefty investments in the extractive industries, this scene of Barclays as a “parent” serving us “children” seems a bit disingenuous. Rather, I would extend the children metaphor to the bankers themselves—frantically directing money to whichever economic activities bring strong, reliable financial returns regardless of the social and ecological impacts of such activities. Don’t get me wrong, banks provide an incredibly important service; without them there would be no way to circulate money far-and-wide towards the most important projects and initiatives of our time. The mobilisation of significant funds is indispensable for confronting our converging crises. Anyway, this article isn’t about the failures of ESG and “responsible investing”; I am more interested in discussing the topics raised by Barclays themselves: Our relationship with money.
Our relationship with money—what relationship?
The advert is right: studies do show our relationship with money starts at an early age. But what is this relationship? In most studies1, the focus of this relationship is children’s understanding of the rules of money, namely its function as a medium of exchange and the use of arithmetic to calculate value. Some more interesting studies focus on the subjective meaning of money for children2, asking intriguing questions like whether pocket money is theirs or their parents, how children learn to use money in a culturally acceptable way, or how they construct relationships mediated by money. These latter two questions, focusing on the relational nature of money, are getting to the heart of the matter.
Discussing money in relational terms reminds us that, despite its ability to reduce man and nature (and everything in between) down to a price, money represents bonds between people and things. The farmer can only continue to reap and harvest because you provide the money for their produce; and the hairdresser can only pay for this because others are paying them to cut their hair. An undeniable interdependence exists in our complex, highly specialised economy, and money is leveraged to hold it together. Although Barclays proudly highlight this relational nature of money, it has been so flagrantly neglected by the banking sector. In fact, the “originate-to-sell” banking strategy*—a key contributor to the financial crash— rests on a complete ignorance of debtor-creditor relations enmeshed in complex financial products. Rather, money itself becomes a thing, a commodity to trade for financial gain.
How did it get this way?
This understanding of money as an object, stripped of any relational value, is called the commodity imaginary**. It is the most common way we understand money, and its popularity owes a lot to Adam Smith’s barter origin story of money. You’ve probably heard it before:
Imagine a moneyless village. A baker who makes bread wants to trade for chickens, but the chicken-breeder doesn’t need bread—she wants potatoes instead. This creates a problem known as the “double coincidence of wants.” To solve this issue, money emerges as a common medium of exchange, allowing the baker to sell his bread for money, which he can then use to buy chickens. According to this story, money naturally evolved to facilitate trade in an increasingly complex economy.
This story sounds very logical and persuasive. However, it is simply not true. Such a barter society does not exist and never has. Real moneyless societies are diverse, but none are like this. Take the Six Nations of Iroquois as an example: as a moneyless society, they managed their economy by stockpiling all goods and distributing them via women’s councils3.
If we know of moneyless societies, why does this false barter story persist? Well, economics’ position as a reputable science is entirely dependent on foundational assumptions, one of which is the existence of a naturally existing market. Free-market economists, who had gained a celebrity-like status in an era of neoliberalism, pushed policies of deregulation and privatisation to unleash this supposedly efficient, self-regulating market4. Meanwhile, think tanks and their corporate donors, seeking profit opportunities and self-preservation, exerted influence on universities to shift economics curricula towards a favourable free market ideology5. This story, though fictional, significantly impacts policy, justifying the rollback of the state. The devastating legacy of the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) on countries in the Global South, marked by crippling cuts to healthcare and the removal of vital food price controls, is just one facet of this international policy paradigm6. The wider commodity imaginary presents money, and therefore monetary policy, as apolitical; a mere tool to grease the cogs of efficient capitalist market exchange. However, after demonstrating the fictional nature of Smith’s specialised barter village, where enterprising villagers trade cows for spoons and spoons for paper, economics begins to look a bit comical, and its intellectual authority becomes threatened.
A better origin story
As always, stories which are grounded in historical evidence are more credible, and often more interesting. If we truly want to understand the origins of money, we must turn to Ancient Mesopotamia’s hierarchical urban centres. Stone tablets from this period reveal that money was initially accounted for in terms of barley, which later evolved to include precious metals for long-distance trade. This system was used to track debt and credit relationships and played a crucial role in the development of markets. Such evidence highlights that money has always been a social construct, shaped by both centralised authorities and innovative individuals. This historical perspective has influenced Keynesian thought, which emphasises the potential for money to expand in response to the evolving needs of people and the economy. Understanding money through this lens challenges the traditional state-market dichotomy and repositions monetary policy as a fundamentally political issue.
