No, it’s money. The pharaohs didn’t have obscenely scaled tombs because they were clever organizers, they had them because they had command of tens of thousands of slaves who they didn’t mind working to death. People who are rich can build an offshore community because they can just pay for it. They probably aren’t even organizing it - they are paying someone else to organize it for them. When you have billions, you don’t have to be organized at all, you can just say something on a whim and it will materialize for you.
Why didn’t the slaves just kill the pharaoh? Apparently they thought they were gods. I don’t know what our contemporary excuse is.
It’s mostly just the “organizing” skill of finding ways to be born into the right (wealthy) families and social sets. And then add the heartlessness necessary to hire those less lucky to work for you under emiserating conditions, instead of dedicating oneself to actually helping them improve their lot.
Because money is only a symbol - but most people are apparently still gullible enough to believe that “possessing” a symbol can give them magical powers. Even if 99.99999% of the world believe it doesn’t make it true. Using it to define civilization and what people are or aren’t capable of is Scooby Doo logic. Symbols are powerful, but they are also arbitrary. Better to use the best symbols you can so that you can devise social structures which are as close to reality as possible.
I was probably being too subtle for a communication forum where I have no tone of voice. My “wondering” about what our contemporary excuse is was really my clever way of saying that many people today worship money as a god.
But even for those of us that don’t, money still grants power. If somehow we collectively woke up tomorrow and said, “Hey, screw money,” then it’s power would be gone, but a planet annihilating meteor strike would also take away money’s power and is probably more likely. Civilization is what people believe, so what 99.99999% of people believe pretty much is true (within physical restrictions - that meteor still trumps us).
“Arbitrary” is an interesting word, what does it mean? Does it mean that it’s meaning was assigned by people and could have easily been assigned differently by people? Does it mean it is random or accidental? Sure, that’s true, but the water that cut the grand canyon could have flowed elsewhere and made a different canyon. We can’t simply wish the canyon away because it is an accident of history, though. A group of contemporary billionaires could probably fill the canyon in, if they really wanted, though. Even if it is arbitrary, money is factually currently more powerful than a billion years of erosion. It rivals evolution, sickness and the weather.
I get the impression that you think you’ve transcended the discussion when in fact you’ve just missed the point.
How do you get from “money is just a symbol” to “rich people are more organized than poor people”? The only explanation I can come up with is that when you say “money just a symbol”, you actually mean “money doesn’t matter”. i.e. “it doesn’t matter if you have a lot of money or not”. Because if money doesn’t matter, then how does one explain why rich people prosper while poor people suffer and die? It must be that rich people have some other virtue which poor people lack - perhaps organization? How about confidence in their value? Or maybe just positive thinking? This reasoning reeks of the self-help aisle.
Whether I believe in money or not, strangers will allow me to be deprived of shelter unless I give them this symbol. Whether i believe in money or not, someone may murder me (or allow me to die) because doing so would secure them more of this symbol. Meanwhile, people who have a lot of this symbol are able to commit all manner of atrocities without consequence because they can exchange some of the symbol to avoid punishment. So sure, it’s just a symbol, but it matters a hell of a lot.
Nobody has “organized” society this way, not even the rich. It is a relationship created by all of us together - a social relationship. You can’t destroy or transcend a social relationship by just pointing out that it’s a social relationship. People believe in money because acting like it doesn’t matter would be harmful to their survival. If we want people to stop believing in money, we first have to make it possible for all of us to survive outside capitalism.
I don’t! I would need to use this system from the inside to label people as being “rich” or “poor”. I only know how any individual or group define value by what they tell me. How would I know what anyone’s goals are? Or how successful they are at achieving them? The ruse is that most people seem to complacently as-is money as a force of nature when it is really a technology invented and used by people. What is democratic about technology is that it works for anybody who uses it - it doesn’t care what “class” of person others suppose you to be. Giving up your right and ability to explicitly negotiate your place in life with those you deal with is a choice, not a fact of life. If things like money and government are so great and civilized, then devise some of your own to put out there. Those who have already done it are likely no more super human than you are.
That’s pretty funny. If everyone creates it together, one might wonder why most complain about it…
You are making social relationships out to all be universal, which doesn’t seem very probable. This pretty much naturalizes whatever dominant paradigm as a de-facto totalitarianism. Why should “all of us” survive outside of capitalism? This is merely replacing one one-size-fits-all system for another. Also, the chances of “all of us” deciding upon any system are improbable. Come to think of it, when did “all of us” identify as capitalists? If all you can accept is one system for everybody, you are stuck with what you’ve got. An ecosystem of different ways of life coexisting in the same space seems like a more obviously robust, accurate way to go about things.
