It’s a Crime
I’m doing better today. Hotels and heat and a hundred other things are still here in my brain, but I had a good day, and now it’s not as hard as it was last night.
So today we’ll do a rant instead of a purge.
When I say money is imaginary, I don’t merely mean that it’s abstract. I mean it doesn’t exist and when people demand it you can merely claim it exists because there is no technical process to determine if that’s true. Obviously this position is not strong on nuance, but I mean it to be understood as literally true.
There are lots of examples of the way this happens in regular people’s everyday lives. When you take out a loan for a house, that money doesn’t come from other depositors at the bank — the story they teach people in school — it is literally blipped into existence by the rubber stamp of a loan underwriter. It didn’t exist a moment ago but now that you’ve signed all the paperwork the system just adds $600,000 to the balance sheet. Credit cards are a form of this, wherein an underwriter cuts a check to a merchant from a pile of nothing in exchange for the legal right to harass the cardholder. And don’t even get me started on securities and derivatives.
It’s not even a scam by the wealthy. They know that money is imaginary and openly relate to it in that way. They don’t spend money, they get a loan by convincing other wealthy people to sign off on their story of profits. Sometimes they pay it back, but a lot of times they don’t. They don’t need to because their co-conspirators are happy to keep repeating this process so long as the circle jerk keeps jerking. Watch any interview where Donald Trump talks about money and they’ll tell you this exact story. Rich folks with better self-control don’t say the quiet part out loud, but they are playing the same game.
Being wealthy isn’t about having cash or even credit, it’s about being allowed to decide who gets to invent money and who merely gets to move it around. It’s a thing the wealthy invented to control and divide their underlings – it’s a tool they use to collect tributes from the willing and a tool to bribe henchmen to commit violence on the unwilling.
There’s work involved in inventing money, if you’re a person who isn’t allowed to do that by birthright. For many people the only work reliably available is capitalist market labor, and stopping even for a moment risks their survival. Money is still deadly even if it is imaginary, and my thesis here is not that poor people can merely opt out of this system, because they definitely cannot.
But I also know that, given the right scam, money can be wished into existence even by those not technically authorized to do so. How much and how often is determined by luck and resources, but it’s a thing that can be done. Working people do it for their bosses every day, and the more opportunities you can find to do it without a boss the more money you get to control.
Of course, none of that matters if someone is demanding money from you right now. The violence it creates is real, even if they money that motivates it is not.
Good luck out there, trying to find a scam that lets you control enough money to keep the people you care about safe.
ZiB
