This is the sixth issue of the magazine edited by/with a special guest. This collaboration was initiated in February 2025, but it truly began in October 2024, in the streets of Tunis. Myriam, a long-time reader of The Funambulist, asked Léopold: “Have you ever thought about doing an issue on money?” “On money? What do you mean?” The idea seemed abstract, if not vague. A full-evening-long fascinating conversation later, it became somewhat inevitable that we would put together this issue. Léopold has learned so much in this process: central banks, foreign debt, treasury bonds, cash-economies, money printing, cryptocurrencies… all these concepts whose meanings have been deliberately obscured for us all to understand became approachable thanks to Myriam’s generosity and her mission to fundamentally refuse this obfuscation. Although this issue was created together for over a year, it thus made sense to leave the introduction defining its editorial drive to Myriam alone.
Welcome to the 63rd issue of The Funambulist: Follow the Money. In Gaza, there is no more money. After two years of genocide, with its relentless bombing and bulldozing, the last standing banks are in short supply of cash, while the money people kept in their homes was destroyed or looted by the Israeli occupation forces. In the ongoing blockade, the inflated prices of remaining goods continue to rise, needing ever more money. Meanwhile, in the digital universe, the obsession with cryptocurrency is now a feature of techno-fascist politics, a crypto-fascist no longer designating a fascist invested in conspiracy theories, but rather, a fascist that bankrolls right-wing politics with cryptocurrencies. Against futuristic dystopias, one might need to remember revolutionary horizons, as in 1942 in the Philippines, when the resistance against the Japanese occupation decided to print its own money, issuing “guerrilla pesos” to disrupt the colonizer’s grip on the economy.
The link between these stories is money: money as cash, money as a futuristic token, and money as a site of possibilities. Money is ubiquitous, after all, just the medium of exchange we all transact with. At the same time, money is also spectacular, a site of fantasy, the promises of riches embodied in its value, a symbol often of sovereigns or colonizers. Even when there is no money, when it shrinks or disappears altogether, its absence is constantly conjured: “we need money,” “how to make money?”, and “who has money today?” For such a quotidian object, it still crystallizes fetishes and drama. Money is mundane yet spectacular.
What is money? Already, the question raises all sorts of conundrums because, at its most basic definition, money serves to exchange, measure, and store value. Yet these abstractions tell us little about what form money takes, who decides that money is money, what money does, how it moves, between who and for what. Instead, what each of us calls money is a function of the social and political worlds we inhabit, the historical juncture we are embedded in. Money is synonymous with currency, cash, bank deposits, or electronic payments. For me, there is nothing more quintessentially money than the Tunisian 50-dinar banknote, its aesthetic form inextricable from the country’s recent history, while its shrinking value has become a daily reminder of our enduring economic crisis. For others, money is something else altogether, the contactless card, the numbers on one’s account…
The different forms money takes today make it seem immaterial, a series of numbers on a line. Even while noting the shift towards digital money, we should be wary of the lure of the digital, floating, frictionless, almost magical, as if outside of our scope of perception and therefore our course of action. Even money that appears immaterial or that is claimed to be dematerialized—digital currencies, crypto, cards, and apps—is made from a deeply material basis; numbers need data centers to run, apps are built by software engineers sub-contracted in the Global South, credit gets repaid because it is backed by policing and carceral structures, digital currency works as money because an authority says so.
Money is often shunned as too abstract; no one knows who makes money (these days, mostly banks actually), what do expressions like “fiat money” (it’s basically just a synonym for cash) or “bank rate” (a central bank tool that directly affects your loan) even mean. Even those of us into communist theory are infuriated that Karl Marx himself writes money into an obtuse equation. “Wow, I never thought of money” or “Money is kinda abstract, no?”, I am told almost every time I say I work on money. Yet isn’t it dangerous that our most quotidian object is one we deem too difficult, too abstract, too out of our reach to understand?
Even if money seems abstract, we must remember it is the abstract medium of a very concrete beast: capitalism.
As such, in this issue, we begin from the concrete, the feel of banknotes against one’s fingers for those of us still using cash, the financial flows that fund wars, the platforms, institutions, and actors that make our monetary worlds.