Not universal, normative. That is, you can deviate from it as an individual, but doing so is abnormal and will deny you social benefits. In the case of the norm of money, the social benefit you will lose is the ability to procure goods and services from most strangers (and perversely, even from many people you know).
We don’t create it on purpose, exactly. And we certainly don’t like it. You don’t believe in money and neither do I, but you’re not going to give me any of yours and I’m not giving you mine. In this way we’re creating the norm, even against our will.
All of us don’t have to, but we all have to be able to, which is not currently the case. You are right that there should not be one system governing all resource exchange. The problem is that currently capitalism (and money) does act as such a global, totalizing system.
This is why even in total disaster scenarios, when social fabrics are shredded and entire nations displaced, there can still be offshore cities for the rich. No matter how much of society erodes (figuratively and literally), capitalism still governs how resources are distributed. This must change, but it cannot be changed by you or I as individuals, because it’s not an individual relationship. it’s a social relationship, so it has to be changed by society.
It is a relationship created by all of us together - a social relationship.
Most don’t complain about the mere existence of money. They complain about the fact that a very few have found ways, mostly unfair and even rapacious ways, to hoard way too much of it. Which means that most of us have too little, and have to work too fucking hard to get what little we can.
In fact, I’d suggest that money is one of the best ways to organize power for a society. When power is the size of the mob you command or the amount of guns you have, it is very hard for society to keep those with power in check.
When it comes to money, though, it is much easier. Set the top marginal tax rate to 75% or more, raise corporate taxes, stomp on “financial innovation” with powerful regulators and you can get yourself decades where the wealthy aren’t screwing things up for everyone else. America’s wealthy managed to reverse these policies to re-establish themselves as semi-despots, but there are plenty of countries where wealth is substantially more equally distributed. I think that money being arbitrary is one of the things it really has going for it because it makes it easier for society to keep things more equitable (if that’s what a society is interested in doing). Money also often leaves a trail for those who wish to find out how people use their influence.
There are always people with outsized influence, when that influence comes in the form of money it’s a lot easier to point out because they are sitting there on the high score board. I wouldn’t say I hate money, I hate the idea that one person could be considered to be worth 100 or 1000 (or several million) times as much as another person. Money actually helps me bring that idea into focus.
Put down the constructivist textbook, and back slowly away. Maybe go take a few Foucault essays about the nature of power as a beginning remedy.
You’re talking like the straw postmodernist that reactionaries love to invent when they blather on about how postmodernism has ruined academia. “Ha ha ha, nothing is real, well just go walk across this not-real road and let’s see if you get by a not-real car then, ho ho!” Except that you seem to believe yourself.
I am familiar with our history of power and politics. It is worth knowing about, but more as an anthropological curiosity than anything of practical value. Breaking compatibility with such models is not anything to be alarmed about.
At least try to use your own ad-hominems instead of dismissing me second-hand through other theoretical parties!
I am quite principled about not believing myself - or anybody else. At least I back up my “straw” with a better argument then normative behaviors. I prefer living optimally.
Well, possessing a symbol sure allows me to pay for my healthcare. It turns out, when you get over 40, you aren’t immortal anymore and a lot of us develop health problems that need treatment or (gods forbid) we get sick or have an accident.
I’ve long been an advocate of marine settlement and development as a strategy for sustainability. The pursuit of technologies like OTEC and polyspecies mariculture may be key to stopping or reversing Global Warming, But I’ve always been bothered by the undercurrent of Objectivism that seems to follow the subject–much as with the general notion of space colonization. So many seem to think they can’t create an ejector seat for Spaceship Earth…
Relevant to the reference to the more rational alternative of floating communities, my colleague artist Joy Lohmann has been working in this area for a long time with his ASAP-Island and Open-Island projects. Here the goal is open technology to aid poor communities to cope with climate change, empower them with new means of flood-resilient shelter and production, and expand awareness of climate change impact in the developing world. He’s developed many exhibition raft and island projects based on clever reuse of discarded materials.
Recently, he was involved with the Sealand Multiversity project setup in partnership with Roy Bate’s son Michael, producing a number of fun videos. Currently exhibition projects for Open-Island are planned for Berlin in February and Amahdabad in April demonstrating a modular island system developed with India’s National Institute for Design.
Joy’s approach has been focused on repurposing cast-offs but I’ve also been interested in applying open production tech like 3D printing and DIY rotomolding to the recycling of diverse waste to produce new modular building materials and components affording larger more resilient structures. I think there’s a lot of potential in the development of an open source variant of the cube pontoon systems now common in Asia based on recycled material. But it’s hard to get this idea off the ground. (especially when you live in the high desert of New Mexico…) People are only now just starting to wrap their heads around the idea of 3D printed houses and here we’re talking using that to make whole eco-villages on water.
