"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Nov 6, 2011

Recipe

Recipe:

5 - 1000+ people
1 shared space or project
Competing needs and desires
Ego
$500, 000 (or more)

Mix together in a privately owned park. Heat at ambient temperature. Plate cold.

Serves six.

*

Once a group begins to define its actions by the limited resource of consensus money, once currency recreates the conditions of scarcity in the distribution of those resources, you also get scarcity in the redistribution of influence and social relations. Scarcity makes power. The people with the power to distribute the money, the resources, the satisfaction of needs, the security - they band together. And then they use some of the take to protect their ability to control it. The replication, again and again, of the stable form of power.

Introduce money* (which is formalized scarcity), get a hierarchy.

Want a human community in resistance to end up looking like the society or group it opposes?

Send 'em money.


* - credit is money, see Graeber ("What is debt?") in links to the right

2 comments:

Anatole David said...

Bingo. Exchangeable value requires coercion and creates hierarchies.

Graeber's book on Debt is excellent.

Money's a Jealous God's trust.

"Debts are sacred!"

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

"Add ingredients, stir"
~