Never mind if I already read this before, there are pretty good insights to be grabbed from here... I guess that #wertkritik has been penetrating the Internet mainstream (which is, of course, the mainstream underground) for a while now. Good, now lets hope 2014 will be the year of the World Invasion :) Money is a complex cultural technology. Sometimes it breaks down, but that just gives us all the more reason to tinker with its blueprints. Each new system, though, will have its own psychological side effects and trade-offs. We know what mainstream currencies such as the US dollar are good for: overcoming barriers between buyers and sellers who don’t particularly know or trust each other. The trouble is, by reducing the need for personal trust relationships, mainstream money encourages social atomisation, to the point where arms-length purchasing starts to seem like the only valid kind of transaction. Look at the obsession economists have with measuring gross domestic product in monetary terms. GDP is supposed to reflect what is created in society, but if my grandad builds me a table in his workshop, it’s not included in GDP, and if I buy a table in Ikea, it is. The former is not considered valid production, whereas the latter is. That is arbitrary, and obviously something has gone wrong. The problem might be that mainstream money is simply too efficient. It numbs people into forgetting that it’s a socially pragmatic delusion, and so we take it for granted, just as we take oxygen for granted. But oxygen is vital for our survival, whereas money is only an intermediary tool, cushioning us from the base-level economic production that actually sustains us. There’s an ecological dimension to this, of course, which is my overriding concern. Our ability to exchange without knowing where things come from blinds us to the real core of the economy: not money, but the physical things we must wrench from the ground by human effort, which is underpinned by agricultural systems, and energised by sunlight, water and soil. The more we abstract and fetishise money as a thing in itself, the more we lose sight of its sources and its goals. We get confused, and feel disempowered relative to those who wield larger flows of it. Sealed off from inquiry in its hermetic shell, money distorts our perceptions of one another. We can’t seem to remember that it is merely one means of exchange among many. What energies would we unleash if we were to break open that opaque shell and split the monetary atom?
Posted on: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 22:19:37 +0000