This article cuts to the heart of the matter.
Money is a strange thing. So is economic organization in general. And the nation state.
The question gets asked in history a lot as to how the United States (and for that matter Germany, Japan, Britain, etc.) was able to mobilize so dramatically and build one of the largest most sophisticated war machines the world had seen, coming right out of the Great Depression. That sounds kind of strange now, seeing as how we are merely in a recession - though some are actually calling it a depression due to its profound effects and lifespan - and when it comes to simple things like paying federal workers, fixing infrastructure, funding college and social security, establishing health care for all, etc., we're just so broke! You have to sort of ignore easy money for banks in the form of QE and subsidies, energy and agriculture subsidies, and then the gigantic defense budget, among other things. There's always money to be found in the couch when someone needs to be bombed.
So why is it that we treat money as this scarce, material object, as if it grows on trees (to be a little ironic here), when reality tells us that it miraculously takes its existence from our very relations and what we are willing to do for each other? As a growing chorus of MMT theorists are telling us, sovereign governments can create money out of thin air (and just as easily destroy it if inflation rears its ugly head); all we need to do is decide as a people what needs to be done. We could stop this absurd charade tomorrow and invest in clean and renewable energies (though more has to be done in dramatically altering lifestyles and energy consumption), but we won't.
That's because thanks to decades (or maybe centuries) of propaganda, we have been convinced that it is in fact some sort of scarce, material substance, which conveniently seems to come out of corporate and financial industry spigots. The government can't just start spending money into existence with better social programs and jobs, because that would break the financial monopoly on the distribution of money. We get paid by businesses that have to take out loans (that come attached with interest rates and all sorts of fees) from banks; we have to take out loans ourselves to buy houses and cars; our own government borrows from banks themselves, even though the government generated the currency by simply entering in numbers in a computer and having it magically appear in bank reserves, because that is how things are set up to work.
So here we sit, a society growing increasingly emaciated as it feeds useless parasites through deception, until it (and the rest of the societies around the world that are being subjected to the same thing) becomes so starved that its population becomes desperate enough for war.
That's the thing about war. It is always almost completely unnecessary. Even WWII if you trace the causes to before the rise of the Nazi regime and the Imperial army. We create the monsters in the first place with our economic inequities and the perverse cultural practices that accompany them, and then we have a new villain of the day to point our collective finger at and compel the people to rise from their collective stupor to mobilize and win the day! It seems to be bare survival that manages to cut through all of the symbolic complexities, that brings a people together towards a common goal. Too bad it often comes down to a war, which is then mythologized with childish archetypes and morality plays.
The abstraction and free-floating nature of money allows it to be instrumentalized to both force people to put out a certain output and to direct those efforts in a certain direction. Money is only available from a limited selection of institutions that in turn utilize people power to satisfy their own ends. The mass of human effort is currently going towards administering a perpetual blowjob (to put it crudely) to a small and useless ruling class, until of course the collective perpetual pleasure engine breaks down, at which point it is probably time for war.
New villains can always be created and the people mobilized with the war drums (there is never a shortage of drooling reactionaries to carry out these ends, as hinted in the previous post), but it is my hope that this time, the people are quite exhausted with war. Hopefully this time, the next mass mobilization that occurs is (as the author of the linked article suggested) a mobilization to address problems that actually do threaten our collective survival, such as the disintegration of the environment which houses us.
For that to be possible, we would have to completely change our view of what we are and what we are capable of. And then organize a society with social equities, power sharing, and communication in mind. Otherwise we simply aren't going to make it. As a lifeform we've become too powerful, too able to affect an entire planet for us to be playing around like this. One can hope anyways.
And finally, here's a good usage of Tumblr to check out.