We do so because we write against the abstract definitions of money that lock it away from politics. If money is so hard to define, it is because some have established themselves as the guardians of knowledge on money and the economy more broadly: economists, experts, bankers, and central bankers. They make up definitions, rules, and try to impose a moral way to transact with money and a righteous economic subject.
For example, economists tell us that the origins of money are this simple story: people used to barter, it became harder, and so everyone agreed on an object to mediate exchange, and that’s how money was invented. This story is false. As anarchist thinker David Graeber reminds us, people have always borrowed from one another, making debt a fundamental social relation. Money came into this relation as the tool that authorities used to enforce debt repayment and control social groups. It was the state that made money into our medium of exchange by enforcing it as what people must use to pay taxes or pay back their loans. As such, the history of money is premised on the history of power. Money is the backdrop to deeply material processes of rule, violence, coercion, and extraction. Yet this mythical origin story, that money emerged organically from transactions, still endures. It is still the front page of all central banks’ frequently asked questions, and if you take an “Introduction to Economics” class (I truly hope you don’t), that is still how money is explained. This story endures because it fits with a worldview that people are inherently savvy economic subjects, that what holds society together is transactions based on trust, and that the market allows things to emerge naturally. It is the world of economists, who make up what they think society is by modelling what they want society to be; individuals who transact freely, bound only by exchange.
Economic experts presume money, finance, the economy, and even capitalism are too technical, too opaque, too complicated to be understood by the majority. By giving them sole authority over the economy, we are conceding a crucial site in our political struggles. In this issue, on the contrary, we take money as an entry-point to make our economic worlds inherently social and viscerally political, to pry open economic processes so as to resist them.
We embrace the politics of money, the social worlds of economic practices, and the proliferation of forms that money takes. In other words, we follow the money as it leads us from coins to capital.
To “follow the money,” as we chose for this issue’s title, is to interrogate not only the monetary and financial systems money moves through, but the political and social structures it is embedded in. By following the money, this issue asks questions about how capitalism functions, how economic structures sustain the colonial present, or how to resist financial capitalism, what its pressure points are, and what alternative horizons might we build from its ruins.
The expression to follow the money is a through line that ties different propositions together. The phrasing comes from investigative journalism, suggesting methods to expose corruption and the collusion of interests that maintain elites in power. Following the money has traditionally meant revealing politicians’ economic interests, or the moment when the political elite reveals itself to be in bed with the capitalists. Yet we know the political is always economic, and too often the politician is nothing more than a capitalist accumulating profit through other means. Follow the money’s original meaning, then, should not serve to look for corruption as if it’s an exception, but instead to examine it as the rule under capitalism. To follow the money in our iteration of the term is to remember that the separation between the domains of the political, the social, and the economic is a tool of knowledge-power and one that does not hold once we start to follow the money.
We follow the money against the idea that corruption scandals, money laundering schemes, or economic crises are exceptional to the modus operandi of capitalism. Instead, capitalism is constitutive of crisis, and financial profits inexorably rise during recessions. Banks make the most money during a crisis when people have no other choice but to take out loans, even with high interest rates. The US Treasury bonds––debt the government issues to finance its operations––perform better during a recession, meaning that while the US can borrow money more easily, it uses it instead to bail out banks rather than alleviate the crisis for everyone else. IMF loans to countries of the Global South are given under the condition that aggressive liberalization ensues, meaning the money flows from the international institution to the state, to foreign companies that swarm under liberalization. The socialist agenda of many anticolonial revolutions gets sabotaged not only by the bourgeoisie at home but also by an entire transnational and interconnected monetary system that requires unanimous acquiescence to function seamlessly. Capitalism is a structure that both makes crises and feeds on them. And it is money that holds the paradox between crisis and accumulation together.