More than the metal its minted on
Understanding money as a relational, flexible social agreement opens possibilities not just for fiscal policy, but also for alternative community currency initiatives. The German Argentine economist, Silvio Gesell, saw this clearer than most. His concept of “Free-Money” remains one of the most innovative ideas of the 20th century. Recognising that money, when endowed with positive interest, takes on traits of eternal preservation and everlasting increase, he highlighted how the incentive to share vanishes in times of crisis. To remedy this, he suggested the introduction of a “demurrage charge,” a gradual reduction of the value of stored wealth, encouraging those to circulate money rather than store it. This idea was put to the test by followers of Gesell in 1929, introducing a revolutionary local currency, the Wära, in a depression-hit German mining town called Schwanenkirchen. With over 1000 businesses accepting the currency by 1931, the experiment proved highly successful, revitalising the local economy, slashing unemployment, and bringing prosperity to a small mining town in the middle of a global depression—until the central government shut it down. But this is just one example. You have the Red de Treque in Argentina which, at its peak, involved 2.5 million people. In the UK, the Lewes Pound has been running since 2008 and is currently accepted by over 100 local businesses. With around £15,000 worth of the currency in active circulation, the Lewes Pound enriches the local economy and promotes community resilience.
When crisis hits, our dysfunctional financial system often causes money to dry up, leaving communities struggling to maintain essential services. This is where community currencies come into play. As alternative mediums of exchange, they allow community members to continue supporting one another, even when conventional money is scarce. In this way, community currencies become powerful tools for fostering resilience and sustaining local economies during challenging times8.
Make money work for us
Barclays’ slogan “make money work for you” encapsulates the commodity imaginary, focusing on the personal gain made possible by playing a strategic financial game. But lest we wish to see history repeat itself, we mustn’t lose sight of money’s intrinsic relational nature. People say money makes the world go round; if that’s true then we need to make money go round. A better, alternative economics will prioritise circulation over accumulation9. Only when we leave cartoonish barter villages to the world of fiction and embrace money as a social agreement will we truly make money work for us.
*Originate-to-Sell Banking Strategy: This refers to a practice where banks issue loans (originate them), bundle these loans into securities, and then sell them to investors. The bank no longer holds the loan or the risk, which can lead to less careful lending practices since the responsibility for the loan shifts to the investor.
**Commodity Imaginary: This is the belief that money is a tangible object or commodity with intrinsic value, rather than a social construct. It treats money as a thing to be exchanged and accumulated, ignoring its relational and social nature, which connects people through economic activities.
References:
- Berti, A. E., & Bombi, A. S. (1981). The Development of the Concept of Money and Its Value: A Longitudinal Study. Child Development, 52(4), 1179–1182. https://doi.org/10.2307/1129504
- Takahashi, N., Yamamoto, T., Takeo, K., Oh, S., Pian, C., & Sato, T. (2016). East Asian Children and Money as a Cultural Tool: Dialectically Understanding Different Cultures. Japanese Psychological Research, 58(1), 14–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpr.12095
- Graeber, D. (2014). Debt : the first 5,000 years / David Graeber. (Updated and expanded edition.). Melville House.
- https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-99-4246-6_7
- Babb, S., & Kentikelenis, A. (2021). Markets Everywhere: The Washington Consensus and the Sociology of Global Institutional Change. Annual Review of Sociology, 47(1), 521–541. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-090220-025543
- Mkandawire, T. (2005). Maladjusted African Economies and Globalisation. Africa Development / Afrique et Développement, 30(1/2), 1–33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24484599
- Barinaga, E. (2024). Remaking money for a sustainable future : Money Commons. https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529225402
- Seyfang, G., & Longhurst, N. (2013). Growing green money? Mapping community currencies for sustainable development. Ecological Economics, 86, 65–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2012.11.003
- Eisenstein, C. (2011). Sacred economics: Money, gift, and society in the age of transition. North Atlantic Books.
