This paraphrasing of Mick Jagger’s line seems apt for modern times because that is the essential game being played by multiple players in the world today. Seeing this game for what it is turns out to be more difficult than it should be for emotional reasons: people are made angry by the very idea that their hard-earned money can’t get them their heart’s every desire, having been convinced that money is more real than anything else. But this is exactly backward; all that is real is matter and energy, and money is neither—it is a mere promise. We could spend all day discussing the entire submerged part of the iceberg of official, objective violence that props up this promise, but we won’t and simply state that the fiction of money as wealth and the fiction of the free market are both erected and maintained in the interests of the State, or the Government, such as taxation, social spending, military spending and colonial administration.
But it is all based on a promise: “If you have the money, you will get what you pay for.” Break that promise, and the entire ephemeral structure simply vanishes.
At this point you may be apt to that, since money simply vanishes, you ought to do something with it in preparation for that event—eat, drink and be merry, perhaps? Sure, that’s a great idea, but what about the rest of it? Do you buy gold futures or bitcoins or yuan, or park it on a small island in the North Atlantic? Do you buy a book called “Russian Made Simple” (https://www.amazon.com/dp/049100530X) or would “Chinese Made Simple” (sorry, title not found) make a better choice? It’s rather difficult to directly hoard matter and energy, you know. You might think of investing in matter (a pile bricks) or energy (a gas well) but an investment is still essentially just a promise. You could, of course, just hoard a bunch of expensive stuff and stand guard over it holding a shotgun, but then what happens to it when you have to take a bathroom break?
I feel like I’ve said it all before. Money is a government scheme. A free market is a criminal market. A day will come when offering someone a million dollars will get you punched in the face. Prepare for life without money. And in response I was asked something like “So, what do you think about bitcoin?” or “Don’t you think the ruble is a bit overvalued right now?” Still, I persist…
And so, let’s look at one aspect of money that everybody should be very clear about because that’s where the whole thing is crumbling: money as a tool of colonial administration. The purpose of colonial administration is to pump wealth out of colonies, and here the most efficient method is finance. Direct violence is expensive and it is much more efficient to bribe local elites to accept an unfair economic arrangement and to keep them in line using the mere threat of violence. This has been the arrangement for some time but now it is failing.
ClubOrlov 