Following the money in our subversion of the expression means prying open monetary and financial systems because they are the infrastructure of capitalism. We enter from money rather than from finance, capital, or even capitalism (though all roads lead back there) because we seek to unsettle the temporalities that each synonym bears. Finance, for instance, is often seen as the latest escalation of a capitalist system when in fact, it is the bedrock of historical capitalist forces too, from insurance policies of enslavers’ ships crossing the Middle Passage to financial instruments that enable colonial plunder. Financial capitalism is capitalism, as we quickly realize by following the money back in time. At the same time, to reckon with capitalism is not to comprehend it as a monolithic structure that moves of its own volition but rather to grasp it through a proliferation of sites. Following capitalist money means looking at why Swiss banks are the vault of authoritarian regimes, helping dictators hide their money while producing “good banking practices” that police deposits in other countries. Following capitalist money is asking how policies against money laundering assert class struggles by criminalizing the people who exist outside the banking system, rather than the rich with offshore accounts.
In the exercise of following the money, we enter the crevices of a capitalist system and trace it back to its central nodes: property, land, capital, and class.
The attempt to follow the money does not seek to hover above these crucial categories: finance, the state, colonialism, or capitalism. Instead, we remain attentive to scales, how money functions best as a device because it ties one’s individual conditions to these bigger structures. That in Tunisia, money is still mainly cash, at the same time as the use of cash is criminalized, is a contradiction that enables regimes of policing to stay in place. The problem is not using cash; the problem is how states and banks work together to make cash, a form of money to moralize, contain, restrict, and outlaw. That one needs documents that prove where you live, what you do, and that you’re a legal resident of a place to open a bank account is a reminder of how legality is a financial category. In other words, our everyday life is not separate from these systems, and most importantly, we can diagnose these structures by beginning from our quotidian. In other words, where is money in your life?
As such, to follow the money is to experiment with a method that locates the granular, that begins (against every economist’s wish) with one’s social condition; who you are in space and time. It is granular because perhaps money offers a way to enter not through abstraction but precisely through the experiential and instinctive. This is what the ubiquitous and the quotidian do; we transact with money, we count money, we struggle to save money, we lend money, meaning each one’s experience is a source of knowledge as much as a site of resistance.
To follow the money is a granular exercise because it asks about our methods to understand financial capitalism in order to resist it. Against the gatekeeping of knowledge on all things economic by economists, we do not respond with more jargon. In reality, we are fighting against material conditions as much as against a regime of knowledge that sustains these structures. That we even have a word, “the economy,” as if it constitutes a bubble that hovers above the messy field of politics, already attests to the scale of the struggle. We are, in a sense, fighting against language, against the learned language that separates all that is economic from the rest of social life as much as that produces a vocabulary of abstractions; the derivatives, the primitives, and the acronyms. Instead, it is perhaps fine to say that we can all understand how money works. We can do so if our starting point is that money is a social form, that it works through political structures, and that its abstractedness enables systems of extraction. If money is plural, shouldn’t our understanding of it also employ a multiplicity of tools, too?
In the exercise to follow the money, we are not just engaging in observation, critique, or diagnosis. We follow the money out of what is there and into what could be: speculations, possibilities, and radical horizons. We do so because of our current predicament; the grim take while shaking one’s head that finance is too complicated, the shortened breath after tracing money-war networks and realizing they’re so tentacular, or the knot that forms in one’s chest when arguing against capitalism but getting lost in the monstrosity of that system. At stake in our current predicament, the collective grief, our enduring despair, is perhaps also a crisis of imagination. To follow the money then is also to follow it out. Out of financialized systems and into mutual aid, out of the financial flows of war and into activists’ maps exposing the nexus, out of national currency and into community trade, out of settler finance and into anti-colonial resistance. To follow the money is to use money to grasp why loans impoverish the poorest while enriching the wealthiest, why sanctions and lending work hand in hand to break the back of postcolonial countries, and why revolutions fail under capitalism. Yet it is not enough to sit with how our systems break, fail, are coopted, or sabotaged. Instead, it is crucial, today more than ever, as our arsenal of political tools wavers against the seemingly unstoppable violence of colonial capitalism, to focus on how it might work next time. How do we connect our social movements by tracing how money flows from one oppression to another? How might a bank function if it’s a bank for the people? What does a revolution look like if it’s a revolution against the international monetary system?
This issue, as such, begins with a game that asks each of you; You’ve got yourselves a revolution, now what? We lay out what already exists: currency pegs, a financial oversight and management board, e-wallets, but also what else we might imagine: barter with your neighbors, occupy a bank, print money for the people. Follow the money out of this world and into the one we have yet to build. ■