Cash Is Peasant
When I was in England I never saw cash until my kids lost teeth. Then I was like WTF, this money has Churchill on it? and gave the boy an exorbitant Jane Austen while he sleeped. England is an increasingly cashless society except on the streets, where the hard-working and hard-done-by still take hard currency (meaning street vendors, beggars and, I suppose, thieves). They say cash is king but, increasingly, cash is only revered the peasantry.
It's the same in Sri Lanka, where we currently sleep. Tap-to-pay is increasingly the way, though 2-3% blows out of the country with each exchange. I know this because that's the discount you get on bank transfers, which are also the rage. Cashless, at least in Colombo, is increasingly the thing, because among the bourgeoisie, convenience is king. On the streets, however, people remain bound to cash, like books in a page, while everybody else is nose deep in their screens. But, increasingly, I get what the cash peasants mean.
You own cash. You have cash. Everything else is literally numbers on a screen. Those numbers can not work (like when the Sainsbury's, Asda, and gas payments crashed in the UK), those numbers can be stolen over the phone by jerks (hence all the scam calling these days), and those numbers can be taken away from you with a keystroke (like Canada taking protestors banking away). With cashless you are effectively renting your money from the bankers and wankers that run the place, into the ground, not coincidentally. They make the money up on their screens and you believe it on another screen, and there's nothing backing anything. No backstop if the electricity fails or government flails out at enemies. You don't own your own money without cash, instead you are owned by things. It is a rentier economy, and you rent everythings, including the means of subsistence.
Late-stage capitalism in the White Empire (Canada, UK, even IMF'd-up Sri Lanka, same thing) is a rentier economy. Rent-seeking used to be a pejorative but now it's a prerogative, the wave of privatization that started in the 1980s has culminated in this. Assets were taken away from the people (that's what state ownership is) and now you have to rent back the same things, as services. So now people pay rent on water, rent on energy, rent on housing, rent on money. It rends a society, this rent-seeking. But it's money for nothing, as Dire Straits sings.
Take card payments, as everyone has to do these days. Every time you swipe, the ass-wipes at Visa or Mastercard take a slice. Some countries have got around this by having their own processing (like in the Netherlands, where it's used, or LankaPay in Sri Lanka, where it's new), but otherwise Visa and Master are able to charge exorbitant rents all over the world. It's a subtle 2-3% inflation that runs across the entire economy, unasked for. They're charging rent on every small-time merchant, the big merchant class that took control of the world.
Convenience is just control in a red dress, dressed to impress, but leaving you heartbroken and economically depressed. Sri Lanka's economy completely blew up in a dollar crisis in 2022 because we were blowing out so much USD, and all the card transactions weren't (and aren't) helping. But we can't help ourselves, because the bourgeoisie like their convenience, and the country is whored out to tourists. It's all just rentier predation in a red dress.
The rush to replace cash with card (and card with digital) is not necessarily bad, but any improvement in the hands of capitalists just leads to further oppression of the working class, as Marx said. A hammer in the hands of a builder is very different from one in the hands of a bludgeoner, and capitalism is the rule by the latter, unfortunately. Thus when people rush to overthrow hard currency, you have to ask what are they replacing it with, and who controls the replacement? The Western world is enamored of the myth of progress, but without progressive governments, they just sink deeper into repression with each step.
Kings As Not So Bad
The West is very proud of overthrowing kings in general, but again and again you have to ask, cui bono? Who benefits? For America's founding oligarchs, the King of the day wasn't slaving and genociding enough, as they wrote in their Declaration, so they created a country where the majority of even white men couldn't vote, and where everybody else was property they could hold. What Americans proudly call the ‘No Kings’ era in current pointless protests was really just oligarchy in a red, white, and blue dress (and still is). They've liberally added some colorful and gay window-dressing to a slave society run by money, but it's still the same thing.
In fact, it's the same old thing as Michael Hudson discusses in his magisterial book And Forgive Them Their Debts. In that book, Hudson tries to explain current capitalist predation by showing that it's the same problems the ancients had, and tried to solve, with debt jubilees. That was Jesus proclaimed as the ‘good news’ and what pissed his fellow Jews and the Romans off so much that they killed him for his views. The historical problem is always that rich rentier classes will eventually enslave so much of the population that the king can't do king shit (like raise armies or build pyramids). To rectify this, a king would periodically forgive the debts, or—as in Greece—a dictator would emerge to free the people from rank oligarchy. You can see how modern propaganda has got this twisted, because the oligarchs like debt slavery. The ‘rules-based order’ is really just rule by property, in property's interests, which only compounds and gets more and more carnivorous in its late stages.
Cash As King
Cash, in this context, is just another king to be overthrown. Overthrown so the rentier-class can rent-seek, calling it Freedom™ while charging you for every damn thing needed for living. Cash was king, and its overthrow by cashless is not apolitical. I'm not saying you couldn't have a cashless society which is empowering, but in this society where the people do not have power, it merely entrenches and enriches the propertied interests. They collect rent on every transaction and can throw you out of the whole system if you protest. And this is only accelerated in the name of consumer convenience, while they monopolize and charge ever higher rents on the means of production, which is where the real money (and power) is. But people lose sight of this because they don't like making change and don't want to carry a wallet. Like, uh, me.
But the poor get this better than the petty bourgeoisie. The last people using cash—the beggars and street vendors, the cabbies and kebabists—are in fact the wisest among us. They carry the inchoate wisdom of the masses, who can sense that these newfangled payments systems are bullshit, embedded as they are within a bullshit system of extraction from every orifice. Cash is still beloved by the peasants because they know some sort of king is better than every sort of rent-seeking master, or Mastercard as they're known currently. That ‘king’ could take the form a dictatorship of the proletariat as in modern China or just a dictator as in ancient Greece, but without that third side of what I call the triangle of power, any technology will just further the interest of the rich over the poor (Marx called it, of course). So it is with the new king, convenience, and the old king cash, overthrown but still beloved by the common people. As they sang in the 1973 Robin Hood,
Incredible as he is inept
Whenever the history books are kept
They'll call him the phony king of England!
A pox on the phony king of England!