Monetary individualism means policy implementation will always fail—instead, monetary policy reshapes social relations towards inequality.

Locke’s monetary theory of society invisibilized two sets of relations. First, when he argued that money comes into existence through individual volition, Locke obscured the relation between money issuers and money users that had been more visible in medieval Europe. Because this relation disappears, Locke’s monetary individualism eclipses central political questions any society must answer. Who gets to issue money, on what terms, and how much of it? Through which channels will cash and credit reach members of a population? Answers to these questions shape the design and constitution of social relations.30 In Locke’s telling, however, monetary individuals “tacitly assent” to money, and do not seek to understand or take part in money creation. They accept whatever money reaches them and celebrate the inequality that is its result. In this scenario, the political institutions that create money disappear from view. Besides eclipsing the relation between money issuer and money users, Locke erased all forms of institutionalizing economic life that did not fall under his conception of money. Locke erased Native monetary forms and ways of coordinating economic life when he argued that Natives were limited to uncoordinated action without a link to the past and to the future. He presented a particular understanding of money, and the particular forms of individuated agency and inequality his monetary individuals ought to exhibit, as universally normative. He considered it a yardstick for judging all societies and made all other modes of being-human-in-society appear uniform and deficient, eclipsing the generalized character of monetary forms across human societies.31

Locke’s theory of money constitutes the liberal social ontology: He proposed ways of inventing identities, categorizing people, being in the world, and possibilities for acting. While Fanon and Freire provided expansive critiques of dehumanization and elements for a re-humanization of the world, they left untouched the (Lockean) monetary ontology that constitutes modern forms of governance. This monetary ontology, expressed through the category of monetary individualism, continues to “immerse” (in the Freirean sense above) its critics and proponents, who remain within a dehumanizing “inertia” (in the Fanonian sense). It is important to make the monetary dimension of Locke’s ontology visible because we continue to live with it today.