loading . . . When Money isn't Power The elite of today's America, those running the show right now, have lived their entire lives in a world completely dominated by Neoliberal capitalism. The function of American capitalism is to ensure that money and power are indistinguishable, to the greatest degree possible. Any time an American oligarch has wanted something done, they've been able to spend money to make it happen. Want a bigger yacht? Sure, what about a yacht for your yacht? Want to build a company? Put enough money in and it will happen. Want to destroy competition? Buy them out or run a loss until they give up. Money always wins. Want to change government policies to make sure you come out ahead? Give a politician a significant donation. Want to break the law? Yeah, “fines” mean “legal for a fee” and almost anyone can avoid prison for the right fee (pay a good team of lawyers, buy your way into being friends with politicians or judges, there's almost always a way).
The correlation between money and power has almost always been 1 to 1 for them, and for many of those reading this now. But This correlation has been maintained in order to support the illusion that power, like money, can be earned though work. And, circularly, it is exactly this illusion that is the primary tool for maintaining this correlation. “If I can earn money,” so the logic goes, “then I can earn enough money to be powerful. Then I should support the system that gives the rich power, because I, too, could be rich.” Insert cliche quote about “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” here.
The thing about illusions is, they don't maintain themselves. Money is not power. Money is a stand in for power under the current system, and only remains so as long as people **believe in** this system. But people have already started to see through the illusion. We have now have two generations old enough to vote who openly and vocally reject it. A whole subset of the political class has developed specifically around this lack of belief. Not only that, but the US has rejected the illusion multiple times. And each time the US threatened to fully reject the illusion, it has been offered a compromise… until Occupy. Instead of compromise, Occupy was crushed with overwhelming violence. The elite have seen the effectiveness of the police force they've been building, and have thus chosen to reject the opportunity for a compromise. They have instead chosen well funded violence.
“If we have all the money,” elite logic goes, “then we can pay people with guns to just force everyone else to do what we want.”
This system they've grown up under has given them access to essentially infinite financial resources. They draw money from taxes through contracts between governments and their companies, yet they pay no taxes themselves. They leverage their assets against debt, then use the growth of those assets to pay off the debt, thus have no “money” to tax. This illusionary wealth gives them access to political power, which they've used to manipulate the system to thereby increase their wealth again, in a “virtuous cycle” of increasing power. They have destroyed all competition and blocked out all paths for future competition. They expand their holdings, trying to own every home, all farm land, trying to extract fees from every aspect and second of everyone's life. Taking everything from everyone has made these elite godlike, more rich than multiple nations combined, untouchable, able to start their own space programs. They believe themselves super human, the rightful god-kings of the earth, saviors of humanity.
Why shouldn't they believe in the illusion? They are the most powerful humans who have ever lived, not simply a little bit but by an unimaginable margin. But they've painted themselves into a corner. The mechanism of debt leverage relies on infinite growth. They've already colonized all the land, they're already extracting all the resources, they've already pushed wages down and raised prices so high that they're eating their own. What's left? Taxes are, at their mast basic, the extraction of money from people with the threat of violence. There is only one path left for growth: robbing people at gun point. It's become necessary to take over governments, strip away everything except the infrastructure of violence, and use that violence to extract everything that could possibly be left.
The US is the richest country in the world. Having direct access to those coffers could be the answer that need to keep the “infinite growth” scheme going. And, as Garrison Davis paraphrased Curtis Yarvin in How The Federal Government Fell, “If you have all the guys with guns, who can physically stop you?”
Except they don't have all the guns. They have all the money, or so it would seem. But again, they actually don't have all the money. They have assets and they have to keep the up illusion that these assets have value in order to actually use them. Yes, yes, loot the US to keep that illusion going. But the thing is, the US isn't actually that rich. The currency is propped up by the belief in the stability of the US dollar, by the infinite tribute from vassal states, by a complex system of soft power built over generations. Spells like “Intellectual property”, “the reserve currency”, and “trade agreements” allow the US to simply demand foreign government simply seize the assets of their population to hand directly to US industry. Levies are paid on the sale of all hard drives and burnable media in Germany, among other countries, which go directly to recording industry investors. Vassal countries are forced to buy bonds to prop up the US dollar. As the global reserve currency, the dollar was always strong against other currencies. This drove down the relative price of electronics and other resources needed to build the most technologically advanced military in the world. Complex economic machinery and ever increasingly complex mathematical tricks have kept the illusion going… until Trump.
But generations of intellectual inbreeding have left the ruling class incapable of understanding the complexity of the system their ancestors built to maintain control. They simply cannot understand or operate it anymore. In order to siphon out more money, they've cut out and throw away their own life support system. Tariffs and dismantling soft power has annihilated the fragile and complex system of soft power that kept the US on top of the world. Crashing the economy so they can exploit the workers at lower and lower wages only works if the workers don't revolt. The money can only be used to prop up the illusion if all the complex math keeps appearing to work, if the “money” you dangle in front of people keeps coming and continues to be valuable… or, at least, valuable enough to keep people calm. Turns out, there aren't actually enough guns to point at people without using the military… and the military are not the cops. It turns out, those guns are only useful if there are enough of them and the people holding them will actually use them on command.
Now their system of control is flying apart. There were other wise elites who backed moderate compromise: corporate virtue signaling, small concessions metered out over decades, embracing the language of radical demands while ignoring the content. But the path of elite wisdom ends with their slow elimination. As the catastrophic crisis of climate change looms, as the necessity of eliminating the keystone industry that cements their power (oil) becomes obvious, as faith in the illusion started to collapse, the least competent have become the most powerful. They thrash wildly, trying to implement their unhinged vision, unaware of the illusions their power once relied on. They deploy agents to have them chased away by fearless unarmed citizens. They try to deploy troops, only to have generals delay and undermine. They bluster and threaten, only to be laughed at. They are becoming the martial arts master who, being used to throwing students across the room with burst of pure Qi, is knocked out with one punch when they fight someone outside of their cult. How long until the illusion breaks entirely?
Money is an illusion. It only has the value we all choose to give it. The power is in our labor. Not simply “paid labor” but reproductive labor, organizing, community, in everything we do to maintain the system both **inside and outside** of “work.” Real power is controlling food, controlling housing, and controlling what you want. You can only be controlled to the extent that you are not organized to resist that control.
Money and power were not always one. The illusion of money was built over thousands of years to where it is today. These two things can be separate again, if you build power by organizing against the dominant system.
So what are you doing to do to break the illusion? https://write.as/hexmhell/when-money-isnt-power
