The rich don't have authority

On the myth of power and money

Part three in a short series on whom we vilify and why. See parts one and two here.

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In my last post on villainy, I examined conspiracies closer to home, ones that focus on a particular group or type of person. I tried to show how countering prejudice and bigotry requires both taking apart false narratives and building new ones. It’s important to zoom in and humanize each individual, and then to zoom back out and start to see our systems at work.

What we see is that our systems are governed not necessarily by people, but by abstractions like profit and power. Certainly there are people at the top of our power structures, and they enjoy unfathomable wealth and luxury and influence. But it feels important to remember that they only exercise such power over the rest of us because of our monetary system, and our collective willingness to honor it. If everyone decided not to do things for money, the power of the wealthy would vanish in an instant.

It’s this myth of power I want to dig into.

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Luigi Mangione suddenly brought the question of “what do we do with the people at the top?” front and center. All things being equal (which they aren’t), this murder left a family traumatized and bereaved. At the same time, no one needs to mourn the death of someone personally responsible for the death of so many others. Moreover, I found a fascinating piece arguing that the popular response venerating the killer as a working-class hero is naive — not because hero worship is immoral, but because it was obviously a coordinated professional hit.

In any case, while Mangione is no anarchist, anarchists have long been smeared as assassins and bomb-throwers, so let’s address the question head-on. What should be done about our destructive systems and the people who run them? Conservatives and fascists, of course, want to give our rulers more money and power. But for those opposed to exploitation and injustice, there seem to be three main responses.

Both liberals and communists assume the solution is to remove the people in power and replace them. That strategy runs the gamut from simply electing someone else, to full-on overthrowing the government. We don’t need to do either. In fact, those actions accept the premise of powerful positions in the first place. Anarchists would rather challenge the positions themselves, and the whole power structure that supports them.

The only reason rich people are powerful is because we’ve imbued so much power into money. We need to realize that the power of money is a myth. By that I don’t mean it isn’t real. Myths are incredibly powerful. I mean it’s mythological. It has power because we agree it does. If everyone suddenly decided money didn’t have power, it wouldn’t.

Right now we need money because of work. We need to work to pay for the means to live. Mostly rent and food, but also utilities, transportation, clothes, books and devices, everything else. We need to pay for these things both because everyone has agreed that currency has value, and also because the authorities are poised to punish those who violate property laws.

None of this is based on anything material. There is nothing inherent in a piece of furniture or fruit that suggests a dollar value. Supposedly, the price of a product captures the value of all the time, labor, and materials needed to create it, but we all know that’s a fiction mainly found in economics textbooks. It has little relation to real people and processes.

So when we say, “it’ll take X million dollars to do this,” actually it won’t. What it will take is a certain amount of time, labor, and materials. Those are the resources actually being spent on a project. Money is just the vehicle we use to mobilize and distribute those resources, and the price attached to those resources will vary depending on context. We can all think of a dozen examples of our leaders suddenly finding the money to fund things we don’t need, like foreign wars, while wringing their hands about not having enough money for things we desperately need, like affordable housing and healthcare. Money isn’t the issue; power is what’s really at stake.

The other problem with always communicating value in monetary terms is that you lose sight of the material resources we have. For instance we’re running out of sand, but the implications of this lack aren’t public knowledge, because we don’t talk about the sand needed to built things — what it’s made of, where it comes from, or how much energy is needed to transport it. If we did communicate all those “externalities,” I’d wager we’d see a pretty different response from the public when developers or business leaders announce new proposals.

Here might be a good place to trumpet anti-work: Marxists are right to divide folks into workers and owners. But while leftists usually want to shift power to workers, anarchists would rather not work. In fact, as long as the work system remains in place, the planet’s plight will continue to worsen. Work is killing us and the planet. We’ve gotta stop working. Quitting is beyond most people’s capacity; striking is more within reach than we realize.

Back to power itself: I want to emphasize the importance of disobedience. Eventually, together, we can choose not to do what rich people say. We can ban them from our countries, like Panama. We can tax them out, or call their bluff about leaving. We can refuse to give them the time of day. We need the resources, technology, and knowledge of systems their corporations and governments currently own, but when have the billionaire class ever had those things themselves? Their genius is fake, their masculinity is fake, and their money is fake. They don’t deserve our obedience. We can stop taking them places, stop cooking their food, stop making their clothes. Most importantly, we can stop following their orders.

Of course, this dovetails into security and law enforcement. The state maintains its power through a monopoly on violence. That means peaceful protestors pitching tents and distributing food is illegal, but police assaulting and injuring students is maintaining order. That means killing a CEO is terrorism, but killing thousands of people through deliberate criminal neglect is just business. Most people follow orders only because law enforcement officers follow orders too.

That’s why it’s absurd to me to pretend our global society is based on democratic principles like an international rules-based order, or domestically on a “social contract.” The only arrangement everyone agrees on is that if you break the rules badly enough and get caught, people with weapons will put you in jail or kill you. Our society is based on fear, runs on money, and is powered by oil. None of these are sustainable.

It’s fantastical to imagine everyone suddenly and collectively refusing to obey the directives of people with money and power. But I think it’s helpful to remember that technically we could. It’s helpful because it shakes us awake for a second from the delusion of power derived from money. It’s only as real as we let it be. Aware of this, we can work together to build alternative systems, meet our needs without keeping count, and learn to live together without giving or taking orders.

From there, we can imagine telling our would-be rulers that they have no power here: they can step down or step aside. We’ll take the reigns from here on out.

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