Civilization is built on renunciation, a renunciation that generates a perpetual feeling of discontentment. There’s a tension between our desire for freedom, self-authorship and the capacity to do edifying and interesting things, and society’s push for conformity, notably through work that enables money to circulate around. Why would I pursue applied machine learning engineering in insurance instead of art? Even then, that’s if I’m lucky. Most people are account managers selling garbage, work in low-paying jobs moving boxes, serving food. Some get to do edifying things, it’s rare. Just look around.
In the third place, finally, and this seems the most important of all, it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts. This ‘cultural frustration’ dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings. As we already know, it is the cause of the hostility against which all civilizations have to struggle. It will also make severe demands on our scientific work, and we shall have much to explain here. It is not easy to understand how it can become possible to deprive an instinct of satisfaction. Nor is doing so without danger. If the loss is not compensated for economically, one can be certain that serious disorders will ensue. (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents)
I respect people like Musk or Bezos, I guess. This “economic compensation” has to be activated, and it’s not activated by intellectuals. Bankman-Fried tried to push the notion of compensation to its limit (i.e., economic life is a joke where people push around fake money, and it makes us rich, everyone is compensated, no renunciation, extreme utilitarianism. It ended in a wacko parody. He tried to separate the ideology of effective altruism from its reality. Fredric Jameson, in chapter 8 of his Postmodernism book, on this impossible separation:
Linguistics has a useful scheme that is unfortunately lacking in ideological analysis: it can mark a given word as either “word” or “idea” by alternating slash marks or brackets. Thus the word market, with its various dialect pronunciations and its etymological origins in the Latin for trade and merchandise, is printed as /market/; on the other hand, the concept, as it has been theorized by philosophers and ideologues down through the ages, from Aristotle to Milton Friedman, would be printed «market». One thinks for a moment that this would solve so many of our problems in dealing with a subject of this kind, which is at one and the same time an ideology and a set of practical institutional problems, until one remembers the great flanking and pincer movements of the opening section of the Grundrisse, where Marx undoes the hopes and longings for simplification of the Proudhonists, who thought they would get rid of all the problems of money by abolishing money, without seeing that it is the very contradiction of the exchange system that is objectified and expressed in money proper and would continue to objectify and express itself in any of its simpler substitutes, like work-time coupons. These last, Marx observes dryly, would under ongoing capitalism simply turn back into money itself, and all the previous contradictions would return in force. So also with the attempt to separate ideology and reality: the ideology of the market is unfortunately not some supplementary ideational or representational luxury or embellishment that can be removed from the economic problem and then sent over to some cultural or superstructural morgue, to be dissected by specialists over there.
The “very contradiction of the exchange system” refers to the way in which exchange, under capitalism, inherently creates alienation and objectification. Money is used as a universal equivalent. Money acts as the medium through which goods, labor, and value are exchanged. The very existence of money as a representation of value introduces contradictions, such as the disconnection between the use value (practical utility) and exchange value (market value) of commodities. While money simplifies trade by being a universal equivalent, it also objectifies and mystifies value. This mystification creates an illusion that economic relations are natural or neutral, hiding the underlying social and labor relations. This is what Marx calls the “fetishism of commodities.”
Jameson critiques the Proudhonists for thinking that abolishing money could resolve economic problems. Marx argued that the contradiction is not resolved by removing money, as the contradiction stems from the very structure of exchange under capitalism. If money were replaced with something like labor coupons (or other “simpler substitutes”), the contradictions of objectification and alienation would persist and simply manifest in new forms.
The contradiction of the exchange system is that it simultaneously depends on and perpetuates alienation and inequality. Efforts to separate ideology (such as the concept of the market or money) from the material system of exchange are futile.
While decentralized finance and cryptocurrencies claim to break free from centralized financial systems, they do not escape the fundamental contradictions of the exchange system. Instead, they create new forms of objectification and fetishism. Defi and crypto does literally nothing. The promise of decentralization does not resolve the alienation of labor or the mystification of value, it merely shifts these issues to a different medium, often with new layers of abstraction (e.g., blockchain technology).
The technologies operate within and reinforce capitalist logics, particularly speculation, accumulation, and commodification. Cryptocurrencies are treated as speculative assets, creating wealth for a small elite while exposing others to extreme volatility and risk. Good for the small elite. At this point I don’t care anymore. The decentralization narrative may obscure new forms of concentration of power, as wealth and control in crypto systems often become centralized in the hands of early adopters, miners, or platform developers. The blockchain and cryptocurrency ecosystems mystify their social and economic functions, presenting themselves as apolitical or neutral technologies while obscuring literally everything underneath. No, you can’t get the ‘economic compensation’ from fraud or magic. The economic compensation is the reward for renunciation. Rich societies are rich because its workers renounce, suffer, are dehumanized, are treated as disposable1, and the way rich societies treat people in other less rich societies is worse.
Footnotes
To be clear, I don’t celebrate this, I don’t think it’s great. It pains me. I simply find it difficult to even begin imagining an alternative. It’s frustrating and disheartening, of course, because I’d like to support a center-left vision that finds a way to accommodate ambitious individuals with more economically conservative views. I’d like to adhere to Habermas’ grand vision. But I just can’t see it, getting along, finding meaning, it’s a grand delusion. More precisely: any solution involves some socialist component. Socialism doesn’t work because planning doesn’t work. “Structural reforms to address economic inequality, corporate greed, and the erosion of democratic control”; that won’t work. Political quietism coupled with a critical aestheticism (not beauty as free of moral considerations; but beauty as the ability to describe ugliness, with no pretensions to changing the world); that may work for me, it’s still disheartening.↩︎