Yeah… I’ll agree that the creation of the modern state was pretty violent, but also, many people fought to create that state that weren’t the ruling class.
Plenty of people embraced the state and fought to make it a reality. It wasn’t all just imposed from above.
The old version of people just being acted upon rather than being a force of history needs to go, because it’s not really historically accurate. There were plenty of grassroots efforts to make the modern state, as well as some top-down efforts to centralize authority and control it. But to say there is no democratic processes involved, and it was all just imposed on people is just not correct.
Yes, and in the case of places like Sweden, it has high legitimacy, because people agree with it and support it. Less so here in the US, where institutions have been undermined by government scandals of various kinds in the 1970s, and then by movement conservatism from that period to today.
Fully agreed; currencies and crypto are traded as speculative commodities (yes, currencies have other uses and crypto far less so). And by that I mean they trade these things with no intention of taking delivery. It is not important that the thing exists except to the extent that we all agree it does. Their value fluctuates with the perception of the usefulness of their qualities to store and exchange value.
I left out other examples. Somewhere between virtually anything and actually anything.
My point was that it isn’t very useful to talk about the imaginery nature of money and value, whether in reference to cryptocurrency or not.
The fact of the matter is that you can walk into any shop in the US, pick up any item that you want, take it to the register and hand over a predetermined and clearly indicated number of dollars with confidence that your dollars will be accepted and the item will be yours.
You cannot do that with cryptocurrency or gold or even useful things like gasoline. That is where the difference lies.
