ponda
23rd October 2011, 06:09
Here's a very interesting article from the Reality Sandwich website that discusses the possibilities of society without money or after money.Some might find this interesting reading as the Occupy movements gather steam around the globe.
This article is the introduction to the anthology What Comes After Money? Essays from Reality Sandwich on Transforming Currency and Community, edited by Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan, just released by EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books. Contributors include economist Bernard Leitaer, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, musician Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky), theoretical physicist Amit Goswami, Larry Harvey (founder of Burning Man), and alternative historian Peter Lamborn Wilson.
The Impossible Alternative by Daniel Pinchbeck
The money game ... We are all forced to play it, whether we like it or not. A few leap across the Monopoly board with great gusto, building or toppling companies, gobbling up futures on resources and minerals, speculating on currencies. Some market new cultural products -- images, memes, books, lines of software code, musical jingles -- as their gambits and dice throws in the global casino. Others, dealt a worse hand, play a more brutal version of the game in the back alleys of third world cities, begging for baksheesh, selling their sex for a meager sum, sending their children to work in factories or collect bits of nickel and aluminum from toxic trash heaps. Simply by virtue of being born into this single global system, this omni-oppressive world order, we are all conscripted into a relentless contest, a ceaseless tumult.
Ever since the mangling of his ideas led to horrific dictatorships and genocidal regimes over the last century, the philosopher Karl Marx has been out of fashion, neglected and suppressed. This is understandable but unfortunate, as many of his insights into the mythic dimensions of money and the workings of capital deserve reconsideration. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes money as "the visible divinity" in our capitalist world: "By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It therefore functions as almighty being. Money is the pimp between man's need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person." Since birth, we have been trained like performing seals to accept the spiteful conjuror's trick that transmutes any and all qualities into quantities-into bigger or smaller piles of cash. Seemingly without an alternative, most of us accept a system in which everything and everyone has its price, and beneath every celebration lies a cynical calculation.
Hypnotized by our culture, most people believe that our current form of money is the only rational way to exchange value -- that a debt-based currency, detached from any tangible asset, is something as organic and inevitable as carbon molecules, ice, or photosynthesis. We forget that money, in its current form, is just a tool. Humans created money to perform certain functions and satisfy certain needs. But just as engineers and computer programmers drop cruder, out-of-date tools and pick up better ones as soon as they become available, we might also switch to more sophisticated instruments for transferring goods and services that function more efficiently and equitably. We could implement new mechanisms and platforms for exchanging value that we have designed to prevent the destructive social and ecological feedback loops produced by our current financial system. As an operating system for society, money needs a major upgrade. This upgrade will not just happen on its own; we need to apply our intelligence and creativity to make it happen.
This requires an act of will, and a leap of faith, from many of us. Personally, I grew up with an artistic New York background and, until a few years ago, I never gave much thought to economics, considering it incredibly boring, useless, and the opposite of anything cool. About five years ago, I began to comprehend that the underlying logic of our economic system was inciting a systemic crash -- that our model of endless growth on a finite planet was bringing about mass species extinction, mass pollution, and was somehow linked to a nihilistic value system that mortgaged the future of the planet for the instant gratification of the lucky few. When we launched our web magazine Reality Sandwich, we made alternative approaches to our economy one of our areas of focus, and a priority. First appearing in Reality Sandwich, the essays included in this book present a range of perspectives on the problems endemic to our current financial system, and propose tangible ways to change it. For those who are not used to this type of discussion, it takes a while to familiarize yourself with the issues and the terminology, but the effort is worth it, as the subject is of critical importance.
Over the last half-century, the mainstream culture institutionalized hipster rebellion and integrated it within the corporate mainstream, which constantly instructs us to "Just Do It," "Think Different," "****," and the like. Corporations took our innate impulse toward dissent and our desire for meaningful change, and transmuted them into effective sales tools for their products. The new counterculture, which I believe Reality Sandwich represents, goes beyond easily assimilated gestures of rebellion to interrogate and analyze the underpinnings of our current destructive social order. We believe it is no longer enough to propose alternatives -- we need to implement them, instead of waiting around, expecting that someone else is going to do it for us. For this reason, along with Reality Sandwich, we launched a social network, Evolver.net, which provides the organizing hub for what we call the Evolver Social Movement. The ESM brings together local communities that share a vision of how society could be transformed under a global umbrella, and promotes initiatives in permaculture, public performance, local currencies, and viable alternatives in many areas. Evolver actively seeks to collaborate with other movements and organizations that employ DIY tactics to revitalize civil society, such as Transition Town, the Zeitgeist Movement, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Burners Without Borders, et cetera. We propose that reimagining and reinventing society through conscious collaboration is the avant-garde art form of our time.
While rarely discussed in the mainstream media, an awakening is currently underway: More and more people are coming to realize that what we use as money is not some natural force or omnipotent being, but a magic spell. This spell is maintained by the oracles and high priests of finance from their well-guarded temples -- the banks and treasuries -- where they alchemically transmute little bits of paper or blips of data into valuable artifacts, using occult symbol, incantation, and numerical abracadabra. Indeed, what the financial sorcerers fear more than anything is a collective loss of faith in the abstruse and arcane instruments they use to bind the great human mob in invisible chains of debt, servitude, and scarcity.
