Through the course of events in human development the nature of terms alter and shift. Terms, verbage, phrases, or what have you being the way that we translate our presumptions and perceptions of reality. The words we use and how we use them say a lot, not only about ourselves, but also the world around us. Value, a word with quite a few definitions today is greatly utilized by many for its most popular contemporary definition that I’ll sum up as market price. Prices are the numerical translation of societal value. Money is the way we meet up to the standards of our “values”. Together they are walls of the barrel we’re all stuck in.
Money potentially is a wonderful tool, and an efficient way to extend the representation of the abstract power of a given Individual in a given society, in a manner that allows more of the masses to trade for their needs without exerting themselves too much. Money being the representation of societal power, should be a tool controlled and created by the many, on the basis of the whole, to insure an environment that produces mutual benefit. However today we live in a world that has less public banking and money creation than there should be. I have always found that money was a tool of measurement, but it only has that purpose in addition to its place in the world today. Prices require that measuring tool to function as such so that society can function under its current structure. Organically money and prices should fluctuate in“value”by the actions we take in the market, but life doesn’t function in the fashion explained by the great Austrian Economists. People value money, no other need really matters because money is the means to acquire the ends.
Today’s reality has placed the idea of value in a position to be synonymous with that of price. Price being the signal that directs demand, tells us that value in terms of the individual is constantly changing. This is an evolution of terms greatly orchestrated to benefit those who gain from societal disunity, greater competition, and a lack of cooperation. This is an unfair and dangerous match, but let us go to the root before we battle the obvious. What is it that births value? Is it the functions of the market, or is it the process of production? I believe the source of value to be human need and/or want. If we descend into the histories of people and look to the bartering economies you will find the trade of one thing for another. The most just of transactions comes about because some say your potato was worth the exchange for a mango. However clearly you valued the mango over the potato and it is this feeling that many toss away in the analysis of economies, but this urge compounded the whole economy through is what creates societal value, which through our transactions converts to the demand within an economy, and from this demand can spring forth supplies and inevitably prices.
Remembering even dictionaries outside of economic literature are listing the first definition of value along the lines of market price, we find ourselves in a new social order. The ruling class has fought hard to make the idea of cooperation seem nefarious or evil. Culturally the principles of “communism” or communalism is frowned upon greatly in the United States, this is not because the idea of community is frowned upon, but because greed and self interest benefits the ruling class much greater than cooperation. We have come to value self interest over blatant rationality. The idea of value is the same whether it is the items we prefer or the philosophies we promote that statisfy the human need and want generated from the same place in the human spirit. We have abandoned the collective because we equate all of life’s ups and downs with the price tags that are less generated by market fluctuations than edicts from the boardroom and backdoor meetings.
Individually we must value money at all costs in a world where we must accumulate a shrinking pool of available money to satisfy our needs. Though this has been a reality in America since its colonization, its affects ripple outward. This need has compounded, as they always do in societal structures, and now entire economies, the entire world over, is driven by the accumulation of money in one form or another. But why? Why haven’t we come to a point where money should be the measure tool that it was intended to be? Because power is not shared equitably, and the ruling class fights the idea of equity, or even parity. This fact is its own issue that must be argued at another point, but money is the answer to seeing how the ruling class has destroyed the idea of value, and perverted it as to gain a larger portion of societal power to hold over the masses.
People value luxuries and exuberance, even if it is a reality that is no where near their grasp. Poor people value Louis Vuitton and Gucci not because the cotton is better, or the leather tougher than any other, but instead people value these brands because they are icons of the frivolously spending for “good quality”. The idea of being able to aquire the things that you want in “good quality” is grand, down right seductive, but when you include pricing in the equation stratification exists and blockades are implemented by the means of the individual. This systematic rejection puts stress on the common majority and frustrations build. while the ruling class lives in their gated communities, usually governed collectively, the common majority fights its self as it awaits the next feeding. Ever cramming ourselves into environments, meshing cultures not likely to mesh under any other circumstances than dire need, to achieve a level of wealth that can only remotely satisfy the continuously growing list of wants and needs generated by the ruling class.
Now this starts the rat race to climb the ladder. We all must scrape up as much as we can. Along the way we set aside for later and spend what we can for what we need, but as this happens the cycle continues. The masses work to produce a profit for the Capitalist, to earn a wage which they then go give back to the capitalist in terms of purchases. Wages in the“western world” are not adequate to provide people with the means to live their lives in the manner that the ruling class has set for us all. Wage growth does not match growth in productivity, the gap is going strong. People are more productive while being paid less, the hunger for money grows. Automation threats the livelihood of the masses the hunger for money grows. The stock of money, the receipts of societal power, has grown in America and the world over, but the common majority still struggles. So now the common majority is forced to work with less as the ruling class holds ever more of the majority of societal power in bank accounts across the planet.
It is the struggle for more, and our neglect of actual problem solving that pushes neighbors to hate one another, and colleagues to stab each other in the back, and it is the ruling class that creates this environment. They hoard the power of society, and its easy for them to hoard it because society sacrificed its power to private banks that print the people’s power’s representation on receipts, that we covet over all things, for those at the top. With every year we see the further development of a world that is so greatly dependent upon a token of human imagination that truly could have been beneficial to the masses, but has instead been the shackles that binds us. The power and privilege that comes with money seduces the masses into complicity. We stand for our own enslavement, and because of the fancy flashing trinkets of the rich we ignore the lack of substance.
What benefit does society receive from shelves covered with fifty differing cereals if they are all tainted with chemicals and food-like-stuffs that leads to lucrative transactions for the medical industry later? What benefit does society have from private transportation if they run on fuels that should have been obsolete ages ago, and they are designed and constructed in a manner that allows them to fall apart all too quickly? These are things our society values. Cocoa Cola, Kelloggs, and Chevrolet are all valued American staples. They’ve employed, nursed, and made America feel grand for ages, but are they really worth what they are telling us they are? In a system as corrupt as that of American capitalism there can be no idea of mutual benefit over that of the individual, there can be no idea of the representation of societal power being owned and created by the collective for the collective, there is only room for that of greed and its by-products. Marx said it best capitalism creates a world in its own image, and it is the values shared by the societies of the world that paint their images. So whose brush is painting the image of the world today? Where is it that the societies of the world get their values? What overwhelmingly is being valued by the world over? Money rules all, and those that have set the standards. Society struggles as it plays the games of the few, and blindly value their deception.
Communalist Soap Box 