Looking Back — A Prophecy

JE52 783458 £20

January 1st.
The start of a new decade is a ridge walk.
Such rare, high, temporal-perspective
reveals truths less accessible
in the lowlands of days, weeks and months.
From up here you can see for a century
as the great landscapes of past and future
fall away on either side.

The past fades to darkness.
Eventually, everything is forgotten.

But the future shines.
Too bright to see.
Nothing can be distinguished
because everything is bathed in the light of infinite possibility.
Up here you understand that this
is the future’s fundamental truth;
it is a sovereign territory.

In lowland time
they don’t understand.
Down there,
imagined futures are contingent upon current beliefs.
Such subjugation
condemns them to the poverty of eternal repetition.

Pity them.

Hopelessness is a key product of capitalism.
The Empire’s survival depends upon its manufacture.
Distributed by a vast bureaucratic apparatus,
its utility exists in its capacity to destroy any possible future
discordant to the system’s logic.

A conscious act of rebellion
is to look into the shadows of the past
to identify the dim edges of solid shapes.
And then for you, and your friends,
to bridge between those shapes.
a new history to a better future.

Over the last ten years
money burners have been doing just that.
In the beginning, people thought of us as a curiosity.
‘Quixotic’ was the word.
Within the shallow logic of capital,
money burning was a self-defeating enterprise.
The authorities watched, but were quiet.
They believed it’d snuff itself out.

We already had our detractors, of course.
There have always been shouts
about the homeless, the food banks, and the children in war-torn countries
from those who felt a moral imperative
to speak the truth, as they saw it.
But once witness to a Ritual Sacrifice,
most changed their mind.
Many were persuaded to join us.
A Sacred act possesses a higher spiritual and moral power
than any form of exchange.

Minds were now ajar;
old ideas slipped through to be newly realized.
The symbiotic relations between charity and economy,
poverty being an ingrained, necessary and expansive aspect of capitalism,
our conception of money underpinning our own oppression
- all of this embedded itself in people’s minds.
Such thoughts became the common currency of conversation
at those parties, where for one brief night,
a republic of gratified desires was attained.

But the moralists,
the objectors,
and the servants of utility
hadn’t been stirred up from the outside, as yet.
Their naïve anger was ripe for exploitation.
A few years into the decade,
with the movement gathering momentum
- at festivals and other autonomous spaces in what remained of Great Britain -
the Empire of Capital finally acted.
The ire of the masses was stoked
and directed at us full square.

‘Think of the good all that money could have done’, ran the headlines.
‘Think of the babies that have died,
the elderly and infirm that have suffered,
think of the old soldiers lying homeless and cold on our streets’
- all for the want of money that these sinners have just willfully wasted!’
We were cast as the apotheosis of sneering excess;
not the bankers, nor the billionaires, nor the Bullingdon Club, but us.
We, the money burners were set against all decency,
against all reason
and we could be hated
without restraint.

But money burning cannot be co-opted

Our defensive line was impenetrable.
Capital dare not challenge the idea at the heart of their own ideology.
Since the Empire’s great victories in the 1980’s
the battle cry of the neophytes of neoliberalism — their stormtroopers — had always been,
‘It’s my money, and I’ll do what I want with it’.

Now, we shouted it back at them.

We made our arguments, too.
We asked questions of them.
We gave to charity and we exchanged for profit.
But above all, we continued to burn.
Through the spits and fury, witness after witness stood tall
and testified to the forgotten power of Ritual Sacrifice.
The roar from the first great wave of anger
had abated by the middle of the decade.
It had been heard all around the world.
Our numbers swelled from tens to hundreds of thousands.
The Empire regrouped to prepare for a second assault.

Meanwhile, the catastrophe of climate change completed its transformation
from existential threat to lived reality.
Now, it was not only the poor who couldn’t escape its impact
but the rich, too.
The political pressure this manifested could not be ignored.
Governments struggled to respond effectively.
They found it hard even to be seen doing anything,
let alone to actually make any real difference.

We — the money burners — were their opportunity
to kill two birds with one stone.
We’d be both the scapegoat for public rage
and the justification for extreme political and economic measures.

The second attack came twenty years to the day after the 2008 crisis broke.
Black Friday — as it’s now known -
was when the scourge of money burning would be routed from the world.
Those countries without laws preventing it
were publicly encouraged by the highest powers
to enact legislation at the earliest opportunity.
Where laws were already in place, but not enforced,
arrests were made.

It was terrifying,
but actually
the real battleground
was public opinion.

Their strategy was to cast us as ‘against life’,
as nihilists,
as if our cash were the carrier of some vital life-force
which we ritually murdered
and that these acts of willful destruction
were a death-wish,
a suicide note from humankind.
‘The public must not succumb to hopelessness’,
they proclaimed without any sense of irony.
‘All efforts, resources and money must be dedicated
to tackling the climate emergency.’

Waste would no longer be tolerated,
and neither would we.
They wanted to crush us.
And they wanted to do so visibly and in all righteousness.
The triumph of their logic
- their truth -
would be the means by which austerity,
in the most extreme and vicious form ever imagined,
could be enacted under the cashless conditions of absolute surveillance.
The poor would be eternally sacrificed
to save the rich.

Money burners were helpless.
No individual can survive the machinery of state.
Empires thrive on their ability to divide us
and then crush any and all pockets of resistance.

However, together as one people we are strong.
Stronger than them.
Their initial reactions had been slow.
The seeds we’d already sown had begun to flower.
Public opinion was shifting.
We stated our case once again.
And still, we burned our money.
The battle of private consequence
and public reaction
was played out.

It had been said a long time ago,
that ‘Money is the oxygen on which the fire of global warming burns’.
Now, finally, perhaps we can begin to believe
that everyone
no matter what they say in public
must realize this truth.
Because in private, no-one at all
- most especially the politicians, themselves (so I’m told) -
believes that saving money,
will save the world.

Capitalism’s crisis is a permanent condition.
Stability has always been a smoke and mirrors deception
born of political exigencies, elections and luck.
They will promise us anything for political power.
But values born of a vote bought,
are always in debt
to the logic of capital.

Back at the first Church of Burn Synod,
a few weeks before the start of this decade,
money burning had been described
as ‘the breaking of a spell’.
And now at its end,
our continued acts of disenchantment
have carved out a space in the noosphere.
We’ve created a gap in the mindspace
into which old ideas no longer fit.
The story of austerity as both saviour and necessary evil,
and the logic of capital in whose language it is told,
are the old testament.
A new one is being written as we speak.
It will be a story of abundant love, born of forgiveness.
It will be so, because without these qualities,
without a sacrifice of the old gods,
all human life
on planet Earth
will die.

So in this coming decade let’s hear our politicians talk
of new social and economic paradigms.
Of a new way of being in the world.
Let the campaigners, practitioners, and academics
put forward their Green New Deals with new confidence.
Let’s protect cash as the preserve of individual sovereignty,
as a bulwark against state surveillance,
and as our sacrament.

Let our past be no longer a prison,
but an old home, we’ve outgrown.
Let us live with grace in the present
and look with hope to the future.

So here, right now,
in this midnight moment,
on the ridge between two decades
I finally burn JE52 783458 £20
and bring to a close
the ritual, magic and divination
that has for so long
been woven around its sacrifice.

_______________________________________

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I have lightly borrowed from David Graeber’s Hope in Common and Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z