Article continues here:
http://www.realitysandwich.com/impossible_alternative
This article is the introduction to the anthology What Comes After Money? Essays from Reality Sandwich on Transforming Currency and Community, edited by Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan, just released by EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books. Contributors include economist Bernard Leitaer, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, musician Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky), theoretical physicist Amit Goswami, Larry Harvey (founder of Burning Man), and alternative historian Peter Lamborn Wilson.
The Impossible Alternative by Daniel Pinchbeck
The money game ... We are all forced to play it, whether we like it or not. A few leap across the Monopoly board with great gusto, building or toppling companies, gobbling up futures on resources and minerals, speculating on currencies. Some market new cultural products -- images, memes, books, lines of software code, musical jingles -- as their gambits and dice throws in the global casino. Others, dealt a worse hand, play a more brutal version of the game in the back alleys of third world cities, begging for baksheesh, selling their sex for a meager sum, sending their children to work in factories or collect bits of nickel and aluminum from toxic trash heaps. Simply by virtue of being born into this single global system, this omni-oppressive world order, we are all conscripted into a relentless contest, a ceaseless tumult.
Ever since the mangling of his ideas led to horrific dictatorships and genocidal regimes over the last century, the philosopher Karl Marx has been out of fashion, neglected and suppressed. This is understandable but unfortunate, as many of his insights into the mythic dimensions of money and the workings of capital deserve reconsideration. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx describes money as "the visible divinity" in our capitalist world: "By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It therefore functions as almighty being. Money is the pimp between man's need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person." Since birth, we have been trained like performing seals to accept the spiteful conjuror's trick that transmutes any and all qualities into quantities-into bigger or smaller piles of cash. Seemingly without an alternative, most of us accept a system in which everything and everyone has its price, and beneath every celebration lies a cynical calculation.
Hypnotized by our culture, most people believe that our current form of money is the only rational way to exchange value -- that a debt-based currency, detached from any tangible asset, is something as organic and inevitable as carbon molecules, ice, or photosynthesis. We forget that money, in its current form, is just a tool. Humans created money to perform certain functions and satisfy certain needs. But just as engineers and computer programmers drop cruder, out-of-date tools and pick up better ones as soon as they become available, we might also switch to more sophisticated instruments for transferring goods and services that function more efficiently and equitably. We could implement new mechanisms and platforms for exchanging value that we have designed to prevent the destructive social and ecological feedback loops produced by our current financial system. As an operating system for society, money needs a major upgrade. This upgrade will not just happen on its own; we need to apply our intelligence and creativity to make it happen.
This requires an act of will, and a leap of faith, from many of us. Personally, I grew up with an artistic New York background and, until a few years ago, I never gave much thought to economics, considering it incredibly boring, useless, and the opposite of anything cool. About five years ago, I began to comprehend that the underlying logic of our economic system was inciting a systemic crash -- that our model of endless growth on a finite planet was bringing about mass species extinction, mass pollution, and was somehow linked to a nihilistic value system that mortgaged the future of the planet for the instant gratification of the lucky few. When we launched our web magazine Reality Sandwich, we made alternative approaches to our economy one of our areas of focus, and a priority. First appearing in Reality Sandwich, the essays included in this book present a range of perspectives on the problems endemic to our current financial system, and propose tangible ways to change it. For those who are not used to this type of discussion, it takes a while to familiarize yourself with the issues and the terminology, but the effort is worth it, as the subject is of critical importance.
Over the last half-century, the mainstream culture institutionalized hipster rebellion and integrated it within the corporate mainstream, which constantly instructs us to "Just Do It," "Think Different," "****," and the like. Corporations took our innate impulse toward dissent and our desire for meaningful change, and transmuted them into effective sales tools for their products. The new counterculture, which I believe Reality Sandwich represents, goes beyond easily assimilated gestures of rebellion to interrogate and analyze the underpinnings of our current destructive social order. We believe it is no longer enough to propose alternatives -- we need to implement them, instead of waiting around, expecting that someone else is going to do it for us. For this reason, along with Reality Sandwich, we launched a social network, Evolver.net, which provides the organizing hub for what we call the Evolver Social Movement. The ESM brings together local communities that share a vision of how society could be transformed under a global umbrella, and promotes initiatives in permaculture, public performance, local currencies, and viable alternatives in many areas. Evolver actively seeks to collaborate with other movements and organizations that employ DIY tactics to revitalize civil society, such as Transition Town, the Zeitgeist Movement, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Burners Without Borders, et cetera. We propose that reimagining and reinventing society through conscious collaboration is the avant-garde art form of our time.
While rarely discussed in the mainstream media, an awakening is currently underway: More and more people are coming to realize that what we use as money is not some natural force or omnipotent being, but a magic spell. This spell is maintained by the oracles and high priests of finance from their well-guarded temples -- the banks and treasuries -- where they alchemically transmute little bits of paper or blips of data into valuable artifacts, using occult symbol, incantation, and numerical abracadabra. Indeed, what the financial sorcerers fear more than anything is a collective loss of faith in the abstruse and arcane instruments they use to bind the great human mob in invisible chains of debt, servitude, and scarcity.
Article continues here:
http://www.realitysandwich.com/impossible_alternative