Moving Beyond Money

I've been looking forward to this topic.   The abolition of money seems to me a crucial challenge for real human progress.   Yet I don't hear many people talking about this.   There seems to be a general acceptance that money is either a neutral utilitarian thing, or at most a necessary evil.    And there is all the quasi-mystical conversation about manifesting success, self-affirming that "I deserve to have lots of money," and treating it as a natural or supernatural resource that can be used for good ends or bad ends depending on the user.

My thinking on money is deeply informed by Norman O. Brown's book Life Against Death, especially the chapter "Filthy Lucre."   Brown's book will get its own spotlight entry in this blog very soon.   For now a quick summary of the isolated chapter which for me is the best account of what money "really" is.    Life Against Death as a whole is a summary, a  critique, and an extension of Freudian theory as applied to Western Civilization as a whole (as opposed to its usual application, the neurotic individual).   "Filthy Lucre" is the main illustration of applying psychoanalysis to a broad social phenomenon, in this case money.   A basic assumption of the book is that all people, and civilization as a whole, are afflicted by a general neurosis, or to put it another way, there is no such thing as normal mental health, either individual or collective.   It follows that there is no such thing as a reasonable or realistic or utilitarian point of view or institution.   All institutions and points of view partake of delusion, and of the infantile fantasies that ultimately drive us in all areas of our lives.

Money is no exception to this rule.   Freud himself had analyzed money as rooted in the traumas of the anal developmental period, and had stated that what money is to us, unconsciously, is shit, and that what we do with money is basically play with it as we once played with our own shit.   Brown develops this idea, connecting it to witchcraft, and other kinds of human waste:  locks of hair, fingernails, the little pieces of us that are used in witchcraft to attain power over those to whom they formerly belonged.   That's money too--useless bits of paper and metal used to magically wield power by those who hoard those useless little bits.    From the symbolic to the magical to the real:  money is power, and the means to power.  It is NOT a reasonable and pragmatic medium of exchange.   It is a tool of power used by those who want to have power over others.    That's what money is for, and that's why it (and capitalism) are anti-human and anti-democratic.

This is a very brief, and perhaps crazy-sounding summary of Brown's argument, which is actually eloquent, detailed, and amazing.   I recommend it very highly.   And no, I don't at this point know how we move beyond money, and what economy, trade, and prosperity look like without money.   I do think it would be important for all of us to think about this problem.