Money has been around for thousands of years but only in capitalism, which overcame prior feudal and slave relationships, has it come to dominate all human and natural life.
Money exists in the modern world as a means of rationing the wealth available to most people while allowing it to exist in hyper-abundance for the few. On a planet with finite resources, approaching minimalism in our ownership of possessions may be a treasured ideal, however the rationing imposed by money on the majority does not derive from such idealism or concern. The very focus of the minority making money is to monopolise as much of the wealth as possible from the majority, and to exploit the natural world far beyond not just what is sufficient to meet our needs, but beyond the carrying capacity of the planet. The money system works hard to convince working people that it promotes freedom, liberty, and incentive, but this ideology is always the exact mirror image of the truth. It is the thinking of the rich, its liberty to exploit the majority and the planet with impunity, with minimal legal obstructions. But for those whose meaning in life is to provide that leisure class with a life of indolence and obscene indulgence, life is the very opposite of liberty, and can best be described as a modern form of subservience and oppression.
History illustrates powerfully the impressive creativity, imagination, reasoning, and persistence of the human species. It is therefore a great insult to the human race that most of it must spend its life with the primary objective of sustaining the elite’s extravagant lifestyles. The rich will hire this ingenuity, problem-solving and perseverance for its own ends, but these are wasted, when they could have served humanity as a whole. Money is without doubt a form of power. Today, money’s empire greatly rivals those of the kings of Versailles. It has found its way into all corners of the earth, leaving no stone untouched.
Money has also destroyed the family, sending adult offspring far from their original homes to find jobs, and financial worries fuel the mental ill health of both workers and the instability of their marriages. Once in place, the market system’s wheels just turn, blindly, irrespective of the damage they do in grinding up human lives and relationships, regardless of the dying planet they spin upon. Money, representing the commodity in which the value of all others is reflected, possesses no human values. We have surrendered and entrusted our entire lives and our living world to an institution that is the least responsible, the least flexible, the least stable.
Because the accumulation of money is an impersonal motive for production, it leaves a mountain of waste in its trail. Companies attempt to seduce demand by tempting people into oftentimes useless objects through vast expenditures of resources in advertising. Buildings, equipment, land, and professions require a massive infrastructure of insurance, which as with advertising firms, globally taking up millions of workers, energy, equipment, office and parking space, all for a completely unproductive cause. The same is true for professions devoted to buying and selling stock, to opening doors or sitting at reception desks, to assisting administrators, and such entire professions as lawyers, lobbyists, ticket sellers, marketers, and the military. These agencies, departments and professions, listed in Bullshit Jobs (2018) by anthropologist David Graeber, but also by socialists for over a century, illustrate the unnecessary complexity of a system based on money, one marked by an eye-boggling degree of waste of human lives and precious energy and resources.
Money also brings out the worst sides of human beings. By offering temptation, since it has the power to satisfy needs and wants, it invites built-in corruption in companies and governments everywhere, requiring vast policing resources to monitor and arrest a minority of offenders. Drug-dealing and theft are themselves primary examples of how a money system can trigger leeches at best, and potential murderers at worst, depriving society of even the best minds and bodies of a generation who turn into addicts, career criminals, and prison inmates.
Most people, even economists, cannot even imagine a world without money. Professionals whose specialty is the monetary system insist that incentive, entrepreneurship, and meeting a seemingly endless rainbow of needs, requires a monetary system. However, psychology knows otherwise. Our needs and wants are not infinite and, if anything, are artificially enhanced by the monetary system.
The complexity of the money system boggles the imagination. Right now, every individual and family in the tall building in which I live must spend time shopping for items that could easily be shared among a few hundred people. We all go out to shop because a money society has destroyed our collective natures and lifestyles (which were quite evident even in late feudalism, in which humans enjoyed, on average, rich relationships with extended family and other town residents). We must all do our food shopping even though in one go we could procure sufficient ingredients to cook a meal for a room of several dozen residents or neighbours. We look at any city street and see a long line of unused cars.
A human world consisting of billions of citizens should probably encourage a minimalist home, especially if the well-studied factors that most determine our happiness and meaning are such psychological variables as freedom, work, health, relationships, solitude, creativity, feeling part of the community. Without doubt hobbies require resources and possessions (musical instruments, books, screwdrivers) but it is not clear what little we could get by with if most items were shared and our lives could return to the collective form which is our archaic nature.
Our economists are failing us if in the face of today’s problems, including a dying world, they are not devoting their science (if it is one at all) to devising improved economic systems in which humans and the living world might thrive.
The money system has its obvious problems for those of us who must work in the Western world for an employer, but the system did not evolve similarly throughout the world. The institution of money is even more brutal in countries which still have theocracies, military juntas, one-party governments, or autocracies. Wars over resources or the competing ideologies and sense of entitlement of power-hungry rulers, starvation, extreme poverty, cartels, and environmental despoliation, are the symptoms of a monetary institution that fails because it is not based on meeting needs, although its ideology insists it does. It is time for economists to devise outlines of possible non-monetary systems that might better meet our needs. Until such a time, it is down to ordinary citizens such as ourselves to keep promoting such a vision. It may be hard to imagine such a future at this time; we may even at times feel crazy doing so. But our world is so rife with insecurities that alternatives are desperately needed.
Dr. Who